Let’s talk about Vampires. Few mythical creatures seem to have captured quite as much worldwide attention as the blood-sucking undead. Perhaps it’s because they’re a resonant idea when used for horror – a monster that is active when most humans are vulnerable and that acts as a predator on humanity. Perhaps it’s because there’s a lot of baked-in sexuality to the modern vampire (as well as many mythical predecessors), evoking some pretty deep fantasies.
Or perhaps it’s because they’re versatile – as might be guessed from those first two points, there’s a huge range of possibilities with vampires, from the zombie-like infected of I am Legend (the original book, mind you), to the charming but deadly children of the night that come to us from Bram Stoker, Anne Rice, and Vampire: the Masquerade; from neighborhood nobodies as with Call of the Night’s Nazuna Nanakusa to terrifying powerhouses like Kizumonogatari’s Kiss-Shot Acerola-Orion Heart-Under-Blade. There are a lot of ways to do Vampires. So it’s kind of frustrating when we get a vampire show where you could call the vampire just about any supernatural name and have it stick just as well.
We start, right away, with the good stuff, as a boy is bitten by a vampire, saying she’s giving him her curse, and he’ll be hers forever. They declare their love for each other, and something happens, changing the boy somehow. They both seem to be grade-schoolers in this opening, by the way.
Cut to boy grown up to high school as he’s woken up by the childhood friend with ruddy hair, an ahoge, a sweet and avid approach, and an obvious crush he’s too spinless to dissuade her from properly, and he talks about his weird little girl dreams, since evidently he doesn’t remember the incident properly. The stock childhood friend, bargain bin Sumika, slips us the first of many panty shots before we’re introduced to an ultra-popular douchebag who turns out to have supernatural abilities. Our lead (Taito, properly) then manages to get the classic Truck-san treatment, shoving a girl (Douche’s minion) out of the way of an oncoming traffic accident, only to be thoroughly squashed himself, even going so far as to separate his head from his body.
Great! Twelve minutes in and the show’s already over! That means I can be done, right? No, sadly, we cut the loli vampire, Himea (or Saitohimea in full), trapped in some colorful esoteric otherworld of swirling seals waiting for Taito while reminiscing of their childhood together and being shocked by horrible black lightning, and Taito comes to as a talking severed head. His body is able to get back up, the colorful seals from the other realm put it back in order, and he’s ultimately able to put himself back together, though he’s understandably freaked out.
Evidently, Taito dying restores vampire loli’s powers, he remembers her properly, and speaks her name to summon her into the mortal plane. She mercifully magics herself a high-school body (or at least a slightly less loli one) and some clothes before warping out, and the jerkly blue wizard gets a phone call as we see that other kid was responsible for Taito forgetting and Himea being banished in the first place. Finally, he runs to the park where he used to play with the girl he forgot about except in dreams for years and meets her again… only for her to be immediately run through with a sword.
This show has so many opportunities to abort, yet it doesn’t take them.
We get a flashback explaining that Taito’s gift/curse will save him from death six times (for a total of seven lives), refreshing every fifteen minutes. I will give the show that the rules are important to get out fairly early, especially for a power as relevant as “revives from any amount of damage”
In the present, the stab appears to have come from the arrogant blue-haired prick (Gekkou, to use his name) who seems determined to, with his idiot girl minion, fight it out without offering an explanation. Before they can even battle it out, a giant spider demon appears, with the kid who messed Himea and Taito up in the past, Hinata. Very quickly we get all sorts of arbitrary reveals about how the one jerk we barely know is the other’s twin, new forbidden powers and did I mention that this all has basically no preamble and just launches into something that seems like it was meant to be the grand final battle? Hinata is defeated, Taito seems to have sacrified his life, and the show once again seems like it should be over.
Except we cut right back to school where Sumika’s unsuccessful copy once again wakes Taito up, just in time for new transfer student Himea to show up and Gekkou to bully Taito (and the now super-clingy Himea) into joining the student council as his “slaves” Whatever that means and however that works out.
