Tag: Zetsuen no Tempest

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.