Sequels are simultaneously some of the
easiest and hardest things to write. On one hand, it’s hard to live
up to ‘the original’ in a lot of ways. People will look at the new
sequel and automatically compare it to what came before, so there’s a
higher than average bar set for the sequel. On the other hand, a lot
of the legwork you’d normally have to do is already done, and if
you’re continuing on with a story the first one was clearly good
enough that you have a strong backbone to build off of. Sometimes
you can even make an acceptable if not good sequel by just doing more
of the same (particularly if you have an episodic premise that can be
arbitrarily extended… much like Shana, in theory). It’s usually
better to innovate and expand, but some properties can just get away
with giving us more of what we liked to begin with.
Shakugan no Shana Second… does not do
that. And it suffers for it as a sequel. It falls into that
firsthand trap where, aside from its own merits, it just doesn’t hit
the same high notes its predecessor did, and presents to us a
degraded product, lesser in just about every way. How much lesser?
Let’s take a look.
At first, it doesn’t seem like Shana
Second is going to be that bad. The characters have at least
acquired a moment’s peace after the climax, and they seem to be
moving forward. Yuji has a massive wellspring of Power of Existence
and he’s actually training to use it so he won’t be a helpless
escortee anymore. He still ends up being a helpless escortee for
most of this season, but it’s the thought that counts. Shana’s
feelings towards Yuji, while dialed back from what might have been a
confession of love as she prepared herself to maybe die in the
climax, have fully flipped to the ‘dere’ side of her mild and
explicable Tsundere attitude, and she eventually comes to terms with
wanting to confess her love anyway. Yoshida as well has somewhat
resolved her feelings, and the battle for Yuji’s heart is joined.
The thing is that we spend the better part of episodes 1-17 setting up, enacting, and viewing the denouement for just one real arc. There are some interjections, like two episodes at the start of a kind of do-nothing denizen and two episodes telling a story from Margery’s past, but there is a huge lot of putting around. Shana season 1 took its time with each arc, but it took the time it needed, and knew to weave together the growth of the mundane characters with the supernatural action, keeping the story moving. The first two thirds of Second are really bogged down by a lot of puttering around and dragging out of the action.
The main track for that time is as such: a mysterious transfer student appears and starts clinging to Yuji. This would be enough trouble for Shana and Yoshida, but to make matters stranger and more threatening, the transfer student looks just about exactly like Supreme Throne Hecate, the Bal Masque leader who was messing with Yuji at the end of the previous season. Shana suspects foul play, and goes to some Yuji-frightening lengths to test it. As we go through this, we get hints that a figure connected to the past of Yuji’s Midnight Lost Child artifact, Colorful Wind Pheles, is on her way. After a lot of messing around with the cultural festival (what, you thought a show with a school setting might actually escape one?), Pheles shows herself and we get a pretty complex and badass fight with Yuji, Shana, and Wilhelmina on one side, Margery on another side since Yuji’s power reminds her of a viciously hated enemy, Pheles on her own side, and Hecate and her minion Tempest Hoof Fecor showing up to split the battle yet another way and also resolve that transfer student thing. It’s a good sequence even if you have to wait far too long to get it… but not as good as it could have been.
Shakugan no Shana (the whole series) has a lot of plot and fantasy worldbuilding, and also a lot of fighting. Season one knew to largely keep the two separate. Characters could talk in life-threatening situations, but typically about how to counter their enemy and/or survive. In downtime, even momentary downtime, they could get into the more complicated exposition that needed a nuanced approach. In the massive capstone battle to all the Pheles/Hecate Clone stuff, we get a lot of detailed story mumbo-jumbo between blows. It’s not blocked nearly as well as season one’s big fights because season one stayed in the moment while Second’s first capstone battle takes you out of the moment. It wouldn’t have worked nearly as well if the audience was first made aware of who Corpse Collector Lamies via shouting in a battle in which he was involved, so why do we have to largely put up with that being done for the character Johan, Pheles’s lost love who Yuji briefly turns into? It’s still good action, but it gets tied up in explaining way too much with poor pacing for its exposition.
The last third of Shakugan no Shana
Second is an improvement, featuring two strong arcs that could stand
next to the season 1 material on their own, but that is still only
the last third of the season and two strong arcs, where Season 1 had
six strong arcs interwoven and well-paced across its episodes rather
than a muddy marathon and just two good ones.
That said, the two good ones are very
good. The first concerns a hostile denizen, Destruction Blade
Sabrac, looking to hunt down our heroes for the Bal Masque. Sabrac
is a unique, powerful foe (much like the ones fought throughout
season 1, as opposed to the throwaway denizens we see during the
puttering phase or the sympathetic Pheles) with a style, power set,
and background that supports him as an arc villain. The battle with
Sabrac isn’t the most unique engagement in Shakugan no Shana – the
cat-and-mouse game throughout the city does echo one of the season 1
arc enemies – but it is well done. In my opinion, this is what
Second should have been doing the whole time if it wasn’t going to do
anything bigger and better.
The final arc is kind of a retread of the final arc of Season One. Once again we square off against the heads of the Bal Masque plus Dantalion, once again they want Yuji/the artifact inside Yuji for a hackish scheme to attain ultimate power, and once again it’s pretty badass, with characters being put up against the ropes and struggling to steal said ultimate power back from the Bal Masque’s base of operations.
