This Week in Anime

The Blood-Soaked World of Onyx Equinox

Nicky
Totally didn't feel ominous having my first show in 2021 (Savage) have an episode titled "The Last Year". NOPE! Lingering existential dread aside, this show is actually a big landmark for animation, as it's the first animated series fully produced by our very own Crunchyroll, featuring a setting rooted in Meso-American culture, and also helmed by a diverse staff. While this is our first show of the year, it is also one of many the many "firsts" you can give to this title. Today, we're covering Onyx Equinox!

Damn, didn't expect the Abunai Sisters to be one of my first thoughts of 2021 (Savage) either, Thanks Steve. The year is already off to a great start.

Onyx Equinox has a lot more in common with western toons than it does anime despite being, let's say "anime adjacent", in the same way Avatar: The Last Airbender or Castlevania are. It's also, notably, an original action-fantasy for adults. Something we're seeing more and more of in the age of streaming. Still, we mustn't forget the mountain of anime money upon which its house is built on, which is the real mark for occasion.

Yeah, with that I guess we should address the "Adult" aspect of this. It's true that there's been a bigger push for animation featuring explicit content in order to draw away from the idea that drawings are more than just "Kid Stuff", but I don't think that necessarily deems something "Mature" when the only difference is the amount of blood being spilled and the characters are allowed to say "Fuck" now. And this show definitely has that in spades—sometimes to its detriment, I feel.

Normally, I'm okay with that kind of stuff. But the first time I watched the premiere in December, it left me feeling a little unoptimistic that I didn't even get to the part where they introduce the protagonist. This might just be because of my own built-up stress, but I mostly found it unpleasant and confusing at first, and I really wasn't the only one who felt that way enough to turn the car around. After all, every once in a while we get a Netflix original like Blood of Zeus that tries to do the same thing and those are wholly joyless spectacles. Though I did find the monster designs cool and inspired. It's just really hard to care about anything when you open your story with nihilistic death and destruction and not much else to latch onto.

Though, since we've talked so much about FIRSTS, and with the start of another new anime season I'm sure all our readers know this lesson well: First impressions can be wrong!! I ended up much more receptive to it when I was in a better mood, and the story of Izel felt much more compelling.

And I'm glad, because I still found all those parts mentioned Pretty Unpleasant or jarring and often wondered why or what could be done about it, though I also won't say it's thematically out of line with the story or the history, illustrating how cruel and uncaring the gods are to humanity. We're just currency for power to them. The show opens with Mictlantecuhtli kidnapping and swallowing the city of Dani Baan (known today as Monte Albán) essentially as a declaration of war against the Celestial Gods.

Also, a word, there are lots of Proper Nouns with indigenous names in this show, but since the audio is all in English, there are NO ENGLISH SUBS for them!! We're gonna try our best to get all the names correctly, but having no closed captions to go on may not only affect the accessibility of this article but also for anyone who might be unfamiliar or hard of hearing watching the show.

This could really apply to all dubbed anime as well, I really wish companies would get on board and start applying a dub track along with their regular sub release (lookin' at you, Netflix) because I actually do have problems parsing with spoken word and it heavily affects my ability to talk about dialogue when I can't give examples. It's going to be hard for me and everyone posting online to talk about some of the good moments of the show when they can't engage with the "text" visibly online.

How very On-Brand of you.

Off-Brand for me, I couldn't balance two languages at once because my brain kept discerning the differences between English and Spanish and despite being half-Mexican, my Spanish has never been good. Though, this is also why I wanted to talk about the show so badly. Onyx Equinox isn't just a fantasy, these are real people involved and there's obviously a lot of care put into this set-up—even if to most people it might as well be alien.

Though, maybe I can't argue that Quetzalcoatl isn't an anime household name when it's the famous setting of so many cosplay photos. AKA The San Jose Poop Snake right across from the convention center.

Yeah, again, the attention to detail in the designs are super-neat for those that care to look deeper into it. I've always been a big nerd for mythology, so that stuff is right up my alley and some of it fits well into the characters as well. The gods also come in many forms; I particularly love this version of Mictēcacihuātl, the lady of the dead, who you may associate with the more well-known Day of the Dead.

Yeah, at first most of the gods are much more terrifying than poop snakes would lead you to believe. Also scary is when they've stolen a human body and you get to watch it slowly deform, unable to hold their essence. You're more likely to identify them by their voices given that the cast is so small. Fortunately the voice direction is pretty good in that they're always distinctive.

