Gleipnir, in Norse mythology, is the unbreakable chain that holds the wolf Fenrir, fine as a silken ribbon yet stronger than iron. What does this have to do with an anime about a boy who turns into a super-powered mascot suit and an assortment of other weirdos who got bizarre and sometimes creepy transformation powers from an alien living in a vending machine? I’ll be honest, while I could probably make up an answer, I haven’t a clue as to what the real one is. And that, I think, helps illuminate both the strengths and weaknesses of the show, a topic I’ll come back to at the end
The first thing you might come to know about Gleipnir is that it is, according to some, fairly derivative of Mirai Nikki. At least, that’s something that I heard from a lot of sources including friends and other reviewers, and briefly thought myself in the first two episodes. Usually, it wasn’t in the most flattering terms. But, having made it through the whole thing, I find myself disagreeing, at least about Gleipnir being truly derivative, or a knock-off. I certainly understand how someone could come to that conclusion: there are points on which Gleipnir seems to want the comparison, down to its opening recreating, with its leading lady, Clair, the famous image of Yuno Gasai on the rooftop in red and shadow that’s found in the first opening of Mirai Nikki. But, on the whole, I think that while some comparison between the two is important, Gleipnir is more different than it is something living in a predecessor’s shadow. Delving into that comparison seems as good a place as any to start with the show.
First of all, the similarities: Gleipnir, like Mirai Nikki, is focused on a pair of teenagers, a more meek boy and a vicious and possibly insane girl, who are caught up in supernatural happenings and need to fight together in order to resolve the circumstances they find themselves in. Those circumstances may involve questions of hidden identities, and a mission from a supernatural being. In their quest, they end up making some very uncertain allies and also get caught in fights to the death with other empowered individuals. During this, they’re also trying to unravel the mystery of the game’s very nature.
Sounds pretty similar, doesn’t it? If
you want to find points of similarity, you can… but it takes
looking at it in a contorted way to not also see that there are some
huge differences.
For one, Clair is not Yuno Gasai.
Clair is ruthless, vicious, intelligent, and flirtatious – traits
that you could also use to describe Yuno, at least partially but
expressed in very different ways. Yuno was volatile above all else,
turning on a dime from sweet girlfriend to screaming, bloodthirsty
psychopath and back again. Clair is, on the whole, cool and level.
Even when she’s getting worked up, there’s a ruthless calculation to
what she does, and a coldness that you would never dream of seeing in
Yuno.
Further, there’s their relationships with the male lead to consider. Yuno is a yandere, arguably the codifier of the trope in its current form. She has an unhealthy obsession with Yuki, in love to the point of madness, and reacts to any threats to her relationship with murderous insanity. She is the definition of the lovesick stalker, and her entire relationship with Yuki is molded by her psychosis. Because she’s so sweet, loving, and pretty, she presents a huge temptation, luring Yuki in… but because she’s also so blatantly deranged, she presents a huge threat, forcing him to question when, where, and how he relies on her. In the first two episodes you might guess Clair could go a similar way, since she takes a hostile attitude to Shuichi after they first meet, but this soon evaporates entirely. Though they clearly share a deep bond, and she promises to not let him die alone (Perhaps an easy promise for her in particular as she was first seen attempting suicide), It’s hard to say whether or not Clair’s interest in Shuichi is even romantic. It has both romantic and especially sexual overtones at times, but at other times their connection seems to exist in an entirely different spectrum. Portraying the almost alien nature of their relationship, in contrast to the very human but also very unhealthy love between Yuno and Yuki in Mirai Nikki, is one of the show’s big strengths. If I were to name another relationship in anime it was similar to, I would reach for Alderamin on the Sky, and the relationship between Ikta Solrok and Yatori, rather than Mirai Nikki, Yuno, and Yuki.
It may seem like a small thing, to have
one character totally skew to the counterpart character in the “other
show”, but so much of Mirai Nikki was predicated on Yuno Gasai and
so much of Gleipnir on Clair that it really does register as a huge
divergence point between the shows to have their leading ladies be so
fundamentally different, and not even in a way that could be called
“opposite” or any other term of simple relation.