This, by the way, is the first two episodes, and there are a couple things to notice. The first is that… at least the show looks good. It’s well-animated and the colors are actually pretty gorgeous, with a lot of rich, saturated twilight reds contrasted with shimmering blue-white and threatening dark shadows. The second is that the show is desperate. It really feels like a show that, problematically, didn’t have confidence in its material. You can tell the story of ordinary boy and special girl, separated for years, with only one of them remembering their time together and promise, how they reconnect, and even how they go on to fight supernatural evil. But in telling it as big and as fast as they do, the show squanders some of the epic in the name of getting it out right now. All the motions we should have gotten with encountering Gekkou and facing him are shortcutted to a single abortive fight which him, which is when Hinata appears, quickly is established as the basically evil twin of Gekkou (which should be a big deal but we don’t know either of them and kind of hate both their guts as much as we do, so who cares?) and then has a big final boss fight where he seems immortal and Taito’s revival is pushed to the limit and beyond. Again, potential final episode stuff burned on the opening.
Even if the show could sustain the critical mass of dramatic material, the pacing is all wrong. It’s not just squandered because it shows early, it’s squandered because these things, while theoretically dynamite, need time and especially energy sunk into their groundwork in order to actually stand tall. As it is, I don’t feel a whole lot in the battle with Hinata because he’s had maybe a minute or two of screen time to really set himself up as an antagonist, his brother has been a flat jerk, and Himea and Taito’s bond goes from zero to “over the top in love” when he gets his memories back without sufficient preamble or exploration to really understand the two of them and what they mean to each other. There are actually hints, attempts to get it out as quickly as possible where Himea monologues (almost verbatim – it’s short) that he was the only person she met who didn’t want to abuse her powers and he declares (also almost as quickly as I can) that he regrets not saving her in the past that he suddenly remembered, but you can’t really experience it that quickly. When the show is moving like a review summary or abridged series, you lose a good deal.
The panty shots are another sign of this. Far be it from me to say “ecchi bad”, it is what it is, but the way they’re worked in, pretty much arbitrarily in a lot of places… it’s not as bad as Rosario + Vampire, not even close, but it still feels like the creators didn’t have confidence in their story and material and thus decided to flash the viewer some extra fanservice when it was convenient, because they were afraid if they didn’t rush through things and deliver panty shots, they’d lose your interest. And that’s not a good place to be in. If the writers couldn’t believe that we would want to actually watch what they had in store, why should I believe it’s going to turn into anything good?
So, what’s our next crisis? Well, in the vein of this show having freakish similarities to a certain visual novel, it starts with Fake Sumika (no I don’t intend to dignify her with a name) and Himea both getting lunches for our hero and him having to decide how to handle the situation while the rest of the class glares in a mix of jealousy and indignation, while in the “and then completely different” category Gekkou and his human Pikachu girl minion, Mirai, fight some demon bugs that just sort of portal into the student council room while he’s busy self-aggrandizing over having supposedly taken out Hinata. Go figure, but a call from the jerk lets him scram on the grounds that the Student Council needs him They take out the demon bugs in a sort of slapstick comedy fashion.
We get the explanation that the school is some sort of dimensional nexus where all worlds converge, and it’s now the job of the Student Council to deal with that, because only minors can go through dimensional rifts. Shortly after, Hinata (who of course isn’t dead) sends a monster of the week to make a mess as it rains killer blood.
In that, the pacing problems continue as Gekkou vanishes through a portal and Himea is possessed by her androgynous vampire ex, who was never mentioned before and after some rushed backstory about having been her original protector and, seemingly, her creation, and rushed fact drops that Himea has been rendered mortal by being with Taito and possibly doesn’t even have that long to live, said ex is obliterated in a way that makes it pretty clear we’ve seen the last of that plot point.
Himea recovers from her possession (in the same episode in which it started) seemingly with a different personality, and immediately asks Taito to do her, a request that quite reasonably shocks him given the suddenness of it and the fact she hadn’t been in her right mind.
What we haven’t seen the last of is Fail Sumika, who the show keeps cutting back to like she matters. And it turns out she might, because she gets possessed as well, turning into a yellow-eyed version of herself that seems to have been created by supernatural forces for the sole purpose of destroying Himea before Himea can do ambiguously evil things. Now, for a bit, let’s go scene by scene.
Sexy Himea (identified as Himea’s Magic), of course, starts right up with the evil things, messing with Seraphim (which Gekkou is facing in the portal) and Rapture. Sumika’s less successful cousin (back to her normal self) shops for bento ingredients. Seraphim talks about Gekkou being on head of a crow, and babbles about prophecies of doom and destruction, and an ancient witch called Ramiel Lilith who, based on other cryptic vague talks, may or may not be Himea.
