Kaze no Stigma is a show that started
out with a lot of potential, but squandered it by making some very
basic mistakes. The setup involves a society of magic users that
exist secretly in what is essentially our regular mundane world –
the backbone of at least a sizeable subset of the broad genre of
“Urban Fantasy” that combines magic and monsters with the
trappings of the mundane world. Good so far. Our main character is
Kazuma, the scion of a house of fire magic wielders who was kicked
out of his family because he was, himself, incapable… and who
returns with a new mastery of a different element, Air. That’s a
pretty good setup for a character. The show puts him in a position
to help his former family in their time of need, but of course he
should have some conflicted opinions about that, considering that he
was bitterly mistreated. A good treatment would let us learn more
about the character through his struggles, understanding what
happened to him in the interval to lead him to this new power and how
his trials shaped him and will continue to shape him going forward.
Kaze no Stigma… does not deliver a
good treatment of this material. There’s more to worry about outside
of Kazuma, but I’m going start with him because his problems are the
most numerous and varied and his waste of potential the most
striking.
As much as the setup of Kazuma’s return
gift wrapped a lot of good drama, the writers did set themselves one
interesting challenge: Kazuma doesn’t just come back as a magic-user
or even a strong magic-user, he comes back as something called a
Contractor. Understanding what that means underscores the problem.
In-setting a Contractor is the biggest fish in the magical pond. As
far as the anime is concerned (I must admit ignorance of the source
material, but any differences are immaterial to the anime we’re
reviewing), we only know of two of them. One of them is Kazuma, and
the other is the founder of the Kannagi line (the line from which
Kazuma was disowned). The existence of the latter in generations
past is indicated to remain a source of great strength for that
Contractor’s modern descendants. They are that powerful, and
consequently as rare as previously stated: if there are any others
alive right now, perhaps Contractors of the other spirit lords, we
don’t know about them, and it’s more probable that Kazuma is a
once-in-multiple-generations power. If and when he goes all out,
it’s fairly explicit that nothing mortal can match him, and even
top-end monsters of magic are highly likely to be outmatched.
The challenge, or problem if you
prefer, is that top-tier powerful characters are hard to write for.
It’s not impossible to pull off – you can have deep, compelling,
and complex characters who face real and dramatic challenges while in
possession of godlike power, but it does take careful writing and
careful work from a lot of angles. The more above the rest of their
setting a character is, the more it warps what you have to do and the
harder the task becomes.
The first reason for this, and the
first approach that has to be managed, is the fact that compelling
drama requires a struggle. A character needs to want something, and
then have to put in actual effort to achieve their desires, with the
audience able to suspend their disbelief and entertain the idea that
the character might not get what they want (even if narrative law
says they ultimately will). When a character massively outstrips the
rest of their setting in terms of superpowers, that makes a more or
less wide swath of potential challenges non-valid. Because Kazuma
can beat up basically any enemy he could come across, enemies need
something other than combat threat to be compelling. And since his
particular power set is high in utility too, there are more tasks
that cease to be a struggle: Kazuma can fly, so he’s not going to
have to fight to get from point A to point B the way a more human
character might. And so on.
Again, this is a challenge that the
writers could overcome. And actually, there are points in the show
that come close to doing it. For instance, in the last arc (long
though it is) we encounter a villain known as Lapis, a homunculus
made from the last spiritual remnants of Kazuma’s lost love,
confronting Kazuma with her face and voice. Even if Kazuma could
obliterate her with a thought in a technical sense, her nature would
give him pause and force him to struggle against himself about
whether to do it or not. It doesn’t matter how overwhelming Kazuma’s
combat skills are if he can’t bring himself to use them. It’s
ironic; the show actually has the perfect antagonist to challenge
Kazuma on just about every level (if as anemic as everything else on
toe-to-toe fighting), but fails so utterly at using her that I still
have to bring this up.
In general, amazingly powerful
characters need to be challenged not on their power (which we know to
be amazing) but on their will, their resolve, their intellect, their
ethics and convictions… just about everything else that could cause
them to struggle.
The second prong of the problem of
Kazuma the Contractor is the nature of his power in particular. What
is a Contractor? One who has made a contract, in Kazuma’s case with
the Wind Spirit Lord. This sets an assumption about Kazuma’s great
power: there is a price, another side of a contract to fulfill.
