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