Tag: Blast of Tempest

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) I Would’ve Written a Review, But THE DETECTIVE IS ALREADY DEAD

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

“And thus, did my dizzying tale of adventure with Siesta begin….
Until death did us part.”

It may be difficult now, but try to think back to the opening week of this anime season. Alongside a number of rightly-hyped premiers by anime everyone kinda expected to be good, there was the comparatively obscure The Detective is Already Dead. Tantei wa mou, Shindeiru, as it’s known in its native Japanese, had, alongside heavyweights like Sonny Boy and the second season of Magia Record, one of the most promising premieres of the season. Said premiere, “Attention Passengers: Is There a Detective On Board?”, combined witty dialogue, a gonzo, very capital-A Anime set of central conceits, a truly impressive fight sequence, and one of the season’s best and, let’s be honest, simply coolest characters, the titular detective, into an entertaining stew that had a lot of potential. (Full disclosure; I may have a soft spot for “basically Sherlock Holmes, but an anime girl” as a character idea.)

The episode ran through the need-to-knows with the lightning speed and self-confidence of a pulp novel. The secret organization SPES and their army of cyborgs are threatening the world! It’s up to our hero, the legendary detective Siesta, and her straight-laced assistant Kimihiko “Kimi” Kimizuka to stop them! It opens a mile in the air during a plane hijacking and ends in a high school, our leads pulling a drug bust on a dealer in a bunny costume. Capping it all off was a wildly romantic sequence at the episode’s tail end, followed by the header quote in the closing narration to hit us with the emotional coup de grace. Our hero’s been dead the entire time! How will her heartbroken assistant carry on without her? It remains one of the year’s single best episodes, and nothing else I am about to say can or is trying to change that. Episode directors Shin’ichi Fukumoto and Marina Maki should be proud.

I bring all this up not to belabor a point, but to make it clear that, yes, there was a period of time–however brief–when people thought this might be, at the very least, one of the season’s better anime. Twelve weeks on, where its reputation is somewhere between “trainwreck” and “widely-dropped laughingstock” that can seem hard to believe, but it’s true. On one level, the answer to the question “what went wrong?” is extremely simple; none of those strengths remained present for the remainder of the series, and some dropped off earlier than others. But on another, Detective is a downright fascinating case of a show almost systematically undercutting itself at every turn. Detective started falling apart as early as its second episode, and despite some intermittent highlights throughout, it never really recovered either.

We can start by making one thing very clear. Detective‘s problems do not stem from its premise. They’re certainly not helped by it, but it is very possible to tell the story of a life in the past tense. To focus on what the bygone has left behind, to examine how the people around them move on or how they fail to move on. Detective doesn’t entirely fumble this, but it misses more often than it hits. In fact, its handling of this premise reminds me of nothing less than the largely-forgotten Blast of Tempest, which had many of the same issues for some of the same reasons. The core problem is simple; if the central character of your show is dead or otherwise MIA in the present day, she needs a very strong supporting cast. And Siesta, like that show’s Fuwa Aika, simply does not have one. She is a compelling character in search of a compelling anime. It is largely her who renders the show watchable at all, as all the other characters are so underdeveloped that she appears deep as the ocean by contrast.

Instead, she gets Kimi, who to his limited credit, does work out an entertaining straight man / weird girl dynamic with Siesta. They form a fun duo much like their archetypal ancestors (say, Kyon and Haruhi) did.

Yes that’s still Siesta in the top image. Listen, just roll with it.

There is also Nagisa, Siesta’s replacement, who is in almost every sense a much less engaging character, but who has the benefit of being the recipient of a heart transplant from none other than the late detective herself to at least arouse some mystery. The remaining characters are so thin that they are barely worth mentioning. There’s a chuuni-ish idol complete with an eyepatch (Yui Saikawa), an ambiguous foreigner with some ill-defined relationship to Siesta (Charlotte Anderson), and a mysterious child (Alicia) who turns out to secretly be the evil mastermind (Hel) in disguise / assuming another personality / something, it doesn’t really matter.

The fact that the episode where an idol pulls a revolver on the main character is one of the less interesting ones is not a great sign.