There are some different notes this
time. Rather than kidnapping Yuji, the Bal Masque’s aim is simply to
rip the artifact out of him and use it directly… which they
accomplish, leaving Yuji with finite energy ebbing away. Despite
that, Yuji is actually prepared to fight this time, and takes a
proactive role in what’s basically his own rescue, rather than just
having to struggle from the inside. The environments and emotions
are also quite different; the final arc of Season One felt big and
bombastic. The struggle was to overcome the enemies, and Shana’s
allies bled off one by one to fight the foe they came across, largely
battling to a standstill. This time, the atmosphere is grim, and
it’s a struggle just getting anywhere. Further, when one of our
allies peels off, they aren’t just left skirmishing. In season 1,
Sydonay squared off against Margery Daw, here he nearly kills her.
In season 1, Hecate was “Synchronizing” with Yuji, leaving him
unable to do much but complain at her, while this time his heart’s
been pretty much ripped out and he’s left climbing through some awful
terrain to try to get it back, suffering all the way.
It’s not necessarily bigger and better
than Season 1; by its nature, generating the more oppressive
atmosphere means doing things in a way that feels more closed and
contained. The threat of the Bal Masque’s plot is also less visceral
this time around. We know they’re pretty bad folks and thus likely
to do evil things, but we’re not witnessing a city get crushed into a
black hole of existence, threatening to tear reality apart. Instead,
we’re watching a giant statue slowly threaten to come to life.
That said, the movements of the story
and the visuals are on point enough that I would say the ending of
Shana Second holds up compared to the ending of Season 1. It hits
the right notes in the right way so that it at least matches what
came before even if you don’t feel like it exceeds it. The end of
the season is somewhat ambiguous, with Yuji prompted to choose once
and for all between Yoshida and Shana, but we don’t see him actually
appear before either of them before the credits roll (though
something excites Shana so we know he probably picked her as he
always would).
And that’s basically Shana Second, the lesser Shakugan no Shana season. But on its own, is it actually that bad? In my mind… not at all! Shana Second still has good action and good characters, even if it’s marred by poor pacing and too much filler. It’s much more watchable than, say, Kaze no Stigma, it just doesn’t live up to what the first season of Shakugan no Shana gave us. I’d probably rank it around a B – it’s got strong stuff, even some episodes in the puttering phase (like Margery’s backstory) land, but that’s unfortunately not just what there is this time around.
As a bonus, I’ll take this time to
address Shakugan no Shana S. Shana S is a not-quite-a-season that
bridges, in its own way, the gap between Shana Second and the third
season, Shakugan no Shana Final. Shana S, however, is only four
episodes, so it doesn’t make sense to go into it on its own.
The first two episodes of S are
harmless puttering, self-contained stories that fit into the Season
1/Season 2 timeline and don’t have a lot of drama or weight to them:
one where Shana and Yuji temporarily swap bodies, and another where a
surprise party is arranged for Wilhelmina. They’re cute, with a
decent amount of character, and it’s nice to see the characters we
enjoy mostly happy, but the episodes are fluff, and it feels like
there was a good reason they weren’t included the first time through.
The second two episodes of Shana S,
though, are anything but fluff. They depict Shana’s hunt for a
troublesome Denizen before the start of Season 1. Compared to any of
the Denizens we see her fight in the main time frame of Shakugan no
Shana, this thing doesn’t rate; it consumes just a few individuals,
and doesn’t seem to have any schemes that would threaten to destroy
the world or even a city.
However, Shana spends most of the two episodes inserting herself into the shoes of the Torch whose existence let her know that there was a Denizen hunting in the area. She uses being taken for the poor girl to retrace the last few steps of her life, and along the way encounters a lot of human problems. The torch, now the nothing, had a family she was at odds with but badly wanted to make up to and a loving boyfriend being good to her. It’s easy to forget, when we’re trying to save the world and the main characters, just how tragic the normal behavior of grunt-tier Denizens actually is, that there was a person with a beautiful but imperfect life and tons of other people she was connected to, but once all is done and her torch fades away for good… no one will ever remember her. Not her classmates. Not her boyfriend who loved her. Not her mother who she had a complex relationship with looking to be on the mend. No one. That girl is deader than dead and lost forever, to everyone. Only Shana remains to bear the burden of having delved into her memories to avenge her death, cursed to live with both the fact that she couldn’t save any of it and the fact that, as a Flame Haze, such simple humanity is forever denied to her.
Other than dealing with Yuji’s torch friend in the first couple of episodes of season 1 (the one that Shana eventually inserts herself in the place of), this is the only time we really get the weight of the horror that the denizens represent, and that makes it one of the most effective emotional sequences in Shakugan no Shana, both because we understand and contextualize the damage and because we have to see Shana as she was before she met Yuji, struggling with her own inhumanity.
On the whole, Shana S is probably a B+
product. If you want a taster of the drama and comedy of Shakugan no
Shana, you could probably go ahead and watch Shana S to start. Add
loads of kickass action, and what you see would pretty much be what
you get.