Sometimes a show gets famous for something it’s not about. A particular scene, idea, moment, or mistaken bit of marketing will catch the attention of potential viewers and get spread as what everyone who doesn’t know about the show knows about the show. Heck, maybe a fan even makes a particularly good meme that escapes the bounds of the fandom, using a shot taken out of context. It happens.
Shows that get this kind of strange and spontaneous publicity are sure to garner at least a quick salvo of views… but especially when the expectation created by the popularized snippet is off base, there still has to be something worthwhile to sustain interest. Spice and Wolf, a show that garnered at least some fame off the ‘promise’ of a cute and feisty girl with a wolf’s ears and tail, perhaps even clad in naught but her, ahem, natural pelt, is not particularly risque or ribald, and did well enough to warrant a second season. Why? Because it makes medieval economics downright fascinating and intense.
So, let’s take a look at our cast. When it comes to important characters, there are really only two. The first is Kraft Lawrence, a traveling peddler and trader who hopes to one day make enough money to open a shop. Such thoughts are pretty long-range, though, as for the foreseeable future he’ll be taking his wagon from town to town, just trying to turn a profit.
However, he gets a little more than he bargained for when he stops by a small village at harvest time. The villagers, as much as the church may dislike it, have their own quaint rituals to appease a local harvest divinity, the wolf spirit Holo. According to legend, Holo (“Holo with a tail of Wheat”) brings bountiful harvests… or lean ones if not properly managed. Lawrence buys, among other things, a bushel of wheat on his way out. And the next morning that famous moment has manifested in his cart: a young woman with the ears and tail of a wolf, who proclaims herself to be none other than the legendary Holo.
Holo introduces herself as the “Wise Wolf of Yoitsu”, and does manage to prove to Lawrence her supernatural power, as she can at some cost take the form of a gigantic divine wolf. Yoitsu, however, is not the village Lawrence found her in – rather, it’s her ancient homeland, a place that she’s come to yearn for in her ages away, but that is so distant in both time and place that she doesn’t know the way, nor exactly where Yoitsu might lie. She has a general idea of direction, but little more. Bound to the wheat that Lawrence acquired (which she later has processed into a small charm she can wear) she’s escaped the dead-end village far from Yoitsu and now wants to return home, and she offers to help Lawrence make a tidy profit on the way if he’ll take her on her journey to find Yoitsu (As well as provide her with things like food, and the modest outfits she wears for the course of the show).
Holo, frankly, makes this show… but any sort of sex appeal is very far down the list of ways in which she does it. She’s a character who’s fun to watch and engaging on an emotional and intellectual level. She’s hyper-capable, having not only her last-ditch powers (which can’t and don’t really come up all that often), but a detective’s ability to read situations and enhanced senses that give her vast insight, combined with a sharp and clever mind. It would be easy to flub a character with so many advantages, but Holo is also vain, opinionated, and somewhat alien, causing her to get into trouble as well as get herself and Kraft out of it, rather than just being a perfect solution to every problem. While Lawrence is cunning and a good character in his own right (very capable, but perhaps a bit too greedy for his own good). When she’s on screen, which is most of the time seeing as our main cast is only two characters, we’re having a good time, whether it’s having a laugh as she doesn’t quite ‘get’ being human (like almost choking on a “stupid, evil potato” because she forgot she has cheeks and can’t just gulp her food down) or being thrilled or engaged by her genius maneuvers (such as slyly proving that a merchant is cheating the scales by weighing goods on a table that isn’t level). Similarly, the general direction of the journey to Yoitsu, Holo’s desire, forms the backbone for the entirety of the show while Lawrence’s concerns are more the fodder for particular arcs along the way. While we’re largely seeing her through Lawrence’s eyes (since we can ‘get’ what he’s feeling better than what an ancient immortal wolf spirit actually has in mind), in a strong sense this is really her show in which Lawrence supports.
