Escaflowne is an… interesting production. It’s a sprawling story spawned out of the lawless pre-2000s zeitgeist that didn’t require shows to inhabit particular genre boxes quite as insistently as you usually see in more modern works. It’s kind of a fantasy epic, technically Isekai, at least as Mecha as Full Metal Panic, sometimes a shoujo romance, and held together with sutures of psychological drama and alternate history. Whew!
To a modern viewer, the question of
whether to even count this as “Isekai” is an interesting one.
Because by the definition of what Isekai requires, this shouldn’t be
a question, it should be a bullseye. The main character, Hitomi gets
pulled from modern Earth to a fantasy-themed other world (Called
Gaea in this case) where the story essentially takes place. But
nowadays if you expect Isekai to be about other things. You expect
the power trip, the hero’s cheat ability, the harem… all of it.
And technically if you’re willing to reframe your definitions you can
find basically all of that in Escaflowne, it just looks very
different than the million cookie cutter Isekai shows of later
decades. In some ways, I kind of think that Escaflowne stands as the
prototype, the show that did it all well and skillfully before the
tropes were dumbed down and redeemed and lost again in waves. While
this is a Mecha show, and I’m taking a look at in Mecha March here, I
feel that the more interesting angle to approach it is the one of
Isekai and Fantasy.
Let’s start at the start – with our
lead, Hitomi. She’s a sporty high-school girl with a normal life,
normal crush, and a quirky little hobby of reading tarot cards (which
becomes freakishly accurate once she’s Isekai’d). She’s training
late when a strange young man (Van, our male lead) and a dragon
appear, fighting to the death. With a little help from Hitomi, Van
kills the dragon, and then both of them are dragged back to his
world.
There, they travel to Van’s kingdom,
where with the dragon dead his coronation awaits. We meet his weird
catgirl friend and stereotypical old mentor, and promise to get
Hitomi home just as soon as the ceremony is done with. If that isn’t
a red flag to you, then I don’t know what to tell you. Sure enough
the ceremony is attacked by enemy mechas (called Guymelefs) using
invisibility cloaks, which forces Van to go blood contract the
ultimate Guymelef that he had laying around, Escaflowne, to fight off
the invaders. He’s not enough to save his kingdom, though, and ends
up, along with Hitomi, getting teleported out of immediate danger in
a mysterious phenomenon.
So, now’s as good a time as any to talk
about the Fantasy genre, particularly as often seen in modern Isekai,
and why it feels so wrong to file Escaflowne with those shows despite
it being so right. In fantasy anime of the 2010s and now as we start
the 2020s, you see a lot of “Video game verse” fantasy. Things
in these universes work kind of like a Dragon Quest game, or some
other RPG. There explicit skills, spells, classes, and the like.
They often also have a very similar look and feel of a “clean and
shiny” Medieval Europe menaced by some great big dark force. “The
Demon King” is a classic, but even stereotypical Isekai-fantasy can
get a little more creative than that.
By contrast, Escaflowne takes place in
a very different Fantasy universe. It’s kind of a kitchen sink with
magic, knights, small feuding kingdoms, robots, airships, a
tyrannical empire with bizarre new experiments, different races, new
cultures and landscapes… but for all of that there’s a different
focus. In the cookie-cutter fantasy worlds, the world is supposed
to, at least to an extent, fade into the background. It’s the same
all the time because that’s comforting and immediately understood,
and there’s a detailed unspoken viewer contract about what a world
that follows enough of those tropes is going to be like beyond what
you’re actually shown. Escaflowne, though, wants to show off its
world. There’s a lot of world-building, and exploring it is supposed
to be part of the fun, rather than just having it get out of the way
for the plot.
I have a theory that there’s a good
reason why, even though we see RPG-Fantasy worlds in non-Isekai
fantasy stories, they’ve become almost required for Isekai to the
point where it’s weirder if that’s not the case, and my thought is
twofold. First, the stat-and-level conceits give us a way to have
our main character start out weak but grow to become world-class
awesome. Second, the world is usually not just vaguely based on
video game tropes, but specifically on a game that the protagonist
was familiar with, giving an excuse as to why you can skip a lot of
lengthy exposition about the world and learning their powers and so
on. The main character knows already, and can just do things.
