An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

On Wax Wings – Guilty Crown Spoiler Review

So, this is a bit of a weird one – I’ve already done a whole Audio Commentary series on Guilty Crown, what more could I possibly have to say?

Well, really, what I want to do is break down Guilty Crown in a more controlled manner, having the ability now to look back on the whole thing. Perspective is a big deal, and with it I’ve found that my opinion is somewhat different than it was in the middle. In addition to that, not everybody wants to sit through an Audio Commentary, and unlike Hundred I think Guilty Crown is worth a closer look.

As such, I’ll start with the basic rundown of the story. We follow a boy, Shu, as he gets entangled with a pretty girl (Inori) who happens to be involved with some revolutionary terrorists lead by a man named Gai. The revolutionary terrorists exist because some years ago there was an outbreak of the Apocalypse Virus (such a cuddly name…) and Japan is consequently under quarantine and subject to the whim of UN Peacekeeping forces, GHQ, who really enjoy doing the sorts of things the Evil Overlord List suggests you not let your Legions of Doom partake in too freely. Shu gains some sort of ultimate power derived from genetic magic science, which takes the form of, initially, summoning a crystal sword out of Inori and with it smashing tanks, mechas, and the like with ease.

Shu initially works with the rebels only reluctantly, but gets drawn deeper over time in large part because at least they’re not trying to kill him, unlike the other guys. This comes to a head in a big climax where it turns out that Shu’s sister was Patient Zero for the Apocalypse Virus, still has some sort of magical existence that can be made more real by using Inori, and wanted Shu to be the Adam to her Eve for a new successor race to mankind. Gai also apparently knew the two of them (because Shu got easy plot convenient amnesia) and liked the sister, but she’s kind of crazy and evil so Shu ends up having to put both of them out of their misery. The end… except that’s the halfway point.

After the death and destruction caused by Shu’s sister emerging from the woodwork, we find ourselves in a whole new story where Shu and his school friends are trapped in a quarantined city, cut off from the outside world with no help in sight. Fear runs rampant and the kids (including Shu as a super and several skilled former rebels) have to band together to survive their imprisonment in largely abandoned ruins with food and Apocalypse Vaccine running short and a military enforced border of “you die” slowly contracting around them. Shu finds himself placed in a position of leadership, but goes off his rocker when he loses a dear friend and turns into a tyrant, whose own closest allies betray him and leave him to die when the time to escape comes. A tragic ending for… what, we’re still going?

Gai is alive or resurrected or some crud, steals the superpower from the backstabbed Shu (along with Shu’s arm), and makes his intention to burn the world down pretty clear. Inori salvages what’s left of Shu and they try to survive before she inevitably gets captured to be used to help bring about the end of the world by acting as a vessel for Shu’s only-mostly-dead big sister. Again. Despite being possibly the least qualified person for the job, Shu has to get a new superpower, win his friends back over, kill the bad guy, rescue the damsel in distress, and save the world. And once he’s accomplished that (or as much as he will) we are finally done for real.

Now, usually my reviews have a particular pattern: I try to describe what works about the show, what doesn’t work, and what’s interesting to address. At the end of that, I issue the show a letter grade that I feel sums up the overall quality and the experience of watching the show. This time, in part because I’ve already talked a lot about Guilty Crown and in part because I think it would be an interesting exercise, I’m going to do things a little differently; the letter grade will be my thesis for the review, and I intend to support it with analysis.

The letter grade I have for Guilty Crown: D+

Specifically, at the end of everything, I think this might be the definition, for me, of the highest possible D+. It’s a show that doesn’t pass muster, but comes extremely close to doing so. There’s not just one thing the show needed to fix to reach palatable levels, there’s a host of things and fixing any one of them would do it.

