This Week in Anime

The Bizarre and Beautiful Blunders of B: The Beginning

Micchy
Most humans don't deign to watch literally every anime, but alas, such is the life of a cartoon commentator. I just finished Kakegurui, fer chrissakes.

The Jared Leto fanclub really has no room to be throwing shade. Anyway, B: The Beginning is pretty incredible. I'm not gonna mince words; it's simultaneously wonderful and terrible and I both love and hate it with all my heart.

It's equal parts Sherlock and the most chuuni anime bullshit imaginable, and I don't know how you can get much sillier than that. Like, how do you even explain what happens in the show?

One half of the show is a crime procedural centered around Keith Flick, a grumpy disheveled genius detective hunting down his sister's killer. The other half is Batman.

So basically

It's a hell of a first impression to make! The show is utter chaos all the way through, mostly of the fun variety, and the half that isn't a dry crime drama is about your average anime protagonist, Koku.

You know he's the protagonist because he has blue hair and heterochromia.

He's a demigod who's sworn to kill everyone who betrayed him and his gf when they were kids, so he's been going around exacting justice on serial killers, leaving his signature B sign at the scene. Thus, the police have taken to calling him Killer B.

This mystery persists for about an episode and a half before everyone kind of forgets about it to focus on more pressing issues, like dead sisters and evil clown cults. From then on, the show becomes two wholly distinct stories stuck together with scotch tape and chewing gum. On one hand, who killed Keith's sister? On the other, who is Koku and why do the circus rejects all want to kill him so bad?

It's unusual, that's for sure! The Sherlock half of the show is extremely Sherlock, for better or worse, while the anime bullshit half is full of big emotions and grand speeches—y'know, the usual anime fare when it comes to killing gods and stuff.

I can't argue with you there. Thankfully, despite all the convoluted plot twists and protracted gambits, Keith's story works for me, largely thanks to the lovable cast.

Keith is very moe for a dysfunctional TV detective.

Yes, the rookie sidekick Lily is an absolute ray of sunshine.

It's really too bad she gets sidelined so hard toward the end of the show. It's not the only time a supposedly important female character gets damseled either. :( But when she is around, she absolutely steals the show by ruthlessly dunking on Keith's general disaster-ness.

When her entire role in the story is to get saved by the teenage boy? Yeah no.

Yeah, the other half of the show, i.e. the one without Lily's charm, is uh...oh boy is it a mess.

Stop me if you've heard this before: there's a government conspiracy producing inhuman supersoldiers with fragile senses of identity, and then shit hits the fan when one of them decides "fuck it, I'm better than this".

B: The Beginning is very silly, if you couldn't tell already.

Oh, it looks great! The action setpieces are really spectacular, with snappy direction and a lot of flair.

I mean, is there any other anime where an androgynous Rimbaud-quoting murder clown skateboards down a skyscraper pursued by a black-winged demigod vigilante?

Also, did I mention: SWORD LEGS

Ah yes, the sword leg comes back after Koku spends two whole episodes standing at the top of a cliff dramatically braving a blizzard, because that's what kind of show this is.

At the end of the day, B's final attempt to tie its two storylines together is just making one guy responsible for everything. Which is fucking hilarious. Some highlights: "How many times in the last eight years has the doctor worked past midnight?" "37." "How many unresolved missing person cases involving left-handed Asian women under 5'3 are there?" "Also 37."

He sets up a years-long plan to drive Keith to kill him because one time in college Keith said murder was dumb.

I legit burst out laughing at that scene.

tfw you're so invested in the girl you murdered eight years ago that you decide to kill someone solely because their musical taste doesn't align with hers

After being shot point-blank in the head, he spends his final moments waxing poetic about the satisfaction he gets from forcing Keith's hand. It's just So Much. I can't take how much this man is. It turns out that he's also responsible for enabling the attack on Koku's childhood school and supplying the clown cult with their sanity drugs, because of course that was the only way to tie all this together. This show's plotting is so, so dumb. I can't decide if I love or hate it.

Yeah, that's the thing. The whole show's a string of "wouldn't it be cool if...?" ideas thrown out without any themes tying them together. Koku's arc vaguely resembles a coming-of-age narrative, while Keith's is a pretty transparent detective with a vendetta and not much more. It's a lotta good spectacle, but that's kind of it?

B is what you'd get if you took the Five arc from Terror in Resonance and made that like, the whole show.

Hey, I also like Terror in Resonance a lot, haters to the left. But when it comes down to it, I'm not sure if I can recommend B to many people. If for some reason you do decide to watch it, you'll have a great time marathoning it with a group of friends.

It also looks pretty dang nice, so if that's your thing...

Plus any show with ear blush is a good show in my book.

As long as we get more Lily tbh

LMAOOOOOO