This article contains spoilers.

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Let’s start with some basic facts.

Blast of Tempest is a 2013 Studio Bones anime. It’s named after and very loosely inspired by William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. My own knowledge of Shakespeare is limited to what I was taught in my literature classes in high school. We never got around to The Tempest, though I am fond of the other play Blast of Tempest likes to toss out quotes from; Hamlet.

As I often do for an anime I have no particular expectations for, I queued Blast of Tempest up in my video player some two weeks ago, and watched it late at night over the course of several evenings. My intent, as it generally is, was to review it if I had anything of substance to say about it.

But, as you have likely already guessed by this post’s odd title, that did not exactly happen. The fact of the matter is that I don’t really like Blast of Tempest. If you’re looking for your pure-utility “good/bad” recommendation, I’d steer most people away from it. My entire reason for throwing out the first, more traditional proper review I wrote of the series, is that reading it back over to edit it, I just felt like I was being….well, mean, I suppose? I began to really question if this was the right approach, and I’ve placed the review back in my drafts folder. It will see the light of day before too long, after I cut the worst of the bile and re-structure it a bit. Until then, let’s engage in something both a bit more positive and a bit more specific.

Let’s talk about Fuwa Aika.

Aika is murdered before the series even begins. For the vast majority of it, who killed her is the driving question that motivates both of the actual protagonists; her step-brother Mahiro and his only friend (and, secretly, her boyfriend) Takigawa Yoshino. Very briefly; they enlist the help of Kusaribe Hakaze, a sorceress stranded on an island hundreds of miles away, to help find Aika’s killer and avenge her death against a backdrop of wider magical intrigue. Chiefly this involves two giant trees; Genesis and Exodus, one of which has the power to protect the world, and the other, to destroy it.

None of this is unusual, or at least not unusual for the late aughts / early ’10s urban fantasy zeitgeist that Blast of Tempest is part of. What is slightly unusual is how much more fully-realized Aika is as a character than the rest of the cast. It’s not that Blast of Tempest‘s other characters are flat, exactly, but Aika is markedly more complex than any of them, and this is true despite the fact that for the vast majority of the series, we only see her in flashbacks.

The other characters are fairly easy to figure out, even Hakaze, eventually, despite the fact that she’s away from the action for most of the show’s first half. Aika, meanwhile, is a riddle. We initially only see her interact with Mahiro and Yoshino. These interactions paint a picture of a difficult, strong-willed, and thoughtful young woman with a kind center that she only shows to some. But, the negative space created by the scenes she’s absent from–which is a majority of them, in spite of the frequent flashbacks–create a vastly more complex character by implication.

The latter half Blast of Tempest, textually, paints Aika as a fatalist obsessed with theatrical metaphor. She is the character who throws down the largest number of the show’s Shakespeare quotes. Late in the series she compares herself to an actress who can, at best, hope for “a beautiful exit” and who has no real control over her life. On its own, this is fairly interesting. I could devote this entire column to interpreting Aika as a “chained woman”, someone who is bound by the men in her life in a very real and immediate way, even if they don’t bind her deliberately. What’s even more interesting is that, in spite of everything, by the end of the series it seems as though Aika is the one who’s been pulling the strings the entire time.

Let’s get some major spoilers out of the way; Blast of Tempest involves time travel. Hakaze can leap through time and does so twice over the course of the series. The first instance isn’t relevant here, but the second, where she goes back to the night of Aika’s death to find out who killed her, very much is. Aika, as it turns out, is her own murderer. Not just that; she’s a powerful sorceress. Strong enough to defeat Hakaze, otherwise the most capable in the series, without much of a fight.

The specifics here aren’t super important. The fact that Aika willingly kills herself in order to facilitate a plan of her brother’s and her lover’s in the future directly contradicts her own statements about her life philosophy. She says one thing–that this is all inevitable, and comparing herself (and indeed the whole cast) to Caliban–and does another, seizing her fate with her own hands. She could, as is pointed out, easily avoid this outcome. If she were the blithe fatalist she paints herself as, the lack of an external murderer would make not killing herself the correct option. But she does anyway. Despite her insistence otherwise; she isn’t an actress playing a role. She’s a playwright all her own.

Which makes her absence from the rest of the anime all the more peculiar, doesn’t it? Why would you make a character like this and then kill her before the start of the story? I have to confess that I was hung up on this. You could argue that my own fixation on Aika as Blast of Tempest‘s most complex character mirrors the show’s actual narrative. I think, somewhat ironically, in trying to place Aika at the center of that narrative, Blast of Tempest frees her from it. Aika is the only one of the show’s characters who does not abide by the narrative logic it operates on–a principle that is called out nearly by name several times. She pretends to, but her compliance is false on its face.

What to make of all this? On some level, I’m aware that my reading of Aika specifically is likely the result of bias. I do just plain like the character a lot. On another, most of Blast of Tempest‘s other important characters either are male or are beholden to a male love interest. While it’s true that Aika and Yoshino dated while she was alive, she seems to revolve around him much less than, say, Hakaze, who eventually also develops feelings for Yoshino, does. And Yoshino and Mahiro’s actions for most of the series are almost entirely driven by their respective feelings for Aika. Later in the series, when the character of Megumu is introduced, he too is largely driven at first by unrequited love, in this case for a girl who dumped him. Of the main characters, Aika stands alone as a person who truly doesn’t seem to need anyone else, even if she does appreciate them. As someone who very much does feel reliant on other people, I can’t help but respect that, even if the endpoint she takes it to is pretty tragic.

Conversely, I’m not trying to make the argument that Blast of Tempest is some sort of feminist manifesto. (It would be fair to call such an idea a stretch.) Indeed, one might equally argue that the entire reason Aika is dead is because when writing within a certain framework, it is the only way she can exist in the story at all. A woman as smart and capable as Aika inherently disrupts the structure of a male-lead revenge story just by being there. The very nature of the genre requires her to only exist in the past tense.

But on the third hand, I would not simply condemn the series as sexist, either. Aika, as already mentioned, exits her “role”, and Blast of Tempest‘s backstory, of her own accord, through no one’s actions but her own. Violently, true, and one could write entire other articles about the lingering image of her, bled out, draped over a chair, that the series frequently returns to. However, I think it is helpful to consider all possible readings here. “Aika is a victim” is not an idea that, in my mind, holds up to the facts I’ve gone over here. I risk repeating myself, but perhaps it bears repeating; Aika is quite possibly the only character in Blast of Tempest who is truly the master of her own destiny.

And, despite the flaws and frustrations of her parent series, I think that all of this is why I find Aika so fascinating. Blast of Tempest ends like many anime of its ilk do; the dust settles and the cast go on with their lives. Only in this case, somewhere far beyond them, already long gone, is Aika. Never caught, she escapes like a thief in the night.

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