Issue number one would be the alleged female lead, Inori. In the audio commentaries, I was extremely hard on Inori, and while I do stand by my comments as they happened (live, while watching the show), the takeaway at the end is a little bit different. My main complaint about Inori was that she had no character. This was a persistent problem for a few reasons. For one, Inori is not a character who talks very much. She has few lines, and many of the lines she has consist of just saying someone’s name. As a second point, Inori has a pretty flat affect. Most of her lines are delivered in a slightly melancholy squeak. And for a third point if there is one character trait that Inori does seem to have it’s that she’s subservient – she seems to do whatever she’s told and doesn’t seem to care one way or another about things that get other characters interested. Since she emotes so poorly, it’s not easy to actually get into her head and understand what she might be thinking or feeling. The issue is exacerbated thanks to an early sequence: Gai arrives at a prison in which Shu is being held with a big escape plan, only for the plan to (seemingly) be thrown into chaos by Inori’s off-schedule arrival to rescue Shu of her own volition. Later, Inori claims that the whole scenario was Gai’s plan, and that he was just using her as a tool to win Shu’s trust.

There’s not a good resolve, however, to which story is real or if there’s potentially even a little bit of both. On one hand, some of the evidence suggests that Inori is lying when she’s taking back the nice things she said and distancing herself from Shu, because she’s actually worried getting close to her will get him hurt (or something like that). On the other hand, Gai’s writing (which I’ll get to in its own right) supports the notion that this was all just as planned, and Inori never actually did anything of her own free will. So, we’re left with a conundrum where we can’t even quite say that she’s some kind of soulless puppet, because the answer to the question of whether Inori acted of her own and actually wanted something is a shrug.

Inori actually falls out of focus shortly after that sequence. She has a few more scenes, but particularly in the second arc her screen time and lines are even more minimal than they were before. As a result, she doesn’t get another character scene to make up for the fact that the previous one ended with her personality less clear than it began until the final sequence, just before she gets kidnapped and written out of the story entirely. In that last hurrah, Inori actually does express some character and address some issues she has, with what she is and what she desires. Essentially, she reaches, on screen, the conclusion to a growth and development arc that the audience wasn’t actually privy to and thus can’t properly appreciate.

This is a huge issue, because Inori is arguably the female lead of the story. True, Hare (one of Shu’s school friends) gets better development and treatment in just about every way, but she also gets axed right as she’s stepping up to legitimately stand at Shu’s side, which leaves us with the flavorless bubblegum that is pre-endgame Inori.

I get what the writers were trying – make her enigmatic so that the audience wants to know more about her. There are a number of great leading ladies in Anime who start out as colossal question marks, so it’s not like the technique was doomed to failure. The problem is that Inori is an enigma that’s hidden too carefully. If you’re setting up a mystery, you need clues and a scenario that create an interest in following the trail, and when we’re dealing with standard (rather than interactive) fiction, you need to follow the clues down layer after layer at a steady pace in order to not lose the interest of the viewer. Inori doesn’t have enough bait on the hook, so to speak, and she doesn’t get followed closely enough to stay with her rather than just taking the surface read of her being a personality-deprived body pillow with a cool sword hidden inside.

Inori could have been fixed – and Guilty Crown as a whole dragged across the D/C line – with maybe five minutes of screen time spread across a few episodes in the first half of the show. Give us a few scenes, and they don’t even have to be long scenes, that paint part of a consistent and interesting picture of what might be lurking under Inori’s placid pink surface, and we can be patient for the payoff. Let us understand, with some brief dialogues or even monologues, that she’s really feeling something and has some desire buried within her, and don’t contradict it and bury it away in a muddy mess of failed study. You can be mysterious and it can work, but there is such a thing as too enigmatic. If Inori took just a little time to be demystified a bit, that would domino into a better understanding of Shu’s affection for and relationship with his leading lady, which would in turn strengthen the entire show in a fairly meaningful way.

The second big issue is the middle arc, the “Trapped under quarantine” arc. It has a few problems in its setup and execution that I’d like to touch on briefly, and then the big sub-issue that gets it on its list. First, the small stuff. Number one, this is an arc that has a bad habit of stretching suspension of disbelief. Guilty Crown’s setting is… near future. It’s one where you can believe that the technical marvels like the remote-piloted big robots could be built if not today than at least with some time doing real research and the supernatural elements are given a scientific explanation however bullshit that explanation might be. It’s more or less grounded and gritty even if it isn’t exactly “realistic”. Point is, this isn’t Kill la Kill where any stupid thing goes. So when a giant metal wall pops up out of the ground around the quarantine area and is then able to gradually contract like the Death Star Trash Compactor taking out buildings in the process… no, as serious as you paint it, this is too goofy.