One of these things is not like the others.
Sexy Himea continues to feel up and proposition Taito in some weird mystical realm while talking about how the Seraphim, as alien gods, are coming to devour Himea and end the world. The Abridged Series version of Sumika keeps shopping for bento ingredients with her friends, worrying about what Taito would like. Sexy Himea talks about how lonely Himea was in the time before time, cries blood, and then gets zapped by some of the evil blood pool stuff, sending them back to the normal world and erasing her clothes from existence for some reason. Sexy Himea recovers, establishes that even a crappy Sumika clone existing is apparently enough to give Himea the existential angsts and is supposed to be some kind of proof of Taito’s infedelity and continues to try to have her way with him. Gekkou keeps trying to get answers out of Seraphim and doesn’t listen to what it’s saying when they don’t align with what he already thinks, which seems almost fair as Seraphim pretty much just spouts cryptic talk about ‘the prophecy’ and Ramiel Lilith who still may or may not have any relation to Saitohimea despite Gekkou’s insistence that they’re the same.
One of these things just doesn’t belong.
Sexy Himea (still naked) blows stuff up while clinging to Taito (still clothed). Taito angsts about not using the one non-crisis scene he had to affirm his love enough for an overwhelmingly needy ancient vampire witch loli with way too many alternate personalities. This lets Regular Himea fight her way out of Sexy Himea (who turns more Robot Himea in affect, rebooting Rapture) and receive yet another completely over-the-top declaration of love, which manages to fix everything. Gekkou interrupts the resulting kiss scene to question Himea about Ramiel Lilith at swordpoint (she knows nothing) and declare that thanks to his making a deal, Seraphim is off the case. Hinata decides to say hi to Sumika’s table scraps, chats with the yellow eyed version to exposit about her motivation even though she hasn’t said more than two lines in yellow-eye mode, and then buggers off. Taito tries to learn black magic from a book, then Gekkou, meeting a new secondary character (a girl who wants to join the Student Council) in the process. He’s then confronted once again by the human version of Sumika’s ahoge and her even-more-devoted-than-last-time bento, plus the whole class shipping the two of them. If she puts Manga Meat or (to take a page out of the other book) Matsutake in one of these I’m calling shenanigans.
Can you tell me which of these things is not like the others?
To be fair, we do get a little out of pure action for a little bit to do school stuff with more than just random cuts to a forensic artist’s reconstruction of Sumika, like dealing with the new girl, or Himea learning what a date is and getting dangerously bummed when Taito doesn’t want to immediately ditch school (which is evidently the only place she’s safe) to go on one with her, or Gekkou looking for a magic trap in the city with activities that look a lot like a date with his electric loli minion. Taito angsts once again about making Himea sad, leading to this episode basically having the emotional play of the last one, but without the stakes.
It’s kind of fascinating just how the romance angle and emotional stakes are botched by the rushed pace of the show coupled with its unfortunate stasis in other regards. We jump from Taito having forgotten Himea to him having a deep passion for her that would normally take some actual building. I get that they go through a good deal and she helps him out (of problems he wouldn’t be facing if he hadn’t been associated with her, but still) and ultimately sacrifices a lot for him. But we don’t feel why she makes her sacrifices or why he’s attached in the first place. Rather than building chemistry where the audience is aware of it, the show just insists on taking that chemistry as a postulate and going from there. We’re supposed to assume that Himea and Taito’s feelings are legitimate and non-psychotic and that their time together, which we only see in really tiny flashbacks, included a lot of legit bonding to make their feelings come across strong enough that a nine year gap (longer than Taito had been alive when he met her the first time) wouldn’t be enough to dim that.
It makes a good deal more sense to assume that Taito (referred to by the ambiguous military brass as the “victim” in his relations with Himea) is under the effects of a supernatural whammy, but the writing doesn’t seem to even hint at that being a thing, so I guess it’s just cruddy work. In a good show, we would have used the early episodes, that are overwhelmingly action on rails in the show we got, to see Himea and Taito rekindle what they had and form new and powerful bonds that the audience could believe in. Save the anguished declarations of love and deep trials for later acts where they’ve already gotten together once so you need to up the stakes.