Shuichi is also not Yuki. Again, the first two episodes or so could fool you a little, but who is Yukiteru Amano? He’s a wimp, a normal boy dragged into circumstances beyond his ken through forces he can’t control who has to rely on others for protection. Towards the end he breaks out of that mold, as well he should given what he’s gone through during the run time, but the core of his character is that he’s nothing special except for his circumstances. Who is Shuichi, then? In some ways, he comes off as a person who wants to be Yuki, but isn’t. And, I mean that in character, not in terms of what the writers want. He’s an excellent student, but turns down a college recommendation and tells others he didn’t get one because he’d rather be an average, forgettable person than someone special. This is compounded, of course, by the fact that even as the show opens he already has the huge secret that is his transformation. Even in human form he’s changed, most notably by gaining a powerful sense of smell. But, he starts off idolizing normal, and wanting everything to be handled in such a way that he could forget all about the weird stuff. All the same, he lets himself be drawn in, going up to the mountain to rescue Clair from her suicide (not that he knows what’s really going on when he goes) and fairly quickly agreeing to digging into the mystery. And, once the show kicks up and stops holding your hand, Shuichi fairly quickly turns around, recognizing the power he has and gaining the resolve to use it. His crying wimp phase doesn’t survive much past his first experience as Clair’s meat puppet, and given that Gleipnir is half the length of Mirai Nikki with a flagrantly unfinished story, that’s a pretty big delta.
Further, Gleipnir is not a death game. There is a competition, and people do kill each other over it, but the core of the scenario is never strictly “Kill or be killed”. In Mirai Nikki, the diary holders are explicitly pitted against each other locked into conflict until only one survivor remains. I would, personally, say that such a scenario is the heart of the Death Game genre. Sometimes there can only be one winner, while other times you can have some subgroup of competitors all escape the game. Sometimes the game is for the competitors to kill one another, other times death is simply the consequence of losing or failing at some other main competition. Shows like Danganronpa, Eden of the East, Fate/Stay Night, and even the abomination that is Magical Girl Raising Project, along with titles familiar to Western audiences like The Hunger Games, can all have different interpretations on the basic themes, but possess that same Death Game core. Gleipnir has none of that.
Here instead, conflict and killing is
the result not of the rules and framework of the scenario. Instead,
it’s presented as the result of human nature. And in that, Gleipnir
is once again surprisingly effective. The basic idea is this: There
are coins scattered around the town and the forests and mountains
around it. The alien who lives in the vending machine (as mentioned
earlier) wants these coins and will grant wishes for anyone who
brings him one. For the person who brings him a hundred, he would
even grant world-shaking power. Those in the know, who choose to
look for coins, are termed Gatherers. Some Gatherers, because of the
massive value the coins represent and with the combat-capable powers
they’ve already been granted for their initial finds, will naturally
decide to murder their rivals in order to gain as many coins as
possible for themselves. Others choose to search alone or band
together with like-minded individuals. Some, such as the
protagonists, even seek coins not for their own power, but to protect
the world from the possibility of anyone else gaining a hundred coins
and doing evil things with the unstoppable power the alien has to
offer. It’s a basic conflict over scarce resources and negotiable
power, a microcosm of international politics. There are no rules on
this game, nor even anything forcing someone to play once they’ve
found a coin, much less kill other Gatherers. Killing is simply the
result of putting out a prize for everyone to squabble over and
arming them to their heart’s desire.
So, having established what Gleipnir is not (Mirai Nikki), what actually is it? I’ve alluded to much of the plot so far, but I’ll still provide a summary at this juncture.
We start with Shuichi, who because of
his heightened senses and, when transformed, physical abilities, is
able to find that a girl, Clair, is trapped unconscious in a burning
building and to rescue her from said burning building. However,
something about her seems to overwhelm Shuichi, and while she’s
semiconscious (and he’s still transformed) he starts to assault her,
pulling down her panties before regaining control of his actions. In
his haste to exit the scene, he ends up leaving his cell phone
behind.
So, this is kind of disturbing. Our
main character may, in fact, be some sort of uncontrolled sexual
predator as well as a freaky mascot costume monster. I won’t say
Gleipnir didn’t set the bar strange to start.