In some ways, it’s kind of ingenious. In other ways… I deeply miss weird fantasy. It’s not totally lost – Made in Abyss is recent, after all – but despite seeing a lot of fantasy these days you don’t really see a lot that’s anywhere near this daring and creative.
In any case, Van and Hitomi don’t
immediately arrive together at their teleport destination; Hitomi
comes under the protection of our other male lead, Allen, a
pretty-boy knight captain who looks a good deal like her earthly
crush (but older) and she’s quickly smitten with. The whole crew
(Van, Hitomi, Allen, and ultimately the cat girl) meet up at Allen’s
castle, where the same sort of cloaked Guymelefs that destroyed Van’s
kingdom attack. An escape is attempted, but ultimately Van has to
get in the robot to defend it, getting himself captured by the enemy
in the process.
These enemies, it seems, belong to the kingdom of Zaibach, which is now expanding as an empire. Over the course of the show, Zaibach provides three major antagonists. One we meet now – Folken, Van’s brother who was missing (presumed dead) and is now working for the Zaibach. The other that’s more or less “on the ground” is Dilandu, the leader of the elite Guymelef squad that’s been giving team hero so much trouble, who largely plays as your typical eccentric/demented big-eyed villain.
The last is our technical main
antagonist, the Zaibach faction leader, Emperor Dornkirk. Since this
is a spoiler review and the end of Escaflowne is overloaded with
material in any case, I might as well talk about him here, and how
Escaflowne is once again different from other examples of its genre.
Emperor Dornkirk, you see, is a beardy
old man, who is mostly seen as we cut to his weird observatory from
which he’s able to spy on the plot. There’s no twist either, where
he actually has the ultimate giant robot (like you would suspect from
Mecha) or can call down the wrath of the elements with destructive
magic (like you would expect in Fantasy), he is legitimately a
nonissue when it comes to physical violence.
But, okay, Dornkirk wouldn’t be the
first time the power behind the bad guys has been less threatening
than his lieutenants. But Dilandu and Folken, though they last for
quite some time and present our main heroes with ample challenges,
aren’t the typical case where there’s a strong “Final boss” who’s
incidentally subordinate to the real evil. They’re bad and they’re
strong, but they really do feel more like agents and mid-bosses.
The way this works is that Dornkirk is
operating at a level of threat that’s not just about what you can
punch out. Defeating him isn’t as easy as stabbing a frail old man,
and isn’t even really in the same spectrum. To that, it’s really
like each main hero has their own ultimate villain. For Van, there’s
Folken, his fallen brother, a dark mirror of what Van could be if
things went differently for him. For Allen, the shiny noble knight,
there’s Dilandu, the sadistic psychopath who’s also a leader of
soldiers. And for Hitomi, who’s not a fighter but who is our main
character, the enemy is Emperor Dornkirk, who needs to be undone on a
mental and emotional level that Hitomi is more in line with.
There’s also the connection that both
Hitomi and Dornkirk deal with fate: Hitomi predicts it with her tarot
cards, and Dornkirk uses his weird observatory machine to try to
manipulate it. And, lastly, both Hitomi and Dornkirk are Earthlings
rather than Gaea natives, because Dornkirk is eventually revealed to
be none other than Isaac Newton. I’d say it makes sense in context
but as the show is running it kind of doesn’t. However, it’s the
sort of thing that starts to make a ton of sense as you sit down with
it over a nice cup of tea or some such, which means it’s something
I’m going to get into.
