There isn’t a sharp line dividing what
some can find beautiful and what others might find troublesome, even
sick. This goes double when it comes to romance, since different
people approach the topic with different hangups, expectations, and
auto-failure situations that won’t be shared universally. Some
things will usually get a pass, and other things will usually be
found disturbing. Sat right in the middle of the gray area between
the two is the core romance of The Ancient Magus’ Bride.
Here’s the basic summary of the setup:
Chise, a teenage girl, is bought at auction, as a slave, by an
ancient and powerful inhuman sorcerer named Elias, who intends for
her to marry him. Full stop. If you think that sounds like
thirty-one flavors of wrong, I don’t blame you. If that sentence
(run-on though it may be) is enough that you think you could never
like this show… you might be right. For me, there are mitigating
factors, but I blame no one for being unable to make it through
episode 1 of this.
If you’re still with me here, I’ll go
into some of the details of those mitigating factors. First, the
person selling Chise… was Chise. She starts out the show under the
effects of major depression, having been rejected by every caretaker
she’s had in life and having failed to commit suicide at least once
in the past, and puts herself up for auction (despite being given
many chances to back out by the auctioneer) after learning that she’s
something special and, to the magical world, valuable. You could
make a solid argument that Chise is not in her right mind, sound of
mind, or competent to make her own decisions when she does this, but
again she’s abandoned and unloved by normals so there’s not really
anyone who can make these choices for her. Competent or not, though,
no one forces her into this arrangement. Once she decided to be sold
she didn’t have a choice regarding buyer, but she did know that going
in and did it anyway. After all, someone valuing her as a thing
acquired at auction was sure to be more care than Chise had gotten in
ages.
Just a warning, Chise might, in fact,
be seriously messed up.
And that’s another mitigating factor,
actually. The show doesn’t shy away from the fact that Chise is not
well and her relationship with Elias is not founded on healthy
grounds. While it’s not treated as a subject of horror, it is
treated as something that’s not a wise nor happy choice, necessarily.
Helping that as well is the fact that Elias isn’t human. Now, when we get into Speculative Fiction (Fantasy, Science Fiction, and all the sub-genres of the same) there isn’t a sharp line dividing humans from the rest of possible characters. Elias, however, is fairly deep on the other side of the gray area. Like, Aqua isn’t human (she’s a goddess), and Nonko isn’t human (she’s an oni), and Dantalion the Mad Professor isn’t human (he’s a Crimson Denizen) but they aren’t written all that differently from human characters. They have quirks that can be easily attributed to their fantasy race, but you could just have somebody have a quirk like being a vain idiot, a hard drinker, or a mad scientist. Your elves and dwarves and rubber forehead aliens and not-even-bothering-with-rubber-forehead aliens (looking at you, classic Doctor Who) and so on and so forth might as well be human. But despite adopting a very human-like frame (he can even fake a human face in place of that deer skull head), Elias is Not Human in a much more substantial way than most of those other “not human” characters. Elias is quite old and has lived kind of with humans (at least magical society, which is a bit… removed) for that time, but he still doesn’t understand what it means to be human in a mental or emotional sense. His experience, vast though it is, is missing concepts such as jealousy, loneliness, love… lots of things, some of which he learns from Chise directly or indirectly over the course of the show, and others that you might suspect he’s missing (like lust, a functional understanding of ‘consent’, an idea of what ‘marriage’ actually implies for humans…) he’s probably still not clear on or on board with by the end. Elias has done what he’s done with Chise at least in part because he wants to be more human, and has got it in his head that going through human ceremony – again without necessarily understanding it – is a path towards greater humanity.
For me, the romance in The Ancient
Magus’ Bride is interesting in part because it’s so weirdly abnormal,
and isn’t treated as being lovey-dovey or even sane. It’s a deep
dive into Elias’s inhumanity and struggle to cope with and compensate
for things that would come to members of the human species fairly
naturally, and Chise’s broken and warped psychology that’s emerged
from having her self-worth systematically killed off for the vast
majority of her childhood, a continuum of torment that she’s only
now, before our eyes, starting to recover from with the help of
Elias. Yet, neither Elias not Chise is a bad character nor a bad
person. They’re fascinating in their abnormality.
One more mitigating factor is that the
two of them do actually work on things. Towards the middle of the
show (a time period also depicted in the frame story for the
three-episode prequel anime), there’s an understanding of a
reciprocal relationship between them more than one of possession.
Chise is a “Sleigh Beggy”, a being beloved of spirits and magical
energy and thus with vast arcane potential if a possibly truncated
life span, and Elias acts as her tutor in magic, working not to
imprison her but to give her strength. Chise, in return, is Elias’s
humanity tutor. As interacting with her in a human way slowly drags
him towards being more human, Chise is there to help him make it
through the awkward transitions (which, by the time the main show
catches up with the prequel, we’ve seen a few of) where human nature
is painful or confusing. Is this healthy? Eeh, maybe not, but it’s
certainly prograde motion starting from the pitch!
Towards the end, we also see that
Chise, as dependent and depressive as she starts out, isn’t trapped
in that kind of state and does have limits to her patience and
kindness so that when Elias – prey to dark emotions that he feels
at full intensity but doesn’t truly comprehend – tries to do
something horrible, she runs off. True, these things are ultimately
patched over (We’re in a romance show; we’re not going to leave the
main couple split up), but not without time and effort dedicated to
doing so.