Number two for little things that are trouble for the middle arc… the middle arc existing. We spend a lot of in-universe time trapped in the post-apocalyptic city quarantine zone, and especially given the solve we eventually get, you kind of have to ask why. They decide fairly early on (in terms of the real time spent) that they can’t just sit around and wait to be killed, but zerg rushing the exit doesn’t come until after weeks of bullcrap setting up something resembling a self-sustaining society in the ruins like they’re intending to just stay there. There’s no indication why Shu’s top-end elites couldn’t have procured an exit well before the marathon of suffering that was the school’s existence under quarantine really reached the worst levels of resource shortfall and tyranny. There is no reason for the meat of this arc. But, again, that’s a little thing.

The big thing is how badly the latter movement of the arc is handled. This is the part that sees Shu temporarily become an evil overlord. Without even touching on why this comes about (I’ll get to it), let’s talk about how it’s handled once it hits. As with Inori being a mysterious female lead, this isn’t a move that would always be bad. In Mirai Nikki, there’s a sequence where Yukiteru Amano turns to some very dark behavior and it really works. Shu’s dark time… doesn’t. It just seems insane. Guilty Crown is a show that likes to go dark places for the sake of going dark places, and here it really shows that there isn’t much of a real point. When Shu takes over, his stated goal is still to protect everyone – he’s come to believe that relying on power alone is the best way to do that, but that is still his purpose. Why, then, does he made deputies of the bullies who hate him, he knows hate him, he’s previously locked horns with, and he has no reason to expect will do anything but make life more miserable for the people that he supposedly wants to protect? The scenario is one where some harsh measures make sense, like having to perform some triage with regards to who gets treated with the limited supply of vaccine for the still-raging Apocalypse Virus – determining who NEEDS full dosage and who they can afford to let go symptomatic for a while. But every choice Shu makes seems tailored not to address the harsh reality of his situation with an uncompromising ability to do what must be done even if it’s unpalatable but rather to gain for himself a zero percent approval rating and tick as many boxes as possible on the list of things to never do as an Evil Overlord to “I did that”.

The thing is, he’s not even good at it. Shu runs his unnecessary brutal police state and it can’t even really deal with one dissenter because that’s how hopelessly broken the situation is. The fact that he ends up on the receiving end of a coup is just about the only believable thing in the whole sequence.

And, to get back to an earlier topic, it doesn’t help that the reason why Shu turns this way is weak. In the “Fallen Hero” sequence in Mirai Nikki, it makes sense. Yukiteru believes that once he wins the Survival Game he’ll just be able to resurrect anyone who died, and thus that he doesn’t have to face the consequences of killing. Because of that, he becomes utterly ruthless in pursuit of his goal, and willing to kill anyone who stands in his way. All the same, it does still affect him, as we see in a couple of the scenes that rack up a body count, and we can understand that even if Yukiteru has become this unfettered terrorist of destruction, the generally nice kid we knew is still his core nature. How does Guilty Crown compare?

First, Voids. These are the superpowers Shu can use and everyone* (some restrictions may apply) has exactly one inside of them to be drawn out and, by this point in the story, wielded by Shu or bestowed by him onto their source to use. Not all Voids are created equal when it comes to their usefulness in combat or daily life. The kids find a scanner that can estimate the power level of everyone’s Void, and a compiled roster of who has what, graded in tiers, is the result. A particularly unsavory character suggests using this outright as a social ranking system (which in a survival situation should be evident as a Bad Idea), but Shu would rather not. However, some of the low ranking kids go out and try to make a commando mission work to prove that they can be of use despite being low power. They walk right into a trap, and rescuing them from the trap gets a very dear friend of Shu’s, Hare, killed horribly. Stricken by her death, Shu decides that power really is all that matters, and sets up his Void-based society because somehow this would have prevented Hare from dying or something.