This brings me back, in a sense, to the “Isekai” digression, and how Escaflowne differs from most other Isekai in general and the more recent Isekai mold in specific. In most Isekai, the transportation to another world is a singular event, the inciting incident for the story at which point the hero must either find a way to live in their new world or (if such a thing can happen; it obviously can’t in reincarnation Isekai) seek a way to return home. Their situation might not be absolutely unique, but even if there are hints of other dimensional transportation (as in Familiar of Zero) these are typically, in a sense, smallish things. Little notes to remind you that this is not, in fact, a fantasy story being told with natives. And depending on how Dornkirk was handled, Escaflowne could have fit that mold. Instead, his position is just another facet of the fact that rather than being separate, the two worlds in Escaflowne are deeply related. The show, at various points that aren’t always going to be good to halt the plot summary for, gets out a lot of backstory about Gaea and Earth, and how they relate to one another. While Gaea is unknown to Earth, Earth hangs in Gaea’s sky as their “mystic moon”, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
This is what I meant when I said, at
the start, that Escaflowne has hints of Alternate History…
Granted, the main topic brought up is Atlantis, and how Gaea was
either created or discovered by the wishes and power of the people of
Atlantis (known as Draconians on Gaea, and semi-mythical at that),
but then there is the fact, and I’m sorry for delaying on addressing
this, that our villain is Isaac Newton.
The interesting part is that it isn’t
actually as bad a portrayal as you might think on first hearing that
declaration. Newton is best known for inventing calculus and
revolutionizing physics, but it’s also fairly well-recorded that he
was deep into alchemy and mysticism. So much so that it’s easy to
suspect that had he not made monumental contributions to more
respected fields he would likely be remembered in the same way as
John Dee or Aleister Crowley – which is to say essentially as an
occultist.
And Dornkirk, as you might expect of
Newton, provides a blend of mysticism and science in his work and
themes. He deals heavily with esoteric concepts, particularly fate,
but he’s a planner who builds arcane machinery to carry out his goal,
something that’s at least thematically consistent with what we would
think of as a scientist, taking a precise and empirical approach to
otherworldly topics.
It’s weird, unquestionably weird, but
it’s also the sort of thing you can chew on for a while and
ultimately appreciate. And it does serve to solidify the bridge
between the two worlds of the story.
In any case, when it comes to the
actual plot, Van was captured. He’s not a prisoner for very long, as
Hitomi convinces Allen to go to the rescue, and the lot of them make
it to the court of Allen’s liege. That’s not as safe a haven as it
may have appeared to be, though, as Zaibach has begun to exert a
powerful political influence over the king, turning this kingdom into
a puppet state. Folken is there, Dilandu is there, and the king
himself seems inclined to make trouble for Van, forcing him through a
fairly unreasonable sort of trial by combat. To make matters worse,
the princess is even more smitten with Allen than Hitomi herself is,
and by his reactions he’s in a position where saying “no” cleanly
isn’t a desirable option and saying “yes” is even worse (He has
hangups, she has a fiancee, that sort of thing).
The uneasy truce of having everyone in
court doesn’t last long before we get into what’s becoming the show’s
typical maneuvering: a series of fast-paced abductions or attempted
abductions and rescues. This continues as they flee to what once
again should be a friendly state, this time ruled by the young nephew
of the princess with the hots for Allen. It becomes unfriendly,
though, when a shapeshifting minion of Folken impersonates an
authority figure and fingers Van and crew as dangerous rebels.
Hitomi manages to unmask the shapeshifter, which clears their names.
The allegiance-swapping royal intrigues
continue unabated even after that as a new ally arrives, the audience
and princess get the revelation that the young prince is really
Allen’s illegitimate child with the princess’s deceased elder sister,
and Zaibach rolls into town looking for some secret power of
Atlantis, and also the surrender of the local nobles. In a fairly
confusing exchange a lot of soldiers are killed, along with an allied
Duke, and the little prince bends the knee to Zaibach. This act sees
us entering a new arc where instead of bouncing from castle to castle
playing politics, we’re now on an adventure in a magic airship.
