Almost two whole decades after the original Gunslinger Girl, along came a show that took the anime-viewing world by storm with basically the same pitch: In the ambiguously near future, a world government secretly maintains order in society by using specially trained minor girls to do their wetwork.
It’s hard to talk about Lycoris Recoil without addressing the kind of hype this show had. Frankly, around the peak of its popularity, it was the kind of reception that no actual show is going to quite live up to, not even an extremely good one. How far short of that unreachable mark such a show falls… is another story entirely.
Despite the shockingly comparable pitch to Gunslinger Girl, Lycoris Recoil bears little resemblance to its ancestor. Gunslinger Girl was slow, brooding, and fond of putting complex and struggling characters in difficult situations without providing easy answers for the audience. Lycoris Recoil is light, colorful, and constructed more like a fun buddy cop affair with a thin excuse for the buddy cops to be cute girls.
As such, we start by introducing our buddy cops. First is Takina. She starts out as more or less a “proper” Lycoris (schoolgirl assassin) – living for the mission and the approval of her superiors. However, during a sting on a weapons deal, she goes against orders and shoots all the bad guys dead rather than bringing them in, in order to rescue a squadmate who had been taken hostage. Takina is called out for her cowboy cop sort of behavior and put on leave, meaning she’s sent to Cafe LycoReco to meet up with the rest of the cast.
LycoReco is home to the other half of this buddy cop duo, Chisato. Chisato is the ultimate ace of the Lycoris, having positively superhuman ability when it comes to her on-the-job skill, ultimately explained as stemming from amazing eyesight and reflexes that let her dodge bullets. However, Chisato refuses to kill, fighting only with nonlethal weapons, which makes her something of an aberration among the Lycoris. Her handlers, the old man cafe boss Mika (retired badass) and overworked secretary-type Mizuki (formerly from the Intelligence department) keep her busy both as a waitress and as an agent, solo-fulfilling community requests great and small.
Thus, we have our basic contrast: Takina is the brooding depressed cop, Chisato is the chipper goofball. They play against each other pretty much exactly as you’d expect of those archetypes: at first Takina hates it at LycoReco and resents Chisato, but eventually Chisato gets through to her and the two of them form a strong bond.
I’m honestly going to come out and say here near the start that the chemistry between Chisato and Takina is pretty much the best thing in the show. I don’t think it’s romantic in nature, but I can understand where people who do think that are coming from, and you really do believe that they grow to like each other naturally and at this intensity where they’re willing to go out on limbs for each other.
That said, and still at the cost of getting ahead of myself… I didn’t like Chisato all that much as a character. Don’t get me wrong – she was perfectly pleasant and a good person, so it wasn’t like she was difficult to watch at any point, but she’s a character who dances on the line of “too perfect”. I’ve talked about this before but there’s a difference between a character who is a believable good person and a character who is a saint, and the former is easier to believe and puts in more heavy lifting. As it stands, there’s a degree to which Chiasto acts as the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” for Takina’s arc. Because Takina grows a lot as a character. I honestly really liked her arc and how she evolved, how she learned both to appreciate life outside of seeking the approval of her overseers and how she came to understand herself better through her interactions with Chisato.
The MPDG is an archetype I’ve also talked about before, and rather than linking any of those rants I’ll say this much: I think it’s a deeply flawed archetype for discussion because the definition varies strongly from person to person, as does the judgment. Most people who encounter the term seem to “get” the sort of character it means, but putting into words who’s in the group, who’s out of it, and why is a lot harder. For Chisato, I can safely and cleanly say she’s the mostly static catalyst that causes Takina to change; the arc she has for herself doesn’t really cause her to learn, grow, or become a different person.
For that arc, and I know I’m not doing this perfectly in order like I often do, I need to talk about the sordid web of characters who come and go through LycoReco and their various secrets, which get revealed to the audience and characters at different points (gradually over the show, in one of its strengths).
To begin, the world of Lycoris Recoil features a group called the Alan Institute. Alan is a group of anonymous philanthropists who give aid to talented children in need. Though no one known what real humans are doing it (because one of Alan’s rules is that no knowing contact is to be had between the donor and the recipient of Alan’s aid), they have vast resources and even advanced unknown technology to grant as boons to those who need something to let their skills shine.
Unknown to most of the world, it’s not just musicians, athletes, and other clean-cut sorts who get Alan aid: Alan’s philosophy seems to be to help people with the potential to excel, regardless of any sort of moral judgment. Chisato herself was the beneficiary of Alan aid: she had a weak heart and almost certainly would have died, but an Alan donor recognized her skill as an assassin and had her saved with a mechanical heart transplant that is beyond what show-modern science is capable of replicating for the public. It’s because her own life was saved by some mysterious benefactor that Chisato refuses to kill, believing that she should pass on the grace and mercy she was shown.