Clair, naturally, finds the phone and
puts two and two together. She confronts Shuichi about being a
monster, seemingly more interested in that than the molestation, and
soon enough confirms it. She blackmails him to come to her place,
hoping to learn something, but when there they’re set upon by another
“monster” – a girl who gained powerful legs to be a star
runner, but who isn’t happy with how obvious that turned out. She
attacks them, hoping to take coins from them (Clair has one, and is
trying to understand its significance) and turns from mugging to
murder in terms of intent when Shuichi’s timely transformation ends
up revealing her face. In an extended sequence, Clair and Shuichi
get a momentary breather while being hunted by the girl, during which
time she notes he has a zipper on his back. She opens it, revealing
that he’s hollow inside, and after a limited discussion, she steps
inside. Once Clair is sealed inside the fleshy cavity, she and
Shuichi act as one, with her controlling much of their actions and
Shuichi’s physical abilities greatly improved. They defeat the
runner girl, and Clair makes sure they won’t face any more trouble on
that front by killing their defeated foe, much to Shuichi’s horror,
at least at first.
This sequence is the bait on Gleipnir’s hook. It has the most “Mirai Nikki” beats, and an extra heavy dose of the show’s fanservice, both conventional and… unique. On that later topic, now seems as good a time as any to mention that Gleipnir, while never hitting “adult”, is absolutely rife with fanservice, especially in the first half and especially fanservice appealing to what I can only assume is a very specific demographic. Clair’s entering of Shuichi is almost explicitly sexual, but the interior environment, Clair’s limbs enmeshed in walls of flesh while she herself is suspended in a space that is warm, wet, sticky, and close… well, it’s clearly trying to recall something, and I’m sure that there are some people who are intensely grateful to the creators of Gleipnir for providing those images, but it’s not conventional. Others, I’m sure, will probably be repulsed by the entire scenario, and where you stand on the spectrum between considering these scenes hot in some sense and considering these scenes disturbing, creepy, or revolting is probably going to inform some of your enjoyment of Gleipnir, particularly as the show is fairly front-loaded with this kind of material. Not that Clair stops going inside Shuichi, but they do stop having extended entrance scenes and lots of descriptions of what the characters are feeling. Later on, she just hops in and out of her boyfriend/mecha/it’s-complicated and the audience stays with an external perspective rather than indulging in the experience of transitioning or being inside. In fact, there are quite a few things about Gleipnir that seem to change in fairly constructive ways over the show’s run…
In any case, after their first battle,
Clair and Shuichi start to track down the mystery of the coins. Both
are seeking answers, Shuichi as to how he became a suit monster and
Clair as to why her sister became a monster and killed their parents.
The first major order of business, though, ends up being attempting
to track down Clair’s sister, Elena.
Elena wears a lot of hats in this show,
in a way that’s kind of a problem. When we first catch up with her,
Shuichi can smell that she’s an unbelievably powerful monster, well
beyond his own abilities. But when Shuichi and Clair confront her
(Clair already inside), she plays the part of a shy girl with serious
communication issues, as well as a mysterious connection to Shuichi –
she recognizes him, blames herself for making him that way, and even
accepts the consequences if he intends to kill her. When Clair
speaks, however, and she realizes that there’s a girl inside him, her
manner transforms, suddenly snapping to monstrous fury that sees her
literally rip Shuichi’s head off declaring that the place inside him
was meant to be hers. She snaps back almost as quickly, between
realizing what she’s done and seeing that it’s Clair in there,
apologizing, treating the severed head with care, and giving Clair a
coin and instructions to see the Alien to make sure things are set
right. Since Shuichi is still quite alive in his decapitated state,
at least while he’s a costume monster, Clair takes that advice. The
Alien reveals his nature, and is indeed able to, for the price of
returning a coin, fix Shuichi up. He also clues them in on the game
and the status of the gatherers, while playing dumb when it comes to
Elena. In any case, our main pair now has a new issue: after two
hostile encounters with other Gatherers, they’re not comfortable
letting anyone gain the bounty a hundred coins would bring, given
what it could mean for the world.