By the end of the show, Chise and Elias
haven’t reached the end of their adventures necessarily, but they
have reached a state where they, starting from this really troubling
starting position, have evolved their relationship into one that’s…
maybe still not healthy (can it ever be?) but happy and doing more
good than harm for the both of them, and that they both willingly
accept.
And, if like the other shows I’ve
reviewed this month, we were looking at a romantic comedy, I would
probably now be making my closing remarks. However, The Ancient
Magus’ Bride is a fantasy drama after being a romance, and as such it
has an actual plot with an actual villain to examine rather than just
setups to get to know the characters better.
That villain is known as Cartaphilius. He’s first really encountered when Chise and Elias are drawn into strange events by the cats of the picturesque little town of Ulthar (remember, kids: Lovecraft’s universe blends seamlessly with themes and motifs that generally follow a more fairy tale/Celtic and Nordic Mythologies sort of vein and holds the same weight and pride.) (Actually, it kind of does have the influence the more I think about it…). And at first, you think that Cartaphilius is a kind of easy baddie to figure out: He’s a monster of a person who takes joy in the suffering of others and will probably be portrayed as a fairly flat source of evil and malicious action for his remaining appearances. I thought the same thing, watching through the show for the first time. Boy howdy, was I in for a surprise.
Cartaphilius is pretty monstrous, and
does seem to derive joy from inflicting suffering on others… most
of the time. As he continues to appear, you get a palpable sense
that Cartaphilius is not sane, and not just in terms of being
sadistic and amoral. When we actually get his story, we find out
there’s a good reason for his sometimes schizophrenic actions:
Cartaphilius as we know him isn’t really his own person so much of a
composite of the original Cartaphilius, the Wandering Jew cursed with
immortality but still permitted to rot alive, and a mostly kind man
named Joseph who once took him and cared for him. They merged into a
single being, seemingly with Joseph more in control as the new
Cartaphilius, but the endless pain and misery drove him insane. We
see his slide, driven by the most primal of motivators, as he turns
to hideous means in order to cope with his immortality: harvesting
limbs and organs to replace his own decaying bits with magic and
surgery, and ultimately launching into his horrific experiments the
likes of which are seen in Ulthar, seeking a way either to actually
die or to gain a body that doesn’t perpetually suffer degeneracy.
Understanding earns some sympathy from
Chise, but perhaps not so much from the audience. What Cartaphilius
does is serious, big-boy evil, and just because we can see why
doesn’t mean we forgive such actions.
In a sense, the conflicts with
Cartaphilius book-end the show, forming some of its earlier arcs as
well as the last. In the final arc, Cartaphilius has a scheme to
free himself from his curse, and Chise is at the heart of it. Chise
suffers from a horrible “impending doom” dragon curse trying to
rescue the poor creature, and as a Sleigh Beggy in that cursed state,
she’s perfect for Cartaphilius. Elias tries some very sketchy
(horrific, really) things in order to save her, and she runs and ends
up captured by Cartaphilius. Cartaphilius basically aims to
synchronize his existence with Chise’s, grafting flesh between them
(notably swapping an eye that starts sending us to flashback land) to
absorb what’s causing her to die and leave her with the curse of
immortality. This isn’t allowed to run its course exactly, but oddly
enough he does kind of get what he wants. Cartaphilius’s curse of
immortality is left with Chise, counterbalancing the horrific death
curses she’s got so that she’ll probably live a kind of normal span,
probably, or at least is out of immediate danger.
Joseph-Cartaphilius is essentially placed under house arrest at
Elias’s place and Elias and Chise make up (perhaps a bit too easily,
but we’re out of time) and have a very wedding-like scene to play us
out.
I think the biggest things to
appreciate out of Ancient Magus’ Bride are the Xenofiction elements.
I haven’t introduced the term, but the idea of Xenofiction is fiction
that delves deep into the psychology or life circumstances of the
non-human, and ideally the not-human-like. Ursula LeGuin and Vernor
Vinge are both frequent examples in literature of writers who can
handle that other-ness really well. When we delve into the point of
view of Elias, and try to understand what kind of nameless thing he
might be, that’s dynamite stuff. We see him in very inhuman states,
both emotionally and physically, and get that he’s an enigma that
might not have a good solution since he’s still in flux in some ways.
Slightly less powerful are the times when the show really indulges
in the wonder of magic. The animation, with the exception of the
chibi interludes, is utterly gorgeous, and the supernatural things
we’ve shown are beautiful and heavy. The magical beings in Ancient
Magus’ Bride are creative but also deeply resonant.
Further down you have the character
drama and building. I’ve gone in detail about how messed up yet
still effective the romance is, and the rest of the character
building is all over the place. Cartaphilius is saved from being a
generic eccentric cackling villain with a heavily tragic backstory,
but doesn’t get that for most of the show. Some of the tertiary or
one-off characters, like the leader of the cats of Ulthar, have some
surprising depth and humanity while others are just flat. And at the
bottom of what this show does well, you do have the overall plot.
The Cartaphilius stories aren’t bad, nor are many of the arcs, but it
feels like it wants to be more cohesive than it is. Other than a
moment in the middle and the end arc, there’s not really a sense of
continual progress, and there are a lot of things that could go just
about anywhere.
On the whole, I give the show a B+.
But it’s a very conflicted B+. The visuals are amazing and Elias is
hugely interesting, but it’s hard to watch and often kind of
uncomfortable. Hopefully, you’ll be able to determine from that
whether you’d like the show or not.