Escaflowne fairly effortlessly flips
through a few fantasy sub-genres in its run, sliding around the whole
spectrum like butter in a frying pan. At first it looks like the
traditional “Fire Emblem” style war story, where an exiled prince
is going to have to raise allies and take his kingdom back. Then we
get a second castle in and find out no, we’re not doing that, instead
we’re doing a darker and grittier saga of cutthroat politics,
assassins, and maybe some war on the side. But then that kind of
wraps up early and our main characters wander into the great journey
to a mysterious magical place. And, at the risk of getting ahead of
myself, when they get to the end of that the show just keeps going,
only now it’s a character drama with esoteric themes and, if there’s
time, some mecha fighting.
I honestly can’t decide if the writers
of Escaflowne should be memorialized as greats or institutionalized
as loons for pulling this off.
In any case, the journey sees us pick
up the Princess’s fiancee and ultimately get a mystic meeting with
important mentor figures. Van and Allen learn important details
about their pasts (and in Van’s case his heritage and what it means
being part-Draconian) and Hitomi learns that her freakishly accurate
tarot readings are actually causing the doom she predicts: she has a
powerful mind, and because of that ends up shifting the threads of
fate into line with what the cards tell her, which is quite the blow
(and twist) at this juncture.
After a brief stint imprisoned by
Dornkirk in the heart of Zaibach (reached and escaped by poorly
explained teleportation, mostly just to give Dornkirk a chance to
monologue about being Isaac Newton) we get geared up for the next arc
and its own brand of fantasy with the most meta-hilarious episode in
the entire show: the one where Hitomi’s love life becomes the crux of
fate, and Evil Emperor Isaac Newton literally fanfics his preferred
ship into launching because that will somehow allow him to control
time and destiny in the future.
I’m not kidding. There’s an episode
that consists of the party experiencing that strange beast called
downtime, framed with Dornkirk watching them through his
fate-manipulating observatory thingy. He watches, and it is heavily
implied that he is tweaking events, creating a sort of pressure of
destiny that forces (to an extent) the characters to play by his
script. His influence is far from absolute, though, and we’re
treated to scenes like Dornkirk breathing a sigh of relief and
declaring “that was close” when Van and Hitomi have a moment and
it passes. Ultimately, the unseen pressure leads to Hitomi and Allen
to share a kiss, which Van witnesses, quite naturally upsetting him.
The scene fades out on the kiss, with Dornkirk’s maniacal laughter
playing over the scene. It’s framed as well as it could be, but
there’s still a degree to which it comes off as farcical.
And with that now is as good a time as
any to bring up the last “Yes but actually no” mark between
Vision of Escaflowne and what we think of as Isekai nowadays: the
“Harem”.
Now, there’s a word that’s been muddied
to the point where its definition is wondrously unclear.
Technically, I would want to only consider a show to have “Harem”
elements if there are multiple individuals (more than two) in
more-or-less fair competition for the heart of the lead. It’s a
harem if we get to experience, simultaneously, multiple “romance”
arcs. Some would argue that it’s a harem if the lead is male and the
group female, reverse harem if that is, well, reversed.
But more and more the word comes to mean other things. You’re still required to have more than just a single couple, but the extra harem members don’t necessarily need to be in contention (“Chivalry of a Failed Knight is a Harem show”) and there don’t need to be that many of them; a triangle or at least tetrahedron will do (“KonoSuba is a Harem show”). Instead, there’s kind of an unspoken assumption that the depiction of the characters has a lot to do with the tag. Got multiple fanservice girls? You can probably find someone who calls it a Harem.
But, let’s boil it down to the idea of
the “Isekai Harem”. The Isekai character is offered romance as
part of the deal, and has multiple options. That much agrees with
Hitomi; as we see here, her love life is actually rather important,
all things considered. And she does have multiple options.
Practically it’s the bare minimum love triangle with Van and Allen,
but her crush from Earth does technically exist in the narrative even
if he’s never exactly relevant as a person.
Yet, despite this, it would be
extremely hard to call Hitomi’s experience Harem, reverse-Harem, or
even harem-like. It really is the classic love triangle staple.
Yet, to an extent, it presages what’s done with the Isekai genre in
later decades.