In any case, the plot from there is, broadly speaking, able to be divided into arcs. Each one is fairly long, with only two arcs per season for a total of four. Each arc deals broadly with a particular economic issue, with the semi-exception of the fourth and (for the anime at least) final arc, which is a little more nebulous.
The first arc is about currency exchanges, metal standards, and debased currency, and is possibly the strongest arc in general. At the very least it’s probably the most teachable of the arcs, especially as it highlights the contrast between standard fantasy and the realistic quasi-historical fantasy world of Spice and Wolf.
Let’s talk about that element for a minute. Spice and Wolf is, without doubt, a fantasy story. After all, one of the two lead characters is a spirit entity. However, it is very much grounded, and exists in a world that was made, in general, as real as it could be. It doesn’t take place on Earth’s globe or with Earth’s history, but it’s pretty clear that the social structures of the Spice and Wolf world are very familiar to our own past. And, unlike a show like Fullmetal Alchemist, which also has a “Period, except the world isn’t Earth” scenario, the magic is not overall a big element. Holo is essentially, if not absolutely, the only supernatural element in the entire show. She’s glaringly supernatural, and it’s important that she’s supernatural, but she’s alone, one scrap of magic in an otherwise disenchanted world.
In any case, back to currency.
So, to properly explain the plot of Spice and Wolf, I’m going to have to basically teach economics from it, especially in contrast with how some topics are usually handled in fantasy. Coinage is, to that latter point, the big one. Fantasy universes typically have a global currency in metal coins. Sometimes everyone pays in a particular material, like silver, sometimes there’s a usually decimalized exchange rate between silver and gold (and possibly copper and platinum) where one metal of coin is worth ten or a hundred of another. Blame Dungeons & Dragons for that one. Spice and Wolf, however, addresses the reality that even in a situation that uses precious metal coins there are as many currencies as there are mints and then some, and the differences between two “silver coins” are the kind of things that have toppled empires. Coins have a face value, of course, representing the weight and purity of precious metal, and while political power can place its thumb on the scale when determining whether the spending power reflects that, it has to be considered that the ‘real value’ might not be what the coin says on it. After all, a one-ounce gold coin that’s reasonably pure gold and a one-ounce ‘gold’ coin that’s mostly lead on the inside aren’t going to be objects of equivalent value. On the other hand, if a national mint with only so much precious metal can adulterate it and still pass off the coins as being pure, they stand to turn a significant ‘profit’. Because of this, faith in or knowledge of the actual purity of the coin, perhaps backed by the stability of the issuing government, can cause a currency to trade higher or lower. In extreme circumstances, a particularly bad mint might even provoke violence when the soldiers paid in national coin find that nobody wants to take it at the actual value of their wage.
In Spice and Wolf, merchants who travel a great deal tend to favor “Trenni Silver” for their dealings, and most values we hear quoted are in that currency, said to be quite stable, thus its broad acceptance. In the first arc, though, Lawrence is approached by a man with an offer to get into currency speculation. Essentially, he claims to have insider knowledge that a certain nation is looking to improve the purity of their coins and thus it would be of value to trade in their old coins at face value for new: the nation reclaims some reputation along with their old coins, and the trader comes away with what would be a profit abroad. Everybody wins, right?
Holo, however, is able to tell the sounds of clinking coins apart and identifies that the situation is backwards from what the snake-oil coin salesman is offering: the newer coins are actually brutally debased while the old ones, though not great, are reasonably pure. Once Lawrence knows this, of course, any thought of the former deal is off, and in fact he could make money speculating against that nation. And, in fact, he’s not alone. Agents of the nation in question realize this, and actually attempt to assassinate Lawrence before he can spread what he’s realized. After all, currency debasement is already a desperate move because of the long-term costs. If a merchant association were to get them by the balls before they even finished issuing the new mint, the result could be terrible. Between fleet feet, Holo taking her giant wolf form to deal with some pursuers, and a few contacts who ultimately are able to present that very threat, Lawrence manages to escape with both his life and an extremely tidy profit.