There should have been a price.
Here’s the thing, there are a lot of
ways to, as a mortal, get supernatural powers in a setting (any
setting). If you look at it in the most granular sense, there are
probably more paths to supernatural power than there are stars in the
sky, but if you instead want the broadest categories there are a few.
One is that you can be born to it; it’s some people’s lot to be
special. This is pretty basic, and not amazingly interesting on its
own. You could call it the vanilla option, along with any other
subset of “just plain random luck”. And Kazuma defies that. He
comes from a place where he should have been born to power but
wasn’t. Other reasons that work, if you want those who consume media
to accept your world-building, all involve, in the broadest sense, a
price to be paid. Sometimes its frontloaded: the alchemists and
magicians that had to work hard and spend countless hours studying in
order to gain and progress their powers paid up front. People like
that one, and accept it because it ‘feels’ fair. The third option is
that you are still paying or yet to pay: there is something that
either will catch up to you, or has caught up with you, and will
require some compensation for those cool powers. Very often, this
means some cognizant being acting as a patron. They can be utterly
benevolent, or it can be a deal with the devil, but if you use this
conceit there’s always the question of what the one to receive power
gave in return.
Kazuma gave nothing. As well (or
poorly. Very poorly.) as his story is told in Kaze no Stigma,
Kazuma’s contract is completely one-sided: he gets utterly top-tier
powers from the Wind Spirit Lord. The show tries to frame it like a
price was paid, because somehow his gaining the contract has to do
with the agonizing loss of his beloved, but that fails on several
marks. First, as far as we know, the events are primarily
disconnected from one another. Kazuma didn’t reach out to the Wind
Spirit Lord in that moment or anything like that. She died, Kazuma
suffered, and somewhere in his suffering he gained the strength to
take vengeance. Since Contractors are so rare and special, this
leaves us asking “why him?” If his suffering is supposed to be
so uniquely poignant and cruel as to move the Wind Spirit Lord for
pity, we should have been lead to understand that. If his
determination and drive are supposed to surpass that of any other
mortal to such a degree that he alone earns Contractor status, we
absolutely need to see that to such a degree that we understand it,
that we say without a doubt that it had to be Kazuma, and not just
anyone (like, say, the villians of the first arc who suffered
generations of humiliation and servitude, or the main antagonist of
the second arc who’s lashing out at the killer of someone she cared
about and is willing to pay any price for revenge) could have done
it.
Or, if on the other hand the Wind
Spirit Lord really is willing to bestow world-class power for the
asking, we should see that. If Kazuma was simply the only one with
the audacity to ask, or if there was something mystical about him
(maybe being the descendant of another element’s Contractor) that
tickled the Wind Spirit Lord’s fancy, we should understand the Wind
Spirit Lord enough to accept that. For those who don’t know the show
yet, the Wind Spirit Lord never actually appears, so you can scratch
off that possibility.
There is, of course, the matter of the
continuing cost option. Much like the show gift wraps the perfect
Kazuma antagonist (Lapis) for itself and then fails to really open
the present, it gift wraps the perfect resolution to the question of
Kazuma’s contract… and tosses it right into the garbage unopened
when a lesser wind-aligned spirit comes to Kazuma with a problem, and
he makes it abundantly clear that there are no strings attached and
he is under no obligation to aid his benefactor’s house.
There could still be outs to this
situation, ways that Kazuma could have been portrayed that wouldn’t
make him feel like he exists on the most insipid ends of wish
fulfillment, but we’d have to understand Kazuma better as a person to
accept them.
And that’s the third prong of Kazuma’s
problems, and in my opinion the most damning: we never really
understand Kazuma as a person.
Kazuma should have been an amazingly
easy character to make interesting and compelling. He has several
deep conflicts that the show is primed to drag to the front, more if
you include the enemies coming out of the woodwork of his past
abroad. He clearly has (or should have) difficult choices ahead of
him as much as behind him, about how he wants to address working with
the family that rejected him. Choices that become easier or harder
to maintain as the romance with Ayano that’s supposed to be a thing
comes into form (more on that later). There are a lot of ways you
could go with his character, whether he seeks reconciliation, holds
stubbornly to hatred, remains largely aloof – just about anything,
for any reason. All you had to do was pick a character for Kazuma
and stick with it and it would be at least a little bit interesting
and lead to some dramatic scenarios.