Ah yes, the Discovery Channel.

They also 100% do not care about humanity or their fate but rather how they can manipulate them to serve their end goals, which leads back to our initial gamble, Izel. The chosen boy, dubbed champion and humanity's "lowest of the low". He doesn't have a great life, with his sister as his only family, but it's simple and not devoid of joys like eating some sweet homemade Tamales. Something I also did much of over the holidays.

And what follows is his literal descent. Having lost all hope, he falls into the water right after her, hits his head on the door of the underworld, and accepts death until he gets fished out by a giant angry kitty cat who tells him to man-up cuz the gods want him to close those gates.

I love Me'que. I would protect Axolotls with my life.

But first we gotta get to the most important part of any Hero's Journey show: The Power of Friendship!

In order they are Yun (Left) and K'in (RIght), Zyanya, and Xanastaku.

Don't forget!! Horrifying tiny knife creature that constantly cries out for blood like it's some sort of cursed Pokémon : K'i'iik.

But yeah, on their own the cast isn't very complex but they do share their own burdens with each other and believe in helping each other once they learn that's the only way they're going to get anywhere. Izel starts out pretty sniveling, having been thrown to cruel fate over and over again even before the Gods decided to play with him. He's been chased from his home, sold by his father, and generally abandoned by humanity, all before the ball even had a chance to drop.

Now he has to attack and dethrone gods and what does he get out of it? Well, maybe a chance to revive his sister at least.

We still never fully learned her deal tbh, now that I'm thinking about it. I guess that's more of something to expect if we ever get a season 2. But the party is relatable enough that I feel like they work. Somehow I feel like the Ball Chads ended up becoming more likable since they already understand familial connections and always had each other; they also do eventually try to act like brothers to Izel.

Magic Soccer Ball COOL

I feel my shins bruising from the thought.

Ball is love, Ball is life.

Though, tbh, out of the main cast, my favorite character ended up being The Cat Daddy, Yoatl.

Also, his voice is sexy and Mictēcacihuātl agrees.

yeah Content Warning, these are all stills but deffo a lot more full frontal nudity than I expected.

Introduced as Tezcatlipoca's most loyal emissary, Yoatl is tasked with babysitting Izel to make sure he has at least a sort of chance of closing the gates and not just crying the whole time under the guise of "fairness" aka keeping Tezcatlipoca informed because he can't sabotage the bet directly. You keep kind of expecting a heel-turn but he starts out thorny and unhelpful to begin with and then doesn't even when he has the opportunity to. The why lies in his former human nature, even if it's not really something he remembers.

He at least gets to wear more than just....a cloth, after a few episodes.

I also thought Mictēcacihuātl ended up being a more standout character, as a sort of helper and sort of antagonist and honestly, the instigator of the whole actual story.

Yeah, for those familiar, she was actually a human infant sacrifice that death took in to be his "wife" aka someone to watch over his bone collection while I presume he went out to go drink the blood of more humans or whatever. She ends up going out (with the dog's supervision) and falling in love with humanity and later Yoatl. However, they are drawn apart by the way of things, and so she plots her revenge. Gotta hug your dog to feel better about the unfairness of god bullshit.

Also yeah, Izel's last stand at the end, where he decides that he is TIRED of playing games he has no control over, is pretty sweet, on a personal level at least. Even though we have yet to see all the consequences and it could also have spelled the death for ALL OF HUMANITY. We won't really know unless we get a season 2 though.

Yeah, and even if it doesn't get another season, I think it still makes a fine statement about the worth of humanity and all that. It also helps that the music is like, really good and carries a lot of dramatic weight for the show while mixing both traditional and modern styles. Not to mention, given that this is an ambitious project with some new creators, it could've turned out MUCH much worse if it was bad (which it isn't). That's kind of the big pitfall many minority creators fall into. The cycle of Ambitious Project gets funded > Fails due to any number of reason > Studios never want to be ambitious is a rough cycle that plagues all of our current media industries and part of the reason it's so hard to get stuff made by anyone who identifies with anything other than Wonder Bread. So even if Onyx Equinox isn't my favorite, it's good enough that I want people to check it out and potentially try to break out of that cycle.

We gotta have less BRUGS and more shit like this. Let's all put the past behind and overcome BRUGS together!!

We could all use a little more Axolotl in our lives. Have a good 2021 everybody! May these cute pink water creatures bless you.