One of the regulars of LycoReco is a man named Yoshimatsu. Chisato is fairly close with him, and he’s actually secretly former(ish) lovers with Mika. He’s also the true identity behind Chisato’s Alan Donor, having arranged her salvation partly as a favor for Mika. In his view, Chisato’s great destiny is to be an assassin, and living as anything less than a ruthless killer is a dereliction of her duty to the world and a squandering of her gifts – both the one she was born with and the one she was granted by Alan. Thus, Yoshimatsu spends the whole show, mostly behind the scenes, trying to give Chisato the push she needs in order to kill, so she can be what she was meant to be before the current edition of her artificial heart wears out and her time is up.
Yoshimatsu goes to pretty extreme lengths, pressuring Chisato with the missions he provides, leaning on Mika, and ultimately going through more overt movements of holding Chisato’s life hostage through sabotaging her current heart, teaming up with the show’s main villain (An Alan-backed Terrorist named Majima, with super-hearing to match Chisato’s super-sight), and even putting his money where his mouth is by trying to arrange things so that Chisato would have to kill him in order to survive.
Throughout all of this, Chisato’s no-kill conduct never wavers. In the moment, the scenes mostly play fine, and you do kind of want to see her be able to hold true to herself, but at the same time there’s the fridge logic (a term courtesy of Alfred Hitchcock, referring to a scene or issue that hits you only later, when you’re at home and rummaging through the refrigerator rather than in the theater) that Chisato only took up her conduct out of gratitude to her Alan Donor, who she comes to know is the very person now pushing her to go ahead and slaughter. Even if that doesn’t break her, you’d think it would shake her a little more than it does.
There’s nothing wrong with having Chisato act as a catalyst for Takina in their interpersonal arcs. Her being a static character only really becomes as much of an issue as it is (which is not a show-killing issue by any means) because her personal arc does the heavy lifting for the show’s main plot.
Speaking of that, I should get on with the plot summary I’ve procrastinated. One of the first serious missions Chisato and Takina get is to escort a hacker known as Walnuts (who initially appears in a mascot costume, using a voice changer). Walnuts is the #1 hacker, and is under fire from the #2 hacker who wants to become #1, Robota. Walnuts is also a wanted person by the agency behind Lycoris, after having performed a hack that intruded on their supercomputer. Don’t tell team LycoReco that, though… they’re kind of slow.
Though it seems as though Walnuts is killed in a firefight, it turns out that she actually only faked her death and the real form of Walnuts, a little girl named Kurumi, moves in to join the LycoReco team.
From there, we do get a number of episodic missions, but the main thread is all around Majima, who I mentioned earlier. Majima I think is a pretty interesting character. He’s a terrorist, but his cause is neither money nor any sort of simplistic geopolitical ideology. Rather, he stands opposed to the control of information – and through it, the populace – that the government in this show seems to exert. Honestly, in a darker dystopian story, there would be about a 50/50 chance that Majima’s character type would actually be the protagonist.
In specific, Majima wants to break the illusion of absolute peace that the Lycoris system has created, and as an encore hopes to destroy the system as well. He’d like to rebel against Alan as well, seeing their do-gooding as another facet of falsehood in the world that serves to bind people, but he’s a man with priorities (for this, Yoshimatsu actually praises Majima as a ‘good child’ who is living up to his potential. Even when they’re working together, the two really don’t see eye to eye.) Majima tried to do this once before, when he toppled the Tokyo radio tower, but he was stopped by the Lycoris and Chisato in particular. Now he hopes to use an attack on the new tower being built to replace the semi-fallen one to finish the job.
Before we really dig into him, we do have a period where Takina does plot lifting, fighting to get back to the home office only to realize that she’d rather stay at LycoReco and have a moral compass. Good stuff, that involves trying to clear her name of screwing up the arms deal bust, which in turn leads to Majima having been involved in the arms deal as it went down. There’s some legit good detective work following his trail, while he tries to build up his rivalry towards Chisato for that whole “beat him in the past” thing.
When his plan really gets going, which is at about the same time as Yoshimatsu moves from being more or less friendly to causing trouble and putting Chisato on a harsh death timer, we find out it’s actually a pretty clever plan. He uses guns planted all over the city to turn ordinary people into his potential weapons, and then during his takeover of the new tower, breaks through to deliver a message to the city, showing them the Lycoris and revealing what their “urban camouflage” of schoolgirl uniforms actually look like. Throughout Tokyo, perhaps throughout Japan, newly armed and cagey people start jumping at shadows – and at Lycoris agents – turning it into a catastrophe everywhere. The agency is unable to control it thanks to a hack keeping their supercomputer at bay, and ultimately they decide to scrub everything, sending in the male equivalent of the Lycoris to rub out all trace.