If you guessed from this that the
writers did not, in fact, pick a single consistent character trait
for Kazuma or have him stick to the traits he shows in one moment the
next time it’s even slightly convenient to have him react entirely
differently… congratulations, you’re starting to see the problem
with Kaze no Stigma.
Kazuma’s portrayal is downright
schizophrenic, his mood shifting wildly as per the demands of the
plot. There’s not really a rhyme or reason to it; we don’t
understand his character enough to, at any point, know what sort of
reactions are in character. One moment his spite seems genuine, the
next it’s an act serving to salve his pride. One moment he claims to
have the resolve to not let any losses occur, anyone suffer and
die… the next he might seem downright cruel, aiming for suffering
and death for individuals that are far less than terrible foes
himself, or express a willingness to sacrifice relative pawns.
Perhaps Kazuma is a man of strong convictions, but when those
convictions are at odds with one another, they’re pretty much negated
though.
Really, the issue is simply that the
show fails to provide a satisfactory character study of Kazuma. Even
after the whole run, when he’s been through a lot of scenarios that
should have revealed who he is, I don’t feel like I know him any
better than I did from frame one. I can’t tell you if he’s a kind
person, a trickster, a bully, or a convicted hero. There are very
few true things about him as a person, which makes him amazingly
difficult to build empathy with (for the audience) or chemistry with
(for the other characters).
That last bit is another big problem.
Even if you’re not talking about romantic entanglements, , characters
need to have chemistry if you want them to be watchable interacting
with each other, playing off one another in various ways, causing you
to learn more about them and drawing the viewer into their lives.
Kazuma’s status as an inconsistent and therefore inscrutable
character kills that. But, it’s even worse because in Kaze no Stigma
we are talking about romantic chemistry – technically, this show
has “romance” in its genre DNA, and the romance we’re supposed to
believe in is the one between Kazuma and his leading lady Ayano.
I’m going to leave aside the fact that
Kazuma and Ayano are cousins. I’m mentioning it because I know it
would bother some people, and part of the point of a review (even a
spoiler review) is to inform viewers so they can decide if they want
to watch something or not. I’ve just gotten used to dealing with the
fact that cultures can have radically different opinions over whether
a match between cousins is OK. What does bother me is that the
characters have no chemistry and the show never makes you believe in
any feelings between them.
You get a vague sense, as the show
enters its final acts, that Ayano has developed a thing for Kazuma.
I chalk it up to the skill of her voice actress that I can at least
believe its true, even if we’re never given a scrap of reason why.
That’s not enough, though; in order for several movements surrounding
the climax to work, the show needs the audience to believe that Ayano
holds a special place in Kazuma’s heart, one that eclipses the
position of his little brother (who he usually has a positive
reaction to. It’s more consistent than most of his other behaviors
at least) and may even exceed his attachment to his lost love. Ayano
herself expresses some deep doubts over whether she’s the one who can
reach him, and… honestly I’m on her side. About half the time
Kazuma will troll and/or endanger Ayano, and not in ways or with an
attitude that makes it seem loving.
Of course, as much as I have problems
with Kazuma, I have to admit that Ayano doesn’t make the dynamic any
easier to swallow.
As failed characters go, Ayano is far
simpler and far more forgivable. While Kazuma is a kludge of bad
writing choices, inconsistent moves, and informed attributes, Ayano
is just flat. She’s a basic character with little dimension and
limited if any growth allowed, and if she wasn’t the female lead
she’d actually be kind of okay. She is every hot-headed vaguely
Tsundere redhead you’ve ever seen, without any other defining traits
or deeper personality.
And you know what? She’s well-acted
and inoffensive enough in that role that if she were a bit character,
I wouldn’t be complaining about her. In fact, there’s another
character in the show, Kathrine MacDonald, who is basically Ayano but
blonde, American, and not placed in a starring role. MacDoland is
totally serviceable for what she is and while she doesn’t give much
to the show, she takes away nothing. She has the right amount of
screen time for what she is, which is a character with only one or
two notes (I suppose she might actually have a little more pathos
than Ayano, now that I think about it).