This lopsidedness of the cast ends up directly informing the episodes. As a general rule of thumb, those that center on Siesta and Kimi tend to be either genuinely good, even if only in a cheesy sort of way, or at least bad in a funny way. Those that focus on other characters are much less interesting. Sometimes they’re flat-out boring, which is a far worse crime than being ridiculous.

Beyond that, on a narrative level the show makes very little sense. The actual story is very simple, cataloging Siesta and Kimi’s attempts to take down SPES. And later, Kimi’s retirement from ‘detective’ work and eventual resumption of that same goal again, this time with Nagisa. But the show’s structure is so bizarre that it can be difficult to follow any of this. Why, for example, if the show’s central conceit is that Siesta is dead, does a huge chunk of it take place as flashback to when she was alive? These stories being told in this fashion adds nothing to the show. It makes it marginally more confusing to follow, but deliberate obfuscation is not the same as actually being interesting.

Something like The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya or Princess Principal is aired non-chronologically because in those cases, the approach helps develop the sort of story they’re trying to tell. (In the former case, Kyon and Haruhi’s emotional arc takes precedence over the literal events of the series. In the latter case, it is to build up mystery and selectively feed the audience information.) No such thing is true of Detective‘s clumsy halfway flashback deep-dive. And the fact that they are some of the show’s better episodes feels more like a happy accident than anything deliberate. It’d feel like course correction given the widespread but misguided criticism of the premise if that were how anime production worked. But it isn’t, so what gives?

And what to make of the show’s utterly baffling organ transplant motif? Organs, namely hearts, transferring ownership comes up some three times over the course of the series, which is too often in a show this short to simply be happenstance. And let me make an aside here, folks, I’m not professionally trained as a critic, so I’m certainly guilty of occasionally missing things more properly literate sorts would pick up on. But I am a thinking human being, and it’s rare that I just come up completely empty when rattling a metaphor around in my brain. I have no idea what it could possibly mean. None of the possibilities I’ve come up with–the perseverance of love? Specifically the strength of Siesta and Kimi’s relationship? Some hamfisted ‘people close to each other should help each other’ thing? A religious symbol?–hold up to scrutiny. I am left to conclude that it is either a very malformed metaphor or it simply isn’t one at all. In the latter case, why is it in the show at all?

That may seem like a minor point, but the same lack of purpose applies to many decisions made throughout the series. Elements like Yui’s job as an idol, the very fact that the antagonists are shapeshifting cyborgs, a weird micro-plot about priceless jewelry and another about a serial killer, the entire character of Hel, the fact that Siesta has a mecha(?!) at one point, even the series’ gratuitous Spanish subtitle, and the anticipated-and-then-quickly-forgotten cameo by Hololive virtual talents Matsuri Natsuiro and Fubuki Shirakami, seem like they were made less for any real reason and more simply because, well, they’re Cool. Or they’re the sorts of things that are “supposed” to be in light novels.

English-language info is sparse, but the case appears to be that Detective is the first-ever published novel by its author, Nigojuu, which may explain some of the amateurishness here. Or, maybe it’s the other way around! Studio ENGI are not exactly a powerhouse, perhaps they butchered the material. Maybe the light novel’s defenders are right and all this somehow does make more sense in book form. Hell, maybe it’s somehow both at once.

All this said, even with its frankly many flaws in mind, I can’t really hate or even actively dislike Detective. It has too many actually-solid moments and too many bad-in-a-funny way moments to have burned its goodwill from that first episode away entirely. A harsher viewer may write such things off, but I can’t pretend I didn’t enjoy a decent chunk of the show, even in spite of all its problems.

That, and there is that Detective does get one thing right. Especially towards its end. Sometimes, people we’ve known all our lives can disappear like a dream at sunrise. Sometimes too, we do not even get the chance to say goodbye. This is the sole emotional string the anime manages to play correctly, and even then it’s oddly stingy about it. But aside from Siesta’s strength as a character, it is this that saves the show from being a total loss.