I think, though, that there’s a
fundamental disconnect in what it means for the story. In the modern
Isekai, the Harem is an element of wish fulfillment. It’s a good
thing, to be desired and to have choice. In Hitomi’s case, her
situation is a bad thing. It puts her in a hard place and threatens
the ability of the heroes to move forward as an effective team. For
a Harem protag, having all their love interests around is a good
thing, slapstick injuries aside. For Hitomi, having two guys
available is a bad thing, and liable to mess her and everyone else
up.
Speaking of messing things up, we next
see the Princess ask Hitomi for a reading regarding her upcoming
marriage, and whether she should go through with it. Recall, Hitomi
has been warned that her readings actually CAUSE the misfortune she
foretells, but since she’s a doormat she does the reading anyway.
She ends up foreseeing that the marriage will end up unhappy and
broken, with the princess and Allen becoming secret lovers. In order
to prevent this, Hitomi attempts to trick fate by telling the
princess that her wedding will be blessed, until another vision makes
her realize – too late – that she caused the future disaster by
lying this time, which leaves her wracked with enough guilt to just
give herself up when Dornkirk’s goons (a pair of catgirl fighters,
Folken’s subordinates, granted unnatural good luck, because we’re now
going all in on the fate manipulation that wasn’t really particularly
present until this arc) come to kidnap her.
All in all, Hitomi is captured several
times in the ensuing arc as the catgirls start to have a bad
counter-reaction to their manipulated luck, leading them towards
inevitable death. This ends up with a confrontation with Folken in
which the catgirls finally expire trying to be of service to him,
which actually makes him reconsider his loyalty to Dornkirk. Folken
then has a separate meet-up with Van and Hitomi (in which we travel
all the way back to the ruins of their home kingdom just for a nice
backdrop) and defects to join them.
At this point, everything hits the fan.
Allen confesses his darkest secrets to Hitomi and proposes to her,
she doesn’t answer for reason of battle starting, and instead notices
that Van seems to be sacrificing his humanity for her sake, and
then… teleports back to Earth, presumably because she wanted it
hard enough. Once she’s gone, Allen ends up finding his long-lost
sister and realizing that Hitomi was just a replacement goldfish for
said sister (making him a probable siscon as well as an adulterer and
kind of a cradle robber given Hitomi’s age and the age of his bastard
son…). Oh, and then his sister turns into Dilandu and gets hauled
back to Dornkirk.
And no, this isn’t a shapeshifter like
the one from earlier who’s kind never comes up again despite how
unspeakably useful an infiltrator able to perfectly impersonate
people would be. And yes, we all sort of assumed Dilandu was a dude,
if that wasn’t clear. (S)he’s not even particularly androgynous, in
either form. We’re treated to a complicated explanation about
Dilandu being shifted by Dornkirk’s fate alteration, even though a
much more useful fate alteration was quickly fatal for the catgirls
after what must have been years of development of the fate control
machine.
This is a mess, but to be perfectly
honest… we’re on the last crazy train, and I intend to enjoy it.
Hitomi, on Earth, comes to the realization that she loves and misses
Van, which lets her wish herself back to Gaea, which has seen better
days. World war is on between Dornkirk’s Zaibach empire and
basically everyone else, and we really don’t know who’s fighting what
anymore. Folken goes ahead and kills Dornkirk, but contrived
coincidences are being controlled to the degree where this ends up
getting him run through and killed by his own broken sword too.
Hitomi gets sad, fate machine gets interested, and Dornkirk’s ghost
shows up to monologue at us for the rest of the show about how his
fate scheme is going.
The basic idea seems to be that
Dornkirk wanted to create a perfect world, one without grief, war, or
pain, by using his fate machine to grant the wishes of everyone on
Gaea, assuming that with their needs met the world would be peaceful.