Ayano… even in a starring role, she
might have been able to survive, but her co-lead would have to pick
up some slack to make the relationship interesting. However, Ayano
has the unenviable task of picking up Kazuma’s slack on that. And
maybe no character really could have done it, up against such a mess
of writing, but Ayano really doesn’t rise to the occasion. She’s
written as flat enough that it’s hard to tell what Kazuma would see
in her even aside from the fact that it’s clear as mud that he sees
anything. And because he’s so inconsistent, his behavior towards
Ayano ranging from gallant to callous to cruel, it’s impossible to
know what she sees in him that would actually bring out the ‘dere’ in
her tsundere ways. It happens, now and again, but there’s no reason
for it to stay once he’s done teasing her.
The last significant character is Ren.
Ren is the best character in the show. He has development, and
through his experiences moves forward. We get a solid sense of who
he is as a person, and it’s not static as his conviction pushes him
to act differently by the end of the show than he would have at the
start. When he feels something, his reactions are consistent and
make sense. You don’t always agree with him, but it at least feels
somewhat natural. Unfortunately, while more important than anyone
else in the show, Ren is a solid tier below Ayano and Kazuma and
doesn’t do a lot of heavy lifting for the most part.
As far as the story goes, there are
absolutely several distinct arcs. The intial arc is probably the
overall high point for the show in terms of enjoyment, just because
you can accept the fact that you’re not getting answers or
development yet; it’s just starting out. The arc features a clan of
wind-users who serve the main fire-using house secretly rebelling and
attempting to summon an evil corrupted wind god. Ayano does her best
to fight back for the honor and safety of her family, and Kazuma
mostly to clear his name of multiple murders with a side dish of not
really wanting anything bad to happen to his little brother, Ren.
It’s basic, but as introductions to this world go it isn’t terrible.
The second arc is where you start to
see the problems. It centers around a lesser member of the Kannagi
family who blames Kazuma for the deaths of people she cared about
that occurred in the first arc, and tries repeatedly to kill him.
Kazuma’s reactions to the murder attempts, poor and ineffectual
though they are, serve to actually cause all the trouble in this arc
by tormenting and provoking the girl even when he will randomly,
otherwise and in the arc’s end, show her extreme kindness that he
never offers to anyone else. Ultimately, she teams up with an old
enemy of Kazuma’s, kills tons of people to consume their souls for
power, and summons/becomes an undead dragon, only to still lose
miserably. Kazuma swings wildly from some of his worst jerk moments
to some of his shiniest hero moments and the show moves on.
The Taisai arc is probably the high
point of the show’s writing. Kazuma isn’t any better – in fact,
this is where he contradicts his interests from the second arc, but
the arc spends a good deal of time focused on Ren. It’s where he
really comes into his own as a character and we actually learn about
him and things happen that will influence him going forward. In
short, it’s where Ren steps up as a better character than flat Ayano
or inconsistent Kazuma. The meat of the arc is centered on a local
family of earth magic wielders. The earth mages are keeping a
powerful destructive earth spirit sealed away, but have to resort to
human sacrifice from their own family in order to do it. Of course,
a sinister villain wants to unleash the sealed evil for… basically
the same generic spiteful reasons that the bad guys in the first arc
wanted to unleash their sealed evil elemental spirit, it just has
different targets this time. What complicates matters is that the
intended sacrifice is a little girl who appears to be about Ren’s
age, but is actually a magical clone of the woman who would otherwise
have to be sacrificed. Ren runs into this girl while she’s on the
run, and helps keep her away from her “family” (not knowing the
full story), forming a strong bond that results in wanting to save
her from her fate.
While this is the most effective stuff
in Kaze no Stigma, the problems of the show do still shine through
here. However, they are never more pronounced than in the final
dramatic arc, which I’d roughly call the Tokyo RPG arc. It’s longer
than any of the other arcs by far, taking the lion’s share of the
show’s second half and… It’s painful. But it’s kind of interesting
how and why it’s painful. The trick is, this is the arc with the
show’s best ideas, but simultaneously perhaps its worst executions.
The arc concerns the emergence of supernatural powers (if small-time
ones the way the real supernaturals reckon it) among the otherwise
uninformed rabble. The powers themselves are centered around a
‘game’ that the empowered are playing. Like a computer or tabletop
RPG, fighting and completing objectives seems to gain these people
“experience” to improve their powers… and the shadowy game
master is, of course, another of those loose ends from Kazuma’s past.