From there, Lawrence does a few steps of trading (Including getting a better than fair value from Holo busting the merchant with the clever scheme to make any set of scales crooked), ultimately investing in a trading company venture that essentially sees him buy arms and armor on margin, which sparks off our next major arc. For that, I should explain buying on margin.
When buying on margin, you’re basically taking out a loan for some or most of the value of an object you intend to sell, typically in order to do things in greater bulk. If you have $20 (I’ll just use dollar signs and simple numbers for this explanation) and can buy armors at $10 each and sell them for $12, you can make $4 buying your products outright, a $2 profit per unit. On the other hand, if you can buy in margin, you might spend only $1 per suit of armor, taking the other $9 in debt. Your profit per unit is the same $2 since you have to pay back that debt (maybe a little less if there’s some sort of interest) but now instead of buying and selling 2 units you move 20, and thus you make ten times the profit on the exchange… as long as the sale goes well. If for some reason the commodity you’re holding becomes cheaper or valueless, you’re potentially left with a massive debt. Lose it all buying outright and you’re just out your investment of $20. Lose it all on margin and you’re out your $20 and still on hook for the $180 “rest of the value” you didn’t pay. There’s more reward to be had, but also far more risk.
Incidentally, buying stocks on margin was one of the major factors behind the 1929 stock market crash why it was so devastating, since people couldn’t pay back massive loans they’d taken out on ‘sure bets’. Lawrence, however, doesn’t have the benefit of that historical example and does think he has a clear bet to support the fact that his greed can get the better of him. He buys war materials on margin because where he and Holo are going there’s always a grand crusade being drummed up every year… only for him to arrive in a city to discover that there’s no crusade today and the glutted market in arms and armor has crashed to the point where they’re worthless, and Lawrence himself is saddled with a colossal debt that will see him working as a galley slave for decades to pay it off if he doesn’t do something drastic, and soon.
Of course, no ‘get rich quick’ scheme is going to be safe, and in this particular case Lawrence turns to smuggling. Bringing a volume of gold into a particular town (where it’s illegal to trade in) will pull an insane profit, and when Lawrence is looking forward to a life of bondsmanship if he doesn’t turn that profit, such an illegal method no longer looks like quite the risk it was. He makes the contacts he needs to and even ends up recruiting an unknowing local with the skills to help, a shepherdess who Holo takes a quick dislike to, either because (as she says) she doesn’t much care for shepherds and their ability to protect their flock from wolves, or perhaps because she’s feeling jealous. Ultimately, despite some rather threatening encounters along the way, Lawrence manages to get the goods through, pay off his debt, and continue the journey into season 2
In my opinion, Season 1 is significantly stronger than what follows. There’s an expectation it builds of travel, clever merchant stuff, and Holo being fun that isn’t quite replicated with the third and fourth arcs of the show. Technically, everything is still there, but throughout the first two arcs, even when we aren’t sure how totally we should trust her dealing with the shepherdess, Holo is very present. She has a great magnetism and an immense screen presence. In the second season, she does still get some dynamite scenes, but more drama is predicated on the fact that we don’t always know what she’s thinking, which requires her to step into a somewhat more enigmatic role
The third arc is centered around commodities trading (and to a lesser extent, short selling), which is not something that I think I need to introduce quite as heavily because it’s a concept you’ll find in the news today – the sub-topic this year in particular. However, for once it’s not Lawrence getting in over his head; instead, the arc’s human drama is founded more on a comedy of errors. Lawrence visits a certain town and hangs out with local traders. Incidentally, he also makes a guess as to the location of Yoitsu and figures that his path would likely take over a year to reach it… but, if Holo were to split off at a certain point, she might be able to make it in days. Lawrence suggests this, and with the possible budding feelings, gives some offense. At the same time, one of the local traders, a younger man, becomes smitten with Holo without knowing the truth of what she is. While at least a little drunk, Holo lies to him and says she’s with Lawrence because she owes him a massive debt, which leads to the younger merchant challenging Lawrence that, in a fairly short period of time, he means to raise the absurd figure Holo named, pay off her debt, and propose to her.