Instead, they just sort of go with one emotion the whole time: Himea overwhelmingly loves Taito with every shred of her being and is overprotective of him. Taito overwhelmingly loves Himea, is overprotective of her, and angsts about not being strong enough to actualize that overprotective instinct, possibly with a side of angst for not living up to her “every shred of your being” love, despite the fact that he never manages to say “I love you” back to her cleanly.
The dynamic between them, at the pitch level, has been done well in the past. I dare say that while the “Couple where they met in early childhood and were then separated, after which the boy forgot but the girl kept her memory, who become a romantic couple when they meet again after many years of separation with the girl acting as the disruptive stranger in the boy’s life” is a freakishly specific archetype, there do seem to be enough examples to at least call it a pattern.
In Muv-Luv Extra, Meiya Mitsurugi is the character in the same “slot” as Himea here. While she’s not my personal favorite heroine in the VN, she is well-written and well-executed, and following her route you really do feel the romance between her and main character Takeru, enough even to just roll with a final act that’s much more over-the-top than an already silly game. But while Meiya’s actions are at least initially predicated on a lingering affection from early childhood, the reader isn’t expected to rely on that for their investment. Both the viewer and Takeru get to know Meiya and bond with her from when she spontaneously shows up in his bed one October morning until that ending. You learn who she is over time and develop the chemistry between her and Takeru, so that even her own side of the equation ultimately becomes strongly informed by who the two of them are now, rather than just what they said back when they were barely out of diapers.
In Darling in the Franxx, the scenario is even more similar to the one in Dark Rabbit, with Zero Two as the Himea character (Or really the Meiya character. She came first.). But again, this is actually revealed and the memories recovered fairly deep in the show, so we get to see the growth of her romance with Hiro in the present, and believe in the two of them as a couple before their origins are laid bare and the equation shifts because of it. Unlike the main couple in Dark Rabbit, Hiro and Zero Two go through stages. At first Hiro wants to pilot, to be useful, and Zero Two is the partner who can make that dream reality. As they come to know each other better, Hiro finds that he wants to pilot with her more than he just wants to pilot, to be her wings, since they’re both kind of broken people so the help needn’t be one way. By the end of their major arc, he faces up to who and what she is, all of it, and accepts her for herself, allowing them to move forward as a couple rather than just partners, and have something that means more than just the codependent fighting youngsters.
I’ll be honest, I like that show inordinately much and really love the characters, particularly Zero Two, but it’s not the healthiest of relationships with the sanest of characters. And you know what? That makes it interesting. I don’t want to see a perfect relationship with perfect people. That doesn’t have drama. A kind of screwed up love between some very damaged and rather screwed up people? That’s interesting to watch. File it with Yuno Gasai and Yukiteru Amano or Chise Hatori and Elias… and far, far away from Himea and Taito, who are just boring as a couple.
If this show were good, you could have the first episode or so go about the same, with Taito recovering his memories and meeting Himea again, even being thrown into battle as something evil comes for her. But don’t have them just be the “eyes only for you” pairing right away. Yeah, we know that narrative law is such that they’re going to be the ones to get together, but what if Taito doubted that at first? He may remember having met her and pledged with her nine years ago once the seal breaks, and may absolutely not want her to come to harm because their relationship was and is primarily a positive one, but have him recall that she’s a vampire who poisoned him and cursed him (with immortality, but it’s still supposed to be a curse), and that for the last nine years the Chinese bootleg Sumika has been at his side (as he was thinking in episode 1 right before he remembered Himea, like he was going to fall for her). Make the love triangle that the show is so eager to push an actual contest in at least some regard, and have Taito and Himea grow closer while working through their issues. Have him save her by acknowledging her, slowly realize how much that means to her, and ask himself if he’s okay with that and ready to take the plunge, over the course of multiple arcs.
Let Himea feel the sting of having given up much of her life and soul for this boy without knowing that they’re going to get their happy ending. Hell, even indulge her dark side. In the show as it is, she’s hinted to have some serious Yandere potential, even talking about wanting to wipe out every other human in the world so she can have Taito all to herself… in a “leave it to Kero” style comedy bit after the credits. We see some sharpness and darkness in her when she talks to a couple other characters out of Taito’s earshot, but she’s pretty heavily defanged in the narrative that we have. If that weren’t the case, she would be a more interesting character, since we could see how much her love matters to her in an emotionally effective way. We could be on her side because of the positive things she’s done and the earnestness of her feelings, but also scared of her because of the lengths she’s willing to go, whether we’re scared for others she might hurt, or for her if she might scare or offend Taito. At the same time we could take a better look under the hood, and really see what about Taito makes her head over heels enough to lower her very nature for him.