This doesn’t seem like a problem, does
it? It moves the plot forward (and that I can’t argue with) and sets
up Elena as the dangerous, volatile, kind of Yuno-esque character
that Clair isn’t. The thing is, in every later appearance by Elena,
she has a clear characterization, and it’s not what we see in this
encounter. Every time after she wanders off muttering to herself,
having non-fatally beheaded her apparent former beloved (who has
absolutely no memory of her), Elena is neither anything like her meek
persona that Clair seems to recognize as what her sister was like,
nor the screaming Yandere, nor does she seem particularly volatile.
Instead, when we see Elena again she’s calm, collected, more or less
confident, perhaps a bit quiet, and has what seem to be deep
convictions against doing massive harm. She can be harsh at times,
but she’s in control of herself in a way that would seem impossible
from this introduction. And at least in the run of the show, she’s
not given enough study (or the right kind of study) to support this
as complexity rather than being an inconsistent character in terms of
writing.
In any case, moving on Clair and
Shuichi decide to investigate the forest near town. Seeing as the
Alien’s ship crashed somewhere out there, and given that there’s less
foot traffic, it seems a richer environment in which to find coins.
However, Clair realizes that they won’t be the only ones with that
bright idea: out in the forest, it’s their true identities rather
than their monstrous transformation that must be hidden, lest
conflict with the other Gatherers follow them home. Their first
encounter isn’t very nice: they run into a big guy who’s monster form
is incredibly strong (with blades for arms, too) and who only wants
to fight in order to prove his own strength. When they manage, after
a good extended combat, to use their dual nature to endgame him, he’s
surprisingly well-mannered about it and willing to take his death,
but Clair has a better idea, and spares his life in order to buy his
loyalty as an emergency source of muscle. This first pays off when a
creepy big-headed monster gatherer arrives, threatens to make the
people whose real faces he’s photographed into his slaves, and is
promptly bisected by the big guy.
Now, at this point Clair and Shuichi
have a big ally and a new path forward: the dead monster’s cell
phone, with contacts on the other gatherers he’s blackmailed. At
this point, I would also like to mention the storytelling concept of
Chekhov’s Gun. Referring to Russian playwright Anton Chekhov (and
not the Star Trek character), the metaphor states that if you
introduce a loaded gun, at some point that gun must be fired, or else
introducing it served no purpose and it really should have been cut.
Essentially, elements in fiction that are set up must pay off
somehow.
Why do I bring that up now? Because
Clair and Shuichi’s big ally is a big failure in terms of Chekhov’s
Gun. He never comes up again. I know that Gleipnir is adapting a
manga and doesn’t cover the whole thing, and means that he might well
be set to pay off properly somewhere after the point where the Anime
stops. How to handle that scenario, though, is a touchy and
important subject. Most shows that adapt partial Manga or Light
Novel series, while leaving off in a place where the adventure
continues, have a more clean arc break or a source with an episodic
or arc-based nature where one particular adventure can end even if
the story isn’t totally over. This is how things work in shows like
Magi or The Promised Neverland. Other shows, particularly older
ones, go for the “Gecko Ending” (so named after a gecko’s ability
to shed its tail and grow a new one), writing entirely new closure
for the final episodes of the anime and giving it a satisfactory
conclusion that’s not the one the source material ultimately comes
to. You see this in shows like Claymore, or the 2003 version of
Fullmetal Alchemist. This technique has largely fallen out of favor,
and for good reason, but its also easy to see why it was done.
The shows that can’t manage a clean arc end and don’t go for a Gecko Ending, have a serious problem facing them. But even then there are better and worse ways to handle it. By mastering your pacing and emotional buildup, you can have a show properly reach a crescendo even when the main plot blatantly isn’t over. Some do this better, and some do it worse. Made in Abyss, which I reviewed last week is stuck without a really great cut, and has to make do with “to be continued”, but because healing Riko and ending Mitty was given a huge amount of emotional weight, it feels like we reached a conclusion even though some elements are still waiting up ahead. Unbreakable Machine Doll never reached the promised clash between the main character and the antagonist he had a vendetta against, but was able to end on a high note with the resolution of a more immediate crisis. Gleipnir… is a little sloppy. And the Chekhov’s Gun issue here is just one of the elements that indicate that maybe some more care should have been taken somewhere along the line.
