This Week in Anime

Is Talentless Nana Worth Watching?

Jean-Karlo
dunno, man. Even with all the crap going on, I've got all kinds of homework. Gotta kill the killers before the killers kill me, and all that.

This week, Steven and I are proud to talk about Talentless Nana, a show that came out of nowhere for me and basically murdered its way into our heart. At the center of this show is the titular Nana, a ruthless and conniving murderer tasked with killing a classroom of Espers who are projected to kill 10 million people in their lives. With their bizarre superhuman powers, all Nana can count on is cold deduction and a rosy exterior. I should hate this show. But I don't.

See, it turns out that as brilliant as Nana's murderous plots are, they're not fool-proof. Enter Kyoya Onodera, the cool-headed (but very offbeat) Esper who dogs Nana's every turn. He knows something isn't right about her, but it's all he can do to be quite convinced she's up to no good.

Meanwhile, his dogged persistence (blind as it is) forces Nana to keep on her toes as she continues to try setting up increasingly-complicated murder plots that both plausibly eliminate her as a suspect while leaving the door open to some other unnamed entity possibly being the threat. It's a great dynamic. It's not unlike Columbo: the joy is in finding out how Nana will overcome this new Esper's abilities while pulling the wool over Kyoya's eyes.

It would have been so easy to have a dynamic between Kyoya and Nana that only worked on paper. Talentless Nana, put plainly, is a dark show; Nana's serial killings are assigned to her by a shadowy cabal trying to control the rising population of Espers in the world. Being that their powers make them immune to conventional weapons and disobedient to any law or creed, the non-powered humans of the world decide that the only way to nip the problem is to get the Espers while they're young. So a lot of time is taken to illustrate that on some level, being an Esper makes you somewhat messed up as a person. Kyoya and Nana could have been L and Light: a pair of drab, amorphous "amoral" protagonists whose morally grey moralities ultimately mean there's no reason to root for anyone. Here, we have the opposite: both characters are so effortlessly charming in spite of their failings you want to see how they'll one-up each other.

I'm still just gobsmacked at how this show manages to pull off being so dark while not turning me away. I am painfully unamused by grimdark shows (I break out in hives around Future Diary or Gantz). I didn't think I'd like this show by the end of the first episode. But here I am, legitimately enjoying this whole thing. As I said earlier, I think part of it is that the show takes pains to illustrate that Nana's classmates are all sick puppies on some level. Each student is projected to kill several hundred thousand people within their lifetimes, and a quick glance at their neuroses makes that easy to believe. The show starts with Nanao, who at first seems to be a hapless, anxious student. It's quickly revealed that he does have a nascent dark side, such as when he refused to share his lunch with a hungry classmate. And then he lied about it to his extremely-generous father. Considering his power is revealed to be the ability to neutralize other powers, it's easy to see how he could go from neurotic wreck to megalomaniac in short order. Y'know, like Anakin Skywalker.

Six feet under~!

I always believed a lot of shows would be better if they replaced their potato-protagonists with the female lead. I guess part of the reason I love Talentless Nana so much is that it validates that belief. (Asuna, Rem, take note...) And again, there's a bizarre karmic justice at work as Nana works through her victims. The time-travelling Esper is a major control freak who'd definitely abuse his powers if it meant satisfying his obsession with cleanliness. Tsunekichi the diviner is a pervert who tries to milk his blackmail over Nana for all its worth, until the bitter end. Yuka controls the reanimated corpse of a boy she had a crush on who never reciprocated her feelings (and who she killed in the first place). The gyaru Nana offs were both catty bullies who'd sell each other out for a single corn chip as soon as they'd share makeup. This isn't quite Moriarty the Patriot, but these are all characters with serious issues who already show severe sociopathic tendencies at their tender age. You can buy into them having projected kill-counts in the six digits. Again: this shouldn't work, because the basic idea behind this show is the fodder for so many bad Superman/Batman books. But Talentless Nana manages to make this concept work.

There's definitely more to the story than what Nana is being told, like how five years ago the island academy had been host to a previous class of Espers that descended into a battle royale from which only one student survived. The island is still littered with the old corpses!

You can see the seeds for this being planted as early as the first episode, where a pair of students are tasked with fighting each other with their powers... for the position of class president.

keep repeating myself, but I really wanna sing this to the four winds: it does the material justice and I honestly want to see how it plays out. Do I think it's anywhere as good as, say, Moriarty the Patriot? No. If you wanna watch a great murder-mystery where the protagonist is the murderer and you want to see how they get away with it, then that should be your show. But Talentless Nana is a great also-ran. The animation is a little more workmanlike, but the writing is solid and the many obstacles in Nana's path make for engaging television. There's also that macabre satisfaction of seeing Nana put down some genuinely awful people.

Nana may be fairly ruthless in her killing, but she's human enough to want to save a cat stuck in a drain--even if it risks her cover. That counts for something. She isn't Light where she has some farcically inflated sense of self, she's a woman on a mission. No mission is more important than Cat™️.

Says a lot when our girl has to take a step back from how far someone's willing to go.

I'm just counting down the minutes until Nana finds a way to kill him. His power definitely would require a plan that'll be amazing to see unfold.

And she didn't even need potato chips or Willem Dafoe to do it!

Get you a girl who looks at you like Michiru Inukai looks at Nana. You almost suspect she has a better idea of what's going on, giving the evidence towards Nana's actions that comes past her. I almost dread there being a reveal that Michiru has some dark secret or is murderously obsessed with Nana.

She's another one of the key elements that keeps the show from being overbearingly grimdark: a blameless puppy whose worst sin is perhaps being a bit too trusting towards a murderous wolf. And even Nana finds herself dropping her guard around Michiru. She might even resent the idea of having to kill her.

So, uh, roaring pink-haired revenge rampage maybe?

Talentless Nana is definitely one of the most pleasant surprises I've had in watching a show, I definitely need to know how this resolves itself. I'm invested in this murder girl and her doggy girlfriend, and if it's not clear I wholeheartedly urge other folks to join in.

Now if only they could solve the true mystery of this show: whether Kyoya can learn what an F-boy is!