But, no. Himea is a clingy little lover, and Taito’s sole motivation is “become stronger to protect her.” That’s it. Dynamic characterization and badly mimeographed Sumika need not apply.
Speaking of that motivation, another element of stasis comes from Taito. In the first arc, he wants to be strong to protect Himea, she gives him a dangerous forbidden magic that only he can use (because the backlash is lethal), and then… He wants to grow stronger to protect her, so we have the whole Seraphim arc. After that he wants to grow stronger to protect her, so we have that emotional retread. He still wants to grow stronger to protect her, so in the comedy cuts of an episode he chews through every version of martial arts, defeating dojo champs and world-class boxers to prove he’s strong. After that, his motivation is to grow stronger to protect Himea, so he makes a Faustian bargain for methods to gain strength and then uses that to acquire a legendary sealed monster as a familiar. This leads to him wanting to grow stronger to protect Himea, which is where he is when we start a training arc. You can probably guess what motivation he comes out of the training arc with at this point. You’d think at some point he’d be done with this and they could be badasses together. Maybe after trading some unknown quality to an alien god for that power? But, no, just stay on the “You suck and must grow stronger” line, that seems to work for Taito.
In terms of plot, how about that training arc? New teacher (a graduate of their school now working with the military, and mercifully a character able to hand Gekkou his own rear end) shows up as the Student Council advisor, inducts the boring girl Taito ran into that one time into the Council, and hauls them to a magically warded beach to do training. By which I mean he’s intending to beat them up until they can kill a god-tier dragon one way or another. And, okay, a good training arc can be a pretty solid segment, so the Student Council retreat here isn’t all bad ideas. When boring girl proves a monotonous cook, he brings in our even more boring Sumika Fanart, who of course walks in on Himea and Taito cuddling in swimsuits on the beach, rather than Taito being repeatedly killed by thrown pieces of chalk.
You know, go ahead. Shoot her down as brutally as possible. Taito, as he’s written, has no reason to be so gormless as to NOT admit that Himea is his girlfriend. Theoretically, if he had conflicted feelings for counterfeit Sumika, that would make this a difficult situation, but despite almost falling for her before remembering Himea in episode 1, and despite Himea’s insecurity, he hasn’t shown a lick of more-than-friendly regard since.
Instead we get an entire episode of this. I know I was complaining about how much it was action on rails, but pumping the breaks here and now in service of an already-botched plot thread doesn’t do a whole lot to redeem it. The Sumika doll ultimately manages to confess her feelings in one of the more underplayed confession scenes I’ve seen, which on the heels of an entire episode just making Himea feel her relationship is insecure (again) even though it is quite secure (still), in large part because Taito fails at communicating to the girls where he stands (again) and despite the fact he’s able to answer the trolling teacher quite directly (now) is pretty lame, but at least does represent movement.
At least, until we cut to the following night when Taito has returned from the training camp (no climax there I guess) lamenting that he has to make his “I’m with Himea” stance clear. Just then, he gets a call that leads to him learning that his Sumika Funko-Pop has been kidnapped, which causes him to lash out of course in a way that makes Himea feel more sour about the whole situation. The baddies offer Himea that they’ll give up their heavily played Sumika trading card in exchange for her, and like an idiot, she takes the bait, resulting of course in the baddies now having two hostages instead of one for when Taito is able to charge in.
Before he gets there, though, it turns out that the yellow-eyes mode of Garbage Pail Sumika has made a deal to have herself deleted in exchange for the not-really-that-bad baddies getting the data on Seraphim from her persona, the help she already rendered catching Himea, and a promise to return her ignorant self to Taito after. So, that whole thing where she was supposed to have a double personality and secretly be a magical observer for an outer god? Wasted. Yellow Eyes got more lines bargaining for her own death than she did in the rest of the show. I guess even the characters just want out of this series.