In any case, Clair and Shuichi track
down a creepy voyeur classmate of theirs who was both being
blackmailed by the green dude and who had membership in a small group
of low-power, ethical Gatherers, who the pair intimidate him into
introducing them to. Well, I say them, but it’s mostly Clair doing
the work, so they’re quite shocked when she emerges from Shuichi,
revealing their nature. That’s in response to the group leader’s
request to have them undergo a ceremony so they won’t be able to
betray her or reveal her secrets, to which Clair agrees but initially
leaves Shuichi out of, taking the danger of the unknown power on
herself.
While Clair is occupied with the
ceremony (and the lesbian leader of the group getting pretty damn
pervy with her while sharing the life story of why she hates people
who reveal secrets and break trust. “Put Clair in a sexual
situation” is pretty much Gleipnir’s answer to not knowing what to
do for a moment), Shuichi talks with the others, making friends with
a cute girl with a meek persona and, in transformed state, animal
ears, Yoshioka. As it happens, she could also use his help: she lost
her wallet in the forest, and his amazing sense of smell could help
track it down before someone who’s trouble finds it. Since Clair is
taking so long having the moves put on her, they head out to do just
that.
If you guessed that trouble finds the
wallet first, no prize. That trouble is a member of Elena’s current
group, whose power summons a two-headed giant. When Shuichi (with
Yoshioka inside) confronts him, he crushes them. Literally. While
imitating roadkill, both Shuichi and Yoshioka get more and more angry
at how badly the other was treated, thrown away like garbage, and
that shared vision of indignation lets them regenerate into a new
hybrid form that puts some serious smackdown on the boy in question.
Elena arrives in time to save her buddy with a sorrowful look at the
Shuichi-Yoshioka hybrid, and the interference of someone about whom
Yoshioka and Shuichi are of two minds causes them to desynch and
ultimately return to their (not squashed) base forms. Elena leaves
with the boy, leaving the wallet behind.
Shuichi has amnesia for the incident,
but Yoshioka doesn’t. In fact, it seems that Shuichi has amnesia
about a great many things that Yoshioka now has memories of, as
Yoshioka is able to recall Elena’s phone number through Shuichi’s
missing days and give her a call to talk about what’s going on.
Yoshioka doesn’t entirely know what happened, but she does know that
the two must have been close, and that Elena is(should be)
irreplaceable to Shuichi. Elena, however, refuses the offer to
become an ally, seeming to have her own plan and mission that may or
may not be to the same goal.
Once that incident is untangled, we
move into a new arc. Shuichi, Clair, and the group they’ve joined
head deep into the forest, and there run afoul of a large gang of
hostile Gatherers, lead by an impressive yet nasty piece of work
named Madoka. They try to avoid his gang’s territory, but end up
falling right into his trap. Outnumbered, outgunned (since only one
of the team other than Shuichi has fighting abilities), and cornered,
Madoka, the kind of creepy gang leader, gives them a choice: Join up
with him, give him all the coins, and he’ll grant your wishes as his
underling. Oh, but because they hurt one of his dudes before being
cornered, they have to choose one of their own to die as a
prerequisite for joining up. The alternative is to all be hunted
down and killed, but he gives them time and space to decide.
Madoka, for a minor antagonist, is one
of the more interesting characters I’ve seen in a while. On one
hand, he does some pretty awful things, and he and his gang are
pretty much all self-interested scumbags. On the other hand, he
doesn’t fall into the problem where he’s stupid evil. Most
characters with his kind of role are portrayed as dumb brutes who
only keep other dumb brutes in line through the threat of violence.