As with a lot of things in Guilty Crown, if you take it down to a certain level (say, the outline) this isn’t strictly wrong – grief driving a man insane and causing him to curse the world? That’s fine stuff. What’s the problem is that Shu technically doesn’t do this (for the most part) to torment or punish anyone, he does it to protect and organize. Except all his choices are for maximum brutality. Not “as brutal as it needs to be for maximum effectiveness”, maximum brutality.

Feeding into this is that minor problem from earlier… there’s no reason to actually construct a society of ANY kind in the ruined school. Once Shu decides it’s time to bust out of the death trap they’re in, the way to do that is for him to push over some perimeter defenses and everybody to leg it. They stay for a good amount of time as Shu does his best Stalin impression, but we are never at any point given an indication of what they are waiting for or why. There’s no buildup of resources or critical moment to call it “Go time”, they’re just suffering until the writers say it’s okay to move on to the next arc.

This arc was, as a whole, the weakest part of the show. Guilty Crown had a lot of ups and downs – in the frustrating way where every time I thought it might stabilize it decided to do something stupid again – but the ruins arc was the big, long down that, while I was watching the show, convinced me that it really wasn’t going to bring it back. All the same, it could be fixed. The cost would be a bit higher than fixing Inori – the easiest way would probably take an episode worth of material actually seeing how a decent Shu becomes a tyrannical despot rather than cutting from him screaming in fury over his friend’s recent (seconds ago) death to a state where the dictatorship is already fully established. If you’re going to have him make such bone-headed calls, can we at least hear the devil on his shoulder? The progression that makes this look reasonable to him? Other fixes, involving not going the “Evil Overlord King Shu” route, would have more lasting impact on the show as a whole, but I would fully accept the show and promote it a grade if it did the most basic fix of giving Shu a turn to darkness not faster and more arbitrary than Anakin Skywalker’s.

And then we come to Big Issue number three. The third big issue with the show is Gai. Gai is… a problem character, of a problem type, and I want to properly pick him apart to as an example of the archetype in the extreme.

You see, it can be difficult to depict characters that are supposed to be brilliant strategists, master planners, or in general just very smart. It doesn’t have to be a problem; some smart characters are among my favorites. In anime a good example would be Ikta Sorlok (Alderamin on the Sky). An acceptable example would probably be Gunzo from Arpeggio of Blue Steel, which is a show I’ve actually talked about. These characters share a few traits: we’re allowed to see how they think about the situation they’re in, and how they can get themselves out of a jam. Sometimes, they might exploit the flaws of their opponents while at other times they might be able to gain the upper hand by manipulating the situation. They are also typically put into bad situations that they have to use their wits to escape, rather than in positions of power where their struggle is to get the other guy, because it feels better to see them come out from being on the back foot than it is to see them totally take the initiative. Their cleverness is shown by bearing witness to complex but believable plans that account for many factors. Sometimes, watching their schemes come together can be satisfying like watching a fancy domino set topple or a game of mousetrap do its thing: one bit leads to another, and it gets to the end. Usually, their shows will remember to also make their work feel difficult. There are close calls along the way, or maybe the Planner character has to adapt to changing conditions, scrambling to recover from unforeseen circumstances and stick a square peg into a round hole. It’s more interesting and engaging when we see a character struggle. These good characters don’t always have to be fighters either: think of just about any well-done heist scenario and you’ll see the same pattern. Detailed plan, things go wrong, people cover, and the day is won thanks to on-point leadership.

Tsutsugami Gai, however, comes from the other school of writing smart characters. It’s a school that believes surprise is more valuable than suspense: You don’t get to see the setup, where improvisation is genuine and where the appearance of being on the run is a feint to trap the enemy, you just see everything magically fall into place without a lot of understanding of how it got there other than, hey, he’s a genius so of course it would work out. The writing for such characters believes that a reliance on minutae eclipses in expression of intellect the ability to work with a resolution that can be parsed by humans, and that a smug superiority that any resistance or seeming failure has already been expected and accounted for is more fun to watch than the scramble to recover from something going wrong. That somehow the character won’t be insufferable to the audience when everything is Just As Planned.