Taito runs into the captured girls and mercenary “baddies” while Gekkou fights the trolly teacher (and loses), giving up at the threat of Mirai being killed, and then Hinata shows up to drop more cryptic prophecy talk and peace out without actually doing anything. Taito gets the crap beaten out of him without accomplishing anything despite all the times he was supposed to have leveled up, instead giving his best dumb “I never give up” speech, which wakes up Himea so she can rescue herself. He at least manages to hug her before she explodes them to death, resulting in the two now-former baddies transferring into school thereafter. Because of course. In the wake of that, it seems Taito still hasn’t shot down Sus Sumika despite her getting ever bolder with the lovey-dovey stuff, and like they’ll all live dumb rom-com tropes forever after, aside from when Gekkou kills Taito a time or two off-hand.
And you might think, well, that’s not a great note to go out on, but for a 2010s schlock anime, it’s not entirely unexpected. Of course they didn’t finish the story (if you count the prophecy jabbering as a story) but at least the last episode did have some solid dramatic scenes. Taito beaten to within an inch of his last life still struggling to stand and fight back, making the mercenary brothers remember their own past failures? It wasn’t a great resolve, since Taito still hasn’t been able to prove himself conventionally capable and we kind of would like to see him kick some ass somewhere along the line, but at least it had the animation and acting to support it and could have been good in a better context.
Unfortunately, that’s not the last episode.
No, the last episode is a hot springs filler episode with a pointless stinger of spewing more garbage about “the prophecy” and trying badly to establish that there’s a real plot here. That’s how we end.
So, having actually ended the show now, let’s break down some of the issues with A Dark Rabbit Has Seven Lives.
Briefly, some that I’ve covered before. The pacing is all over the place, springing arbitrarily into action on rails or getting stuck in a run seemingly at random. Taito whines the whole show about needing to get stronger, but never seems to make meaningful progress. The love triangle is catastrophically badly handled because the way it’s set up it should be trivially resolved. Gekkou, Himea, Taito, and to a lesser extent Mirai are generally kind of annoying characters. These are all problems, but there are two that I’ve alluded to, but wanted to go over properly here at the end.
First, the vampire Saitohimea. Himea is said to be a vampire. The term is loudly used, and the very first scene where she “curses” Taito with her poison looks and feels very vampiric. The problem is, she never at any point does anything a vampire would do. I talked a lot at the start of the review about how broad the definition of a vampire is, and in my opinion Himea still manages to fall outside of it. A “vampire” can miss pretty much any of the major touchstones (though some are more important than others), but Himea dodges all of them. She’s not undead, she’s a magic loli, and you say “well, okay, not all vampires have to be the undead” and you let it go. She doesn’t care about time or sunlight and you say “Well, okay, not every vampire is that bothered by the sun” and move on. She doesn’t drink blood? That’s a bit of a problem, especially when she doesn’t “feed” on mortals any other way either. I’d argue that the core trait that really unifies the idea of a vampire is that feeding. Blood is traditional but we can kind of accept psychic vampires or vampires that drain somebody’s life energy or “spirit” or “soul”, but it’s really, really hard to accept a vampire who does not in any way need to consume some vital resource from humans. There are a few I can think of, but they usually still at least like it, and come baked in with other trappings to help cover for that miss.
Himea is also sometimes referred to as a Witch, and that’s really what she comes off as. She’s ancient and seemingly immortal, but some witches are. She casts magic, uses curses, and all that jazz just like a witch. Calling her a vampire is just trying to tack on a “special” tag that she doesn’t need and that doesn’t suit her. If the word were not literally used, there would be no connecting Himea to the idea of a vampire. Himea is, to the best of my analysis, only called a vampire because vampires are cool and the show is desperate to get its audience to think that Himea is cool and special, which could have been better done by writing her as a more interesting character. On that score, I’ll concede that while her screen presence skews annoying she’s not actually the worst. One of the things I liked in this show was when we got to see the shrewd, ruthless side of Himea that feels like a thousand year old witch, which she doesn’t like Taito seeing. But it’s not really enough to save her character or the show.
Second, there’s the prophecy babble. I’m just going to go ahead and step on some toes here and say that, as a general rule, I hate prophecies.
