This Week in Anime

Blade of the Immortal Gets Lost in the Ultraviolence

Micchy
Hey Andy, remember when we watched Kengan Ashura and I said something to the tune of wanting more ridiculous bone swords in anime? On second thought, that might not be such a great idea. For one, it'd probably hurt like hell.

Two, I can't imagine bones are actually all that durable as weapons.

I'm liking it just fine for the most part, with one huge HUGE caveat that it's sometimes (see: often) super uncomfortable—if not outright painful—to sit through. Like I'll cut to the chase, Blade of the Immortal has a lousy habit of brutalizing its women in very graphic ways, and I'm not so fond of that. Hyperviolence I'll take, but the multiple torture and rape scenes are absolutely excruciating to sit through as a woman. Even if they're intentionally upsetting I don't know if I want to put myself through that experience as much as Blade of the Immortal (2019) seems to want me to.

This adaptation of Blade is committed to a gritty perspective on violence, usually depicting it as an ugly cycle of pain that just sometimes happens to involve decapitated heads flying through the air. The fight scenes are disorienting and impossible to follow, but I'm not sure the goal was to make them look cool in the first place. I find it hard to believe that editing this claustrophobic and spatially ambiguous is accidental.

To be sure, the direction's started to sag as the series has progressed, but I'm not entirely convinced the show was ever trying to be stylish or flashy the way, say, a Masahiro Ando joint is.
But then again, it could simply be badly boarded action, it's hard to say.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Hm, now I quite liked that episode—we don't get a lot of concrete info on Makie's goals or history, but the scraps we're handed sketch out a rough outline of how complex and contradictory her life has been. She's good at killing, but restrained by what people teach her—and when she discards what she learns she's only more conflicted. By the end of the episode, we don't know her true feelings, sure. But I don't think she does either? In general, I like the way this adaptation streamlines character arcs into the important beats, leaving it to us to extrapolate the details. New characters, like strangers, don't show much of their true selves—but we get enough hints to get a vague sense of where they're coming from. What the show uses its saved time for is a different problem.

I mean my reaction to the show is basically

Which is to say I am way more invested in the random strangers Rin meets and inadvertently screws over than Sword Guy #578.

tfw u have to carry the entire show bc ur partner keeps getting killed on respawn and is otherwise uninteresting

Really though, it's kind of unfair how much more engaging Rin is than whatever Manji and his traveling not-boyfriend are up to. Here's a girl dedicated to revenge but unsure what she's willing to pay to get it, utterly devoted to her cause but also terrified of letting anyone else follow her path and continue the cycle of violence she willingly entered. The episode where she confronts one of her parents' killers and totally keeps her calm to avoid alarming his kid comes to mind.

Rin: your son deserves to live a normal life with what he believes is a normal dad!
Manji: okay time to traumatize a kid

Lending Rin his severed arm for a few hours was the least he could do for goofing this up.

I do like how Anotsu's rationale for killing Rin's family is "your grandpa ousted my grandpa from the cool kids club, so it's just deserts."

Yeah I don't know why anyone in this show bothers carrying on their family's legacies when their families suck so much ass!

He is the belief 'might makes right' made flesh. He's so frustrated with the formality and rigidness of more traditional schools that he lets everything go as nature wills it, principles be damned. Never mind the irony of carrying on a tradition of disregarding tradition. Anyway, he sucks because for all the show's promises of putting him in women's clothing it never. Showed him. In a dress. The absolute cowardice.

I don't know if she's really in the state of mind to be interrogating his philosophy though, not when both of her brain cells are in Revenge Mode. And frankly, she's far from the dumbest character in the show, so I gotta give her a bit of a pass there.

That's okay though, she's trying her best, even faking a C-section to corroborate her passport application sob story. Not that any of that was necessary when all she needed to do was ask.

Let's just pretend Manji did some worm magic to get that to happen. Also: I am really not over how the explanation for Manji's immortality is "magic worms".

Now that's the kind of dumb bullshit I come to my hyperviolent gorefests for! Now if only the show embraced the ridiculousness instead of trying to straddle the line between gritty and goofy. For starters, quit using rape so often as a way to raise the stakes. Just a suggestion!!

Yeah no, Rin's kinda dumb as bricks. If only she'd started with part 1 of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, she'd know that anyone who kills dogs for fun is bad news. Unfortunately Hirohiko Araki was yet but a child during the Edo period, so she couldn't possibly have gotten that PSA.

True! Either way, Rin probably should've bailed when Shira started slaughtering random innocents. If only he stayed gone instead of showing up again with an oyster fork for an arm.

Earlier rape scenes are at least appropriately horrifying, but Hyakurin's torture scene is just gratuitous. The dwelling on her body was way longer than necessary to get the point across. The immediate followup of the flying heads doesn't help the icky framing.

Blade's better at shorter, self-contained stories; it suffers from trying to get a fixed cast to carry whole arcs. It's disappointing that it couldn't sustain the energy of its first few episodes, but they can't all be winners I guess. I still enjoy the show! But like I said, huge caveat that will absolutely cross the line for some folks.

Just a little, before everything gets swallowed by the Bezos Empire.