These characters really get on my nerves. They’re trouble when they’re villains since they can stretch credibility, but they can work. When they’re “heroes” (air quotes due to their usual obnoxious traits), they lead to some of the worst exchanges I can think of. During the audio commentary, I started calling Gai “Tzeentch” after the Warhammer Chaos God of Change, Intrigue, Magic, Plots, and Schemes… and I feel like referring to this brand of poorly written geniuses and tacticians as “Tzeentch” characters is apt. Tzeentch is known for plots within plots, and causing everything to go all according to a plan that only Tzeentch has the intellect to comprehend, but then Tzeentch gets away with it by being an evil god and not an ordinary dude.

Gai, as a Tzeentch character, drags the show down, because you very quickly understand what his metagame is and that his goals will always be achieved no matter what. There’s an inevitability to a poorly written Tzeentch that sucks the drama out of scenarios. When Gai is busy being the theoretically heroic leader of a rebel underground, it steals credibility from the villains and agency from the other heroes to have everything go his way, seemingly without effort. Almost every move Gai makes pays off for him, even those that initially appear to be problems. There’s even a reasonable read, from the lines in the show, suggesting that Gai planned for his dramatic death at the halfway point of the show and unexplained resurrection, meaning that even the seemingly petty ways in which he was foiled were ultimately according to his plan. His smug reliance on everything falling into place, while not often lifting a finger himself, could have been swung to the endearing if it was only once and expressed a faith in his underlings (Shu included) to get the job done, but instead he’s depicted as the grand manipulator and his success as inevitable. I don’t think Leto II Atreides could have plotted out some of the things that Gai appears to plan.

… give yourself a pat on the back if you got that reference, you’ve done good.

Because Gai’s villain run is predicated on his former mentor run, things don’t get much better when he reappears. They also don’t really get better because he doesn’t get a lot of screen time after his resurrection. This might be for the best, though, since if he was half as infuriating resurrected as he was alive we’d be worse off for having more of him. The version of him that is most bearable, which is to say the version that isn’t actually a problem at all, is his younger self seen in flashbacks, who gets called “Triton”. He seems to be a generally good kid, but falls hard for Shu’s (crazy, ultimately evil and apocalyptic, manipulative, incestuous) sister, Mana. She tests his patience and his convictions and leaves him feeling mocked and unloved but with the promise of more leading him on, the torment of Tantalus. It really is a pity he grew up into such a hard to watch character.

Unlike Inori and the Ruins arc, Gai wouldn’t be trivial to rewrite. Most of the first half of the show is predicated on his infallible guidance, and the final arc relies on how he was set up there to build him up as a villain. As much as I dislike Gai, though, Guilty Crown would still have had a high potential with him as-is and those other issues mended.

Beyond those big three problems, Guilty Crown is a… mixed bag. The villains, at least those above the generically brutal occupation forces, make no sense whatsoever – a problem perhaps best expressed by Yuu, a white-haired superpowered kid who seems to only exist to kidnap Inori once and be the second to last boss Shu fights like the last episode is some kind of video game. They try to give a redemption arc to one of the nasty killer soldiers, Daryl Yan (“Kill-em-all” Daryl, as he’s called) and it doesn’t land at all… but on the other hand Daryl’s redemption fails because he’s a tertiary character at best and doesn’t get enough screen time focused on his wishes and desires to let us see past the fact that he slaughters innocents for touching him. And one of the villains, Segai, might still make no sense but is so damn fun that it’s impossible to not enjoy scenes where he inserts himself. He’s a walking ball of quirks, not an intense character study, but he’s great to watch all the same.

The supporting characters are kind of in the same place. A lot of the friends and bullies, like the general bully brigade, generic friend Souta, Shu’s Mom, the Student Council President… they’re not worth much as characters, running from flat and uninteresting to muddy and annoying. Tsugumi, one of the rebels, seems to exist just so the producers could say they actually managed to fit a kind of loli catgirl in a plug suit into their story… but she gets at least a couple amusing lines, and some of the side characters are actually very well done: Yahiro, for instance, has some interesting and compelling reasons why his stances are the way they are, and gets time dedicated to his struggle and pain. It would be better if they didn’t just skip important conversations they started with him, but that’s a problem the show has in general. Hare is actually a pretty good female lead. Even though meta suggests that Inori is Shu’s leading lady, Hare makes a vastly better attempt than most lost cause crushes on main characters with enigmatic waifs to chase after do. We come to understand her, why she loves Shu, and what their relationship and the potential for more mean for her, and she even manages to move in right to support him when he’s in a bad way and possibly even earn some of the reciprocation she so desperately desired. I guess that’s why she had to die – RIP Hare, too good for this show.