It’s… not a bad setup. It feels a
wee bit like a rerun of the second arc (the jilted girl/undead dragon
arc), sort of the way the backbone of the Taisai arc is very similar
to the backbone of the first arc but there’s absolutely been
escalation, and the scope of the scheme, involving countless patsies,
plays very differently from having one grieving and half-sympathetic
woman killing an unreasonable number of red shirt victims. What’s
more, this villain from Kazuma’s past brings in Lapis, who as I said
before is in theory the best possible challenge for Kazuma. The
lower scale villains in the arc also do some work, and we get to see
what a rotten person can become if you suddenly give them an
unnatural advantage.
So what’s the problem? Well, as you
might expect, this is where all the things that weren’t set up right
fail to pay off, and this is where Kazuma’s problems most totally
come due because of how much of the drama in the arc is riding on
him. His confrontation with Lapis are lacking because there’s no
order to how he reacts, and the need for Ayano to call him back from
insanity doesn’t play well because his bonds with Ayano are weak and
his relationship with insanity… well, it doesn’t seem much worse
than he’s seemed before.
It’s hard to say too much about the RPG
arc, since it really is a microcosm of the show as a whole, so
there’s one more type of episode I wanted to address, and I saved
this for last because it’s different: the Comedy episodes. Not part
of any particular arc (though you might be able to suture some onto
one or another or string them together) the Amusement Park, Haunted
School, Hot Springs, and Kathrine MacDonald episodes all skew way
more comedic than the rest of the show. The main arcs of Kaze no
Stigma are dark. People die left and right in all the major arcs,
and while most of those deaths are near total nobodies, it does set
an expectation for the tone of the show, especially what it
establishes about how magical powers interact with humans. The
comedy episodes are different, feeling like they belong to a
different show. In the comedy episodes, a literal firefight in a
crowded complex results in a lot of property damage, but nothing
really ‘serious’. The drama is sucked out entirely for these
episodes and their tone and style is night and day with the arc
episodes.
They’re not entirely unwelcome. It’s
good to have a chance to breathe and even laugh in the midst of a
deadly serious scenario. Neon Genesis Evangelion is remembered as
being a product of deep depression with a very dark tone, but there’s
also a brilliantly funny episode where training to defeat the monster
of the week involves two sulking kids playing DDR.
That said, maybe the comedy episodes
don’t help Kaze no Stigma as much as they could. In that Evangelion
episode I mentioned earlier the enemy is still an Angel. It could
still (as much as we understand at that point) obliterate humanity if
it goes unchecked. Our characters, however odd their training might
be, are still the first and last line of defense against the
implacable monster. It’s funny, but it’s not a genre shift to
comedy; it’s just comic relief. The Kaze no Stigma comedy episodes
feel like a genre shift. It is nice to see the characters in more
relaxed scenarios (or it would be if we actually learned about them
and explored their feelings – something downtime is good at), but
the ‘zany antics’ don’t exactly jive with the world. Some of these
episodes are better than others, but as a group, I think they’re…
flawed, at least.
And, on the whole, I think flawed is the best way to describe Kaze no Stigma. As much hell as I’ve given it, and especially its lead characters the human mood swing and the cardboard cutout, it’s not godawful. The action is at least okay, the actors are all competent and make an effort to work with what they’re given, and the show even displays now and again that someone along the line did understand what needed to be done, it’s just that someone somewhere else along the line couldn’t execute that vision. I do wish we had gotten a better show, something that would have made me feel for the potentially intense drama between Kazuma and Lapis, get to know the players in a budding romance that begins to grow against both parties’ better judgment, or would have drawn me into the machinations of a conspiracy willing to sacrifice anyone or possibly everyone for power. I wish the good stuff – and it is in there – wasn’t constantly held back by such painful core failings. But as much as I wish that, I have to admit the show we got is actually kind of watchable. The bottom end of watchable, in my opinion, essentially the very definition of a D sort of affair rather than a hard Fail. I wouldn’t recommend it, not in the least… But if you still want to watch it after all this, you will get a few good fight scenes, a few cheesy but still alright urban fantasy plots, a helping of Ayano fanservice, and not a lot of good character. But while you won’t find anything great or much good, I doubt you’ll find anything really offensive either. Take from that what you will.