This probably wouldn’t worry Lawrence as much, but he had a meeting with a local historian, looking into legends of Yoitsu, and learning that at least according to some myth it was destroyed by a monster known as the Moon-hunting bear, leaving only whispered tales of Holo as the legacy of her home and people. Holo finds this disturbing news and thinks (or says she thinks) that Lawrence must have known the whole time, accusing him of planning to abandon her when she became inconveinent.
Perhaps spurred by the worry that Holo really would leave, Lawrence tries to turn his tiff with the younger merchant into a contest, especially a bet on the futures and pricing of Iron Pyrite. Essentially valueless, being a moderately common sparkly stone and able to be created chemically, the price is currently inflated due to a fad… but perhaps not as far as it will be. By the terms of their arrangement, Lawrence stands to win if the price crashes, while his opponent will win if he manages to sell a decent sum of Pyrite at a high enough peak first.
Despite Lawrence’s relative certainty that the price of a commodity with little intrinsic value will crash, it does keep climbing for a time. He tries to inject small quantities into the market to depress the price, but the volume is snapped up and the price rises in any case, leaving Lawrence desperate to get enough pyrite to crash the market in one fell swoop before his rival can cash out. With most of the orthodox sources exhausted, Lawrence turns to the town’s alchemists, disfavored and disreputable, to build the necessary bankroll. Negotiations on that front fail and all seems lost, but it turns out that the figure that cleaned out the alchemists before Lawrence could was none other than Holo, who delivers the market-crashing sale before Lawrence can try with what little supplies he has left. The rival is defeated and gives up his suit, and Lawrence and Holo are able to talk honestly and continue their journey with an expectation of being more open and honest with each other.
The final arc is… a little scattered. Unlike the other arcs, there’s not really a central theme. Instead we mix in a failing fur trade, the whim of the church, a potential coup, and an odd and abortive plan to sell Holo as a slave only to quickly buy her back after turning a major profit… it’s much more of a mess, and because of that the plot doesn’t hold quite as much interest as it did before.
The important part is that Holo and Lawrence sort of pull a “gift of the magi” scenario through here. Holo agrees to the weird deal using her as collateral because it could give Lawrence enough of a bankroll to set up shop… which would end their journey but fulfill his dream, even as it would cost her both the man she seems to have developed feelings for and possibly her freedom. Lawrence, for once listening to his sense over his greed, backs out at a critical moment when it could cost him Holo, and despite some hostility from his former partners comes away with a deed, only a fraction the value he could have made but still the very thing he wanted most… which he immediately uses to buy back Holo so they can continue their journey, since that was more important to him than his old dream.
This wouldn’t be so bad, but we spend six whole episodes in a dreary port town for it. In the first season, we didn’t spend exactly all our time stopped in a city for a major arc. We had one-off incidents (even if they ultimately added in to the story that would be told) and a sense of motion. The second season is static, and feels slow or even bloated at times. I won’t say that those episodes are badly used, not strictly, but there’s not really the same sense of fun nor of the breadth of the experience since we’re spending all our time in these kind of dingy and depressed environments, often feeling miserable, pained, or afraid. There’s a great scene in the second season where Holo, the horror of how alone and isolated she really is sinking in, propositions Lawrence and he turns away from her, hurting her feelings even though he did it out of respect for the fact that she clearly wasn’t in her right mind, talking about having a child to avoid vanishing from the world. It really is a great scene, but it’s a very different kind of drama compared to what we’d typically expect out of Spice and Wolf.
Overall though, the show does deserve an A. It’s funny at times, sometimes thrilling, surprisingly grounded, and does have a couple of truly great characters as its leads. Whether or not you think economics would make for powerhouse drama, I really do encourage checking it out.