As an even mildly adventurous anime watcher, you expect to take a gamble on some amount of shows that end up not exactly being amazing. Detective is, by any reasonable metric, middling, rather than outright awful. But that doesn’t make it good. Which puts it in a strange nowhere-zone, both in terms of relevance and in terms of simple quality. This is another of this year’s anime that will absolutely not survive the march of history, mentioned as it will be only as a curio or a “hey, do you remember that show with….?” answer. At best, perhaps some of the staff will go on to bigger and better things. In which case it will be an amusing trivial footnote. Call it a victim of the production bubble, call it just poorly-conceived. It is impossible to imagine Detective outside of this present time and place; mid-to-late 2021 specifically. It’s a born relic.

Yet, strangely, from a certain (and I’ll admit, uncommon) point of view, that gives it its own kind of hopeless underdog charm. The show itself only just barely manages to scrap together something out of its primary theme of transience (and all else it attempts falls resoundingly flat, make no mistake), but in a meta sort of way, Detective is an ode to its own transience. Here for twelve weeks and then forgotten, as though it simply scattered into light the moment it ended. Like it was never there at all.

It’s one of the great mysteries of popular art. Sometimes something that is utterly mediocre will, just for a moment, capture the public imagination or make visible an inner light, only for that light to be snuffed out almost immediately. Such is the case with Detective‘s few true highlights. It is one of the great enigmas of our species’ collective creativity. As such, one would be tempted to ask a great problem-solver, perhaps one like Siesta herself, what to make of it.

But of course, such a thing is impossible. After all, the detective is already dead.

Wanna talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers? Consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) A Mage, a Barrel, and a BLAST OF TEMPEST

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

“We are merely Caliban.”

Full disclosure, we’ve got a bit of a frustrating one today.

I have rarely ever in my limited time as a commentator on anime as a medium written two full-length “reviews” for a single series. I’ve certainly never done it for a show I don’t much care for. Yet, here we are, and here is Blast of Tempest, staring me down like an evil twin in the mirror. Let’s get started.

Very loosely inspired by William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, Blast of Tempest falls within the zeitgeist that was the late ’00s / early ’10s urban fantasy anime tradition, a world quite far from its inspiration. Like many such anime, it is a stew of proper nouns and half-sensical plot developments. Also like a lot of them, it is very silly.

Our premise is founded upon the murder of a girl, one Fuwa Aika, and her brother Mahiro’s quest to avenge her death. From this humble beginning sprawls out what quickly becomes a rather convoluted story. Which eventually comes to involve Yoshino, Mahiro’s friend and (unbenknownst to him) Aika’s boyfriend, a sorceress named Hakaze stranded on an island hundreds of miles away, the acting head of Hakaze’s family, a pair of god-like trees that embody creation and destruction called the trees of Genesis and Exodus respectively, and quite a few more things. Furthermore, Blast of Tempest loves its flashbacks, used to establish characterization post-hoc, especially in Aika’s case.

At its best, Blast of Tempest is content to show you dangerous, motivated people quoting Shakespeare at each other while they run rhetorical circles around, physically fight, or blast magic at each other. This mode, where Blast of Tempest manages to present a flashy, devil-may-care attitude about itself, is where we find the few places where it truly shines. The specific mixture of the flowery Shakespeare quotations, the magic technobabble involved in many of the show’s plot points, the wide swings and consequent misses at commentary on the nature of free will, and the wowee-zowee magic fights combine to make the best parts of the series a kind of low-stakes fun, even if one gets the sense even early on that it’s trying to be more than that.

Near the end of the first cour there is a stunning run of episodes (from about episode 9 to the middle of episode 12), where Blast of Tempest is reduced to three characters smugly proposing thought experiments to each other while the Japanese armed forces assault a mansion protected by a magic barrier. That this run then caps with Hakaze teleporting two years into the future while leaving her skeleton behind in order to avoid creating a time paradox, an action a friend of mine called “reverse-telefragging”, is the icing on the cake. It’s ridiculous on its face, but it’s entertaining, a maxim that describes most of Blast of Tempest‘s high points.

Unfortunate, then, that those high points are as scattershot as they are, and that the show’s first half has the lion’s share of them.

A theory I have about anime like this is that the twelve-episode format actually works wonders for them. It condenses all the stuff of the series–the proper noun soup, silly plot twists, oddball worldbuilding, in-over-its-head themes, etc.–down into a single cour, which is easily kept up with over the course of a season or binge-watched afterward in a few nights. At absolute worst, it’s at least digestible. Here is the problem with Blast of Tempest in this regard; it’s twice that length, at 24 episodes long.