Madoka, on the other hand, is repeatedly shown to actually care about
his gang. If you’re in his circle he’s actually a decently kind,
empathetic person, and he doesn’t take well to his dudes getting hurt
or possibly killed. They’re his precious friends. Because he’s not
just an eccentric freak who can punch stuff good, it’s easy to see
how he earns the fanatical loyalty of others, and I actually found
myself liking him both a little bit as a person and as a foil for
Clair. Madoka is, by his own admission, not particularly bright, but
he has unbending principles, vast personal strength, and a very basic
(if myopic and lopsided) empathy. Clair, on the other hand, is
powerless, but also has a vast amount of cunning, a willingness to do
whatever it takes to complete her goals, and a ruthless streak a mile
wide. Both are willing to gamble with themselves, and Clair even
earns Madoka’s respect in their one encounter with the harshness of
her outlook (Challenging his sacrifice order with the fact that he’s
hurt members of their band, who might die of their wounds), but their
motivations are very different, and both have ways in which they’re
noble and ways in which they’re reprehensible.
Clair, naturally, is the one to figure
out an escape from Madoka’s trap. She has one of their allies, who
has the power to magically grow plants out of control, grow a vast
grove of oleander. Oleander is quite toxic, and while I don’t know
how true this is in real life, in the show that includes the smoke
from burning oleander carrying a high load of poison. Shuichi
intervenes, taking on the burden of the crime to be committed with
his new(ish) resolve to properly live up to his monstrous ability and
not just be protected from the idea of responsibility by Clair, and
they ignite the Oleander. The smoke covers the mountainside, and as
the group flees presumably upwind, it overwhelms Madoka and his band.
Though Madoka himself is strong enough to be reasonably resilient to
the poisonous smoke and could have gotten out himself, he refuses to
leave a goon behind, and is later revealed to have outright died
attempting to save his buddies from the disaster.
This moment also marks the end of a
tiny arc where the guy Clair first blackmailed into introducing them
to the group, who had a twitchy attitude and a stalkerish approach to
Yoshioka, dies attempting to betray the group to Madoka in exchange
for safety for himself and Yoshioka. The act fires off the Chekhov’s
Gun that was the group leader’s power, as he’s strangled to death by
the magic he submitted to for trying to betray the others. As such,
he doesn’t get a full warning out and Madoka’s fate is sealed.
And, sadly, after the Madoka arc things
get… sketchy. Perhaps because the show was approaching the end of
its run without reaching a good arc end in the manga source material,
the episodes after have some constructive issues. We see Clair
investigating Shuichi’s forgotten past and finding hints that not all
is well with his mind while Shuichi solidifies his new badass
persona, making peace with his normal friends and dueling Madoka’s
last surviving lieutenant who’s out for revenge, killing said foe in
an echo of Clair’s ruthlessness that once horrified him once he gets
the win.
We also/then get a basically whole
episode flashback to how this whole mess started. Though it’s just
one episode, it tells a hugely strong tragic story about a group of
childhood friends (including the apparent couple of Shuichi and
Elena) who, after being apart for some time, meet up with one member,
Honoka, missing. Kaito, who hasn’t seen his friends in a long time,
takes that pretty hard since he had a crush on Honoka, and looks into
finding her. He finds that she was hit with tragedy and passed off
to uncaring guardians, before realizing through small mannerisms that
Aiko, one of their other friends, is actually Honoka. Suspecting
that Honoka-Aiko killed the real Aiko to take her place (using the
Alien, who was Honoka’s friend, to achieve the perfect swap), Kaito
brings this up to the others, who treat it fairly awkwardly. Kaito,
working on his own, confirms his suspicions and, in deep grief, kills
Honoka/Aiko for what she did. Only later does Kaito learn that the
real Aiko had been subjected to extreme bullying and committed
suicide, a fact that was only ever known by her best friend, Honoka,
who figured it would be better to let “Aiko”, who had a future,
live on in some sense than to live as her dead-ended self.
Kaito goes off the deep end from that.
It’s implied that he’s gathered a hundred coins at least once, and,
backed up by a weird glowing revenant of Honoka that he probably
wished for at some point, both guards the crashed ship against all
comers and takes lethal vengeance on anyone and everyone who he feels
was responsible for making Honoka feel so unloved that she was OK
disappearing.
In the present, Elena is gearing up to
take on Kaito, while also feeling remorse for Shuichi’s state, his
memories and thoughts sealed (at great cost to Elena) to take him off
the hit list. Why are Elena and their other friend, Naotao, exempt
when Shuichi was targeted? No idea, it’s never explained.