As the machine kicks into full gear, though, it turns out (in a
fairly amusing twist) that the people of Gaea wish, mostly, for the
ability to beat the tar out of each other, meaning that the war goes
absolutely crazy with every grudge and moment of hatred magnified and
offered outlet. In the middle of this, Van and Allen fight (over
Van’s desire to kill Dilandu, reasonably enough) until Hitomi uses
her psychic powers (which I’m realizing are kind of inconsistent) to
snap Van out of it. He sprouts wings (actually set up, his brother
had wings too) and flies to her, clearing everyone’s minds in his
wake, and apparently because Van and Hitomi love each other, fate can
be changed, the machine breaks, and the ghost of Dornkirk shuffles
off to oblivion. Finally, Hitomi is returned to his life on Earth,
because apparently that and ‘together in spirit’ is more important
than everything she is to Gaea.
That, for once, is a trope I’m glad is
kind of dead. The objective you start with in a story doesn’t have
to be the one you finish with, and the normalization of choosing to
stay in the Isekai situation when the person choosing to stay is, you
know, royalty or a hero and/or has partner or otherwise is way better
off in fantasy land than they ever will be living a mundane life on
Earth (unable to share their monumental experience with anyone lest
they be sent to the mental ward, at that) is a good thing. Not every
Isekai protagonist needs to stay; sometimes the journey home still
leaves a brighter future on Earth. But for someone like Hitomi?
I’m just going to chalk it up to the
genre not having changed enough since Narnia by the time Escaflowne
was made.
So, how do I find the show, overall?
There’s a story regarding Escaflowne,
that the entire story was at least planned out, and only after that
were they told that they were only going to get 26 episodes, less
than what they’d wanted. Then, according to the tale, rather than
doing the sensible thing and cutting some subplots or character arcs
here and there to produce a well-structured story for the shorter
run, they decided to compress the entire show, start to finish,
keeping every complicated plotline they had decided on and getting
them all to screen, by rushing through it from the first episode to
the last.
I absolutely believe that. The story is massive – probably about the same ‘size’ as Eureka Seven, which is twice as long, and it never takes a breath. That, frankly, ends up being the biggest weakness of the show: it’s trying to do too much in too little time, and because of that it can’t actually make you feel for what’s going on. It’s like a chess match being recounted, move by move, at a million words a minute. The only things that stick as memorable or connectable are the really crazy moments, like Dornkirk’s wacky shipping adventure and the “nah, we all want to fight it out” element of the ending, because those are loud and strange enough to leave an impact despite being jammed in this sequence of things going on at velocity.
The other problem comes from the characters. Hitomi is OK, but she’s only OK; she gets saddled all too much with invisible protagonist syndrome. Van is brash, and perhaps because of how everything is jammed out, we don’t really get to see as much of his good side as we should. That said, his character and chemistry with Hitomi is at least better than Allen’s. Maybe in the longer version it would have been easier to see Allen as the tortured soul and slave to intemperate passions that he’s clearly supposed to be given the choices made in the outline we have but he comes off as… just kind of awful, having an affair with one married woman in the past, and another in the future when, if he had his way, he’d have a marriage of his own. And the weirdness with his sister that’s probably not supposed to come off as romantic, but with Allen and the rushed pacing it’s hard to tell… Other potentially sketchy love interests in other shows, I can understand why the character goes for them. Elias? That’s easy, he’s really not bad all things considered. Yuno Gasai? Harder in abstract but the writers put a ton of effort into making sure you feel the connection that forms. Allen, as a love interest, is more like a male Aqua; aside from appearances, redeeming qualities are few. And for the record neither I nor seemingly Kazuma really consider Aqua to be ‘in contention’.
That’s all the main characters. They
top out at “Okay” and go down from there. The villains aren’t
much better. Dornkirk is fascinating in terms of the choices made,
but his screen presence is mostly long-winded monologues of nonsense.
Folken is dry, and while Dilandu is at least entertaining, we don’t
get a lot of Dilandu time and do get that head-scratching twist.
With those flaws, I can really only offer The Vision of Escaflowne a C. It had the makings of something not just good, but great… but it didn’t use them well, and the result is something surprisingly forgettable despite being made out of what should be extremely memorable parts.
… since you’ve made it to the end, here are a couple lolDornkirks for the road