On paper, that doesn’t sound like a huge difference, but Blast of Tempest is an unintentional study on the practical difference between about five hours of footage and about ten. After the end of episode 12, Blast of Tempest effectively runs short on plot, and its previously tight pacing starts to crumble. Half of its main conflict (that between Hakaze and her brother who is controlling her family in her stead) is resolved. Because there are still twelve more episodes to fill, the show must then stretch out the remaining mystery (who exactly killed Aika) for longer than it can reasonably sustain. One plot point must now do the work previously done by two.

Under this duress, its flaws transform from things that can be written off as inconsequential into damaging weaknesses that are fairly serious. The slow, ponderous pace the series adopts from roughly episode 13 to episode 18 is nearly unforgivable. Nothing working in the tonal space Blast of Tempest does survives at such a slow speed. Less because the question of who killed Aika isn’t interesting (it is!), but more because it takes quite a while to actually get to that. A good third of the show’s episodes are filled with narrative pillow stuffing like romance subplots and the non-arcs of characters like Megumu, whose defining trait is that a girl he likes dumped him.

Why does this guy exist?

It does eventually recover, regaining a decent bit of its flashy spirit in its final five or so episodes (things get even messier than before when time travel goes from a one-off and one-way plot device to a recurring element). And it’s not like this kind of middle-third slump is rare in anime like this, but this an uncommonly rough example.

There is another problem as well. Aika herself, as discussed at length elsewhere, stands head and shoulders above the rest of the cast in terms of character complexity, despite being dead for the whole series. Aika is established as a sharp thinker with a nonetheless carefree spirit, who subscribes to a peculiar sort of fatalism that doesn’t quite match her actual actions.

Her own musings are the only time Blast of Tempest‘s commentary on the nature of free will even approaches being thought-provoking, and in a better series Aika would be the main character. Ironically, pining for Aika’s full, developed character over the much simpler ones who make up the rest of the cast is, in a way, a reflection of Blast of Tempest‘s own plot. But even if this were intentional, it wouldn’t be to the show’s benefit. Writing an excellent character and then throwing them away isn’t impressive or deep, it’s just frustrating.

“Frustrating”, to go back to that opening sentence, is the operative word here in general. The closest Blast of Tempest gets to having any kind of real point is Mahiro’s declaration in the final episode that “in this crazy-ass world, there’s no point in playing the blame game.” A pithy chestnut that ducks the question of who is really ‘responsible’ for Aika’s death and is generally unsatisfying. It’s a decent enough idea when applied to the real world, but good advice does not necessarily make for good television.

In the final episode, in her second-to-last appearance in the series, Aika dismisses an unnamed book as “dull” and lacking in “inner light”. It’s cheap and honestly a little mean to say that the same could be said to apply to Blast of Tempest itself, but that doesn’t make it wrong. The series’ Shakespeare fixation is, in a meta sort of way, its own undoing. Anime can absolutely achieve the transcendence Aika alludes to in that conversation and that the series clearly strives for. It did so before Blast of Tempest, and would do so again after it. But Blast of Tempest itself just isn’t in that conversation.

I must, of course, turn the lens back on myself here. I have, even very recently, given anime much less ambitious than Blast of Tempest a pass for succeeding at the far more modest aim of simply being entertaining. Worse still, Blast of Tempest even is entertaining at times! But shooting for the moon is a double-edged sword. Blast of Tempest feels like it is trying so, so hard to shoulder an amount of thematic heft that it just cannot lift. I have a begrudging respect for its sheer effort, but the unfortunate fact of the matter is that enough of it is just straight-up dull that, a few specific aspects aside, I can’t muster up anything more than that. A flaw that is, admittedly, perhaps as much with myself as the show. But let no one ever accuse me of not giving it every chance I could think to.

And so Blast of Tempest remains. Unsatisfying, inconclusive, and trying way too hard. It reaches, but it knows not for what. In this way, perhaps Blast of Tempest, like the Caliban of Aika’s metaphor, is all of us.

If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime

The Wizard was Dead Already – The Paradox of Aika in BLAST OF TEMPEST

This article contains spoilers.

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.

So it goes with those who can choose their own fate.

If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.