We get some good scenes in the end. Clair visits Shuichi’s house and finds it like an abandoned ruin, with tracks of what Shuichi uses kept clean, indicating that his perception is, in a deep way, filtered along with his memory (when he first came to the apartment where Clair lived like a slob, he cleaned it up at once). Her smell drives him crazy again and he tears her shirt off before regaining control, and we learn that the reason for this seems to be that Clair is reminding him of Elena (who he can’t remember properly) on some deep level.
Meanwhile, the nice gatherer group kicks Clair and Shuichi for being bloody scary. The main duo ask for the coins, to use them for good, and Yoshioka agrees as a setup. She gives the coins to Elena (having been clued in to Elena’s fight against a bad person who’s already made the hundred) and provokes a new meeting between Shuichi and Elena. The blocks on Shuichi’s memory dissolve, but any pleasant reconciliation with Elena is cut short by the arrival of the Honoka-horror who tries to delete Shuichi both physically and mentally until Elena seals his memories away again.
And, with Shuichi sent back after
grasping the truth for a couple minutes tops, Kaito and his Honoka
looming in the distance, and nothing more resolved, the show stops.
That’s the end of what’s been adapted, though the word on the street
is that some of the movements here in the show’s tail are
anime-original.
Honestly, it would have been better if
they had held off the truth behind Shuichi and his friends, or only
teased it (perhaps with the scene where Clair visits his house and we
have a split-second cut to Shuichi and Elena sitting together on the
couch as he’s compelled to nearly rape Clair there in her place) and
cut shortly after finishing off Madoka. We’d have a much firmer
sense of completion that way, and we totally could have spent more
time with him, since he was fun. There are a ton of things that
never pay off and are never resolved, and it’s in such a way that the
cut feels awkward and arbitrary, not even like the end of a chapter
in a continuing work. Honestly, it’s probably the biggest
constructive flaw of the show, in that it ends up informing many of
the others.
The other separate big problem is what I was alluding to in the beginning of the review. I don’t know what any of this really means, what the point is, or what they’re going for. Gleipnir slides like butter in a frying pan between ontological mystery, regular mystery, shonen fighting, cat-and-mouse war games, and interpersonal drama and tragedy. You can never really pin down what the show actually intends or is trying to do, and the number of elements that are introduced and dropped arbitrarily (like the big guy, the friendly group other than Yoshioka, the questions of protecting your identity, Kaito as a villain…) or that are just plain inconsistent (Like Elena’s characterization) make it even harder. I don’t know what connection the name “Gleipnir” has to anything in this show because it’s hard enough to make heads or tails of this shows themes and determine what elements of the show more meaningful than a title have to connect them to the rest of the show.
That said, while there are elements of
Gleipnir that frustrate the hell out of me, there are also elements
it aces. Clair is a terrible person, but she’s entertaining to watch
(and not just because she’s usually in a swimsuit or her underwear,
glistening and slick). Shuichi’s growth in the present from meek
bystander to cold killer is well-executed, well-paced, and
consistent. You feel both that he’s grown into someone more
responsible and that he’s lost something kind of precious in the
process. The backstory with Kaito, while only one episode that
probably had no business being in this season if they weren’t going
to go farther with it, was good and emotionally effective. You
understood the characters quickly and saw how their struggles shaped
them and dragged them down dark roads. And the mystery was at least
compelling enough to put the source Manga on my radar, which I guess
means the show won in some ways.
On the whole, I’m going to give
Gleipnir a C, but say that I actually rather recommend it. The good
parts are pretty darn good, but the structure has some basic and
fundamental ways in which it is broken, sometimes badly broken enough
that it interferes not just with the show looking back, but with
viewing in the moment. However, one thing Gleipnir never was, was
boring. I tend to have some affection for beautiful messes and
flawed brilliance over banal safety, but that doesn’t mean that it
doesn’t lose points on objective scales for its failings. Low grade
or not, it’s a hell of a ride that’s almost assured to serve up some
freaky fanservice, on-point characters, and interesting questions
that you won’t soon forget.