And then there’s Ayase. Forget Shu – he’s a totally stock protagonist with not much unique personality to set him apart from a million others. Even forget Yahiro and Hare, who I just got done praising. Ayase is far and away the best character in this show. Everything else tops out at the fun end of average, with Segai and Hare being the “standouts”, but Ayase is actually fairly well done. A mecha pilot whose legs are paralyzed, Ayase is actually smartly written, both as a disabled character and as a character in general. Being wheelchair bound does matter to her, it causes her issues in ways that might be ignored by poorly constructed tellings. However, many of her personal issues don’t stem from the fact that she’s paralyzed: her faith in her superiors, connections with her friends, and approach to the world as a whole are interesting and compelling apart from any comment about whether or not she can walk. Unlike the other “good” characters of Guilty Crown, who might or might not still be good in isolation, I’m fairly confident that Ayase would absolutely hold her own in a stronger product. I actually wish that the show was more about her; she gets enough focus that I’m confident that she could have supported the more detailed study, especially since her arc as someone who originally had a lot of faith in Gai for decent reasons is a good deal stronger to turn around into a rivalry than Shu’s amnesia-shrouded past. There’s a point right at the end where there’s a scramble over a vial of superpowers, and Ayase is one of the competitors going for it. Naturally, Shu ultimately ends up with it, but truth be told I would have liked to see what Ayase could do. There’s even a good scene earlier where she’s contemplating taking it, even knowing that it could kill her, because of how important fighting back is, and her internal struggle is well-presented… as opposed to Shu, who grabs the vial without hesitation because he has no hope and no real choice.

She’s also the only heroic character who has both a personality and the ability to give us a legitimate smile. Guilty Crown is one of those shows where everything has to be dark, and frowns, and misery, like we’re going to relate more to their plight if everyone is super serious all the time. It’s a technique that’s mercifully less common in anime than it is in western media, but things that dip into the “Dark for the sake of Darkness” territory can still hit it. And Guilty Crown largely does, but Ayase is still allowed to smile… I guess along with Segai and the fanservice loli in total, but it’s still something to appreciate.

There is one thing about Guilty Crown, though, that deserves straight-up praise and not tepid equivocation… It’s a gorgeous show. The visuals are on point including the supernatural elements and spell effects, the environments, the action including its pacing and choreography, the design of characters and mechas… even the lighting in some of the shots is notably good. For every bone-headed choice Guilty Crown made, and as hard as it can be some times to wade through the hearty stew of idiocy to get to the end, it’s a joy to just look at. I contended during the audio commentary, and I stand by this, that you could have a good time if you just put the show on mute, turned off the subtitles, and watched it that way. I even do think someone might be able to tell a better story with the same visuals (maybe something in the vein of various screencap webcomics that depict movies as though they were RPG sessions – I know of ones for LotR and Star Wars). I don’t intend to do it, but someone certainly could.

There are other shows that look better, but not a ton, so credit where it’s due.

That said, though, I’m sticking with my D+ rating. I wouldn’t recommend Guilty Crown to anyone, and I wouldn’t want to watch it again myself. Its elements tend to be normal to bad, again with the exception of the visuals, and even though I can find some stuff to appreciate, there’s not enough in the way of truly high peaks to make up for the baseline being so low. It just really does feel like a bit of a shame, because it didn’t have to be this way – it’s not lazy or godawful, just misguided in a lot of places and a lot of ways. I called this review “On Wax Wings”, but like certain cartoonists I always felt the story of Icarus wasn’t a warning against human hubris so much as it was about the limitations of wax as an adhesive: these problems could be fixed. They just weren’t. Guilty Crown was in bad need of a rewrite


One thought on

  1. I think this would make more sense to me if I had seen the show (or more anime at all)! I like your writing style and depth of commentary.

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