Through a very complicated climax, we get to the scenes with Yoshimatsu and the replacement heart for Chisato that’s being put in jeopardy throughout the ending. Chisato has a one-on-one fight with Majima (actually, she has a couple) and this I have to highlight in the show’s favor: while Chisato might be a wee bit too saintly to really come off as a good and rounded character, and while she is an incredible ace in terms of combat who basically no-sells everything any lesser enemy can throw at her, her fight scenes with Majima are amazingly strong and dynamic. You believe she can lose and… really, she kind of does in the last one until the Takina-shaped cavalry arrives, which only makes it an even and desperate fight. Majima has an ability that’s at least as good as Chisato’s, and he knows what’s going on with her and how to counter her. The action sequences in Lycoris Recoil are pretty great to begin with, solid mixes of flashy gunplay and martial arts along with grittier urban tactics, but last big, multi-phase brawl with Majima might be the one highlight that comes closest to being fully worthy of the show’s impossible hype.
Through the travails, Chisato is spared from having to kill, the Mk. 2 Artificial Heart is acquired for her so she’ll live something approaching a normal life, Kurumi counter-hacks to restore the supercomputer. The supercomputer shows off info control abilities that would make Sybil or the system in Yurei Deco blush and writes the whole incident off as just a movie promotion – a flagrant lie that the public just utterly buys in a way that almost vindicates Majima’s goal. The extermination of the Lycoris by their boy versions is called off as unnecessary, Majima is revealed to be alive and scheming, and before the agency can take Takina and Chisato back, they make their way with the rest of team LycoReco to run a food truck in Hawaii. The end.
So, sorry for tackling this so sideways, but to go through the show in order, because it takes on a lot of mystery aspects, would be basically to recite the show in full, and I don’t think anyone wants that obscene level of detail when I don’t have a similarly insane level of stuff to say about each movement. Basic plot arc is getting Takina introduced to LycoReco, tracking the weapons deal that sullied her name, following Majima’s trail, and then trying to deal with the double whammy of “Chisato is dying” and “Majima’s plans have hit endgame”.
And I’m glad I mentioned Fridge Logic before, because that is really all over the place in this show. I think the only place where I lost it watching through was how heinously easily the supercomputer pulled the perfect cover up to undo the fact that Majima had basically won with his whole “reveal the truth” game. But when thinking back on it, there are a lot of aspects that don’t quite add up. We know the Lycoris have school uniforms because “urban camouflage” but there have got to be plenty of other methods of urban camo that don’t require you to use adolescent girls as your killer agents. And for that matter, where are these girls coming from? I guess they’re probably orphans or something but we’re never actually told, and we see that Lycoris training is long and intensive and never get any hint that any of the girls have known another life. There are a freeking lot of them, so it’s hard to believe that you’d find that many useful and competent super-young lost and broken. Further, where do they go? Lycoris obviously can’t operate once they come of age. Are they released into general population despite knowing insane levels of top secret information? Is there a secret undisclosed cadre of office lady assassins they graduate into? Or are they just rubbed out when they’re past their use-by date, a grim end that doesn’t fit with the tone of the show but does kind of best fit with what little information we have?
For all its lush design, down to using a lot of Tokyo geography to frame its scenes (you can visit a lot of the “sets” in this show in real life), Lycoris Recoil at some point decided it was okay to just wave its hands and say “You want to see cute girls do this, right? Don’t think about it too much.” That’s a sense I never really got off of Gunslinger Girl, that really used the fact that these were damaged and disturbed kids forming the basis for the specially-trained secret assassin corps.
When you get down to it, what is Lycoris Recoil, and what is it worth? It’s a buddy cop show, and as a buddy cop story it’s better than average. It’s a mystery-thriller sort of show with the hunt for Majima, and as that it’s somewhere north of average. It’s a hell of an action piece, I give it that much. It’s watchable, engaging, at least a little charming, and while it might in some ways be too chipper for its own good (much like Chisato herself) I’d much rather that than something that’s excessively miserable and depressing beyond what the material would actually command.
In the end, I’ll give Lycoris Recoil a B+. It’s a good show, and it’s a good show in a lot of different ways and on a lot of different levels. But it’s not a great show. It’s the top end of standard, and I can very comfortably recommend it, but don’t go in looking for world-shaking amazement.