That’s not to say I automatically hate every work that has something called a prophecy, or even every plot that works around one. The Dark Crystal is one of my favorite movies and much of the action there is rather prophecy-motivated, it’s just cleverly written enough to avoid a lot of the normal pitfalls. The “Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn” series, by Tad Williams, while something I have quite a few bones to pick with, has a central prophecy plotline that has a twist I still consider to be genuinely good and enough to make me forgive the element entirely and even like it. But, on the whole, when a prophecy is introduced into a story, it usually either detracts from the drama and plot, or acts as a highly conspicuous bandage over the fact that the drama and plot weren’t very good or well-set-up to begin with.
A Dark Rabbit Has Seven lives wields one of the worst sorts of prophecies: the vague and omnipresent prophecy that, while saying nothing, somehow says everything. We hear no prophetic words, just that things are the way they are “Because of the prophecy” or “as the prophecy foretold”. It lacks substance and meat. But apparently it’s enough to identify the normal girl who gets put on the student council, by name, as part of the prophetic design. Should we be worried about that, or grateful? Never expanded on. I guess the prophecy is probably bad for our leads because it comes from Seraphim, which is an enemy force, but at the same time Seraphim was said (by Gekkou, so take it with a grain of arrogant salt) to be scared of the current scenario, so maybe the prophecy’s result isn’t good for Seraphim? There’s something in it about the end of the world and it’s somehow related to Hinata and the Church types, but beyond that Haruhi only knows what the point of it all is.
The reason there’s a prophecy in this show, as is the case for far too many prophecy plots, is because the writers gave up. If you can’t think of any logical reason, nor any rational or even fittingly irrational character motivation for something to happen, but still want it to be happen, you seem to get a free pass if you claim some ancient or mystical dill weed said things would go down like this. You’re basically saying, with only the tiniest of fig leaves to hide the naked artificiality of it all, that the only reason these characters are acting a certain way is because the script literally says they should. At which point it would almost be more entertaining to just go ahead and break the fourth wall and have somebody acknowledge that the entire thing is predicated on garbage.
This is especially troublesome with Hinata, who just drops in to remind everyone that he’s a baddie because prophecy, while also not doing anything because prophecy. His taunting of Gekkou and lack of actually destroying the heroes make no sense in any framework of sense, leaving the main antagonist who should be doing some heavy plot-lifting as a blight on the show.
Most of the other prophecy talk, from Seraphim or the trolling teacher, is just dead air. Words are being said that technically have meaning, but nothing is actually being communicated. Again, this is a fairly common pitfall because it is so damnably easy to cover your rear by shouting “Prophecy!” in a literary sense. It distracts a surprising number of consumers from the lack of content.
And that’s without getting into the case where you know the prophecy and there’s an ugly bit of fridge logic about determinism, where if a prophecy is accurate the characters didn’t really have agency and if it’s inaccurate then their struggles didn’t matter. Another tough bullet to dodge, but not one A Dark Rabbit Has Seven Lives developed its prophecy enough to even fire.
To cite one of the good prophecies I mentioned before and show how the, in The Dark Crystal, the prophecy is simple: “When single shines the triple sun, what was sundered and undone, shall be whole, the two made one, by Gelfling hand or else by none.” But unlike most prophecies, this one actually has both drama and agency available. Valuable information is contained: something big and important that will happen, when it will happen, and how it has to happen if it is going to happen. Because of the “or else by none” line, we don’t feel cheated out of the efforts of the characters in seeing a particular resolution come about. The struggle to get one outcome or another is very real, and the prophecy itself informs a good deal of the setup of the movie. Is it a trick everyone could pull? Maybe not, but at least it’s one example where I can’t actually say the work would be stronger if the Prophecy angle were dropped.
A Dark Rabbit Has Seven lives would be stronger if it dropped the important-sounding “prophecy” (and cool-sounding “vampire” term), and while it could keep the fanservice I don’t think it needed the horny camera either and find that element to be indicative of a perhaps justified lack of faith in the writing. As it is, these things are all just smoke. The entire show is smoke and mirrors, tricking you into thinking it’s doing something with its admittedly gorgeous animation when really it’s not
If this show was going to be good, it needed to either recenter around being a true character study of Himea, treating her with the kind of focus and nuance that Mirai Nikki treats Yuno Gasai or Toradora! treats Taiga… or it needed to go the harem route and make Taito a little less resolved and Himea a little less needy to give Diet Sumika (last callout, so here’s the truth: her name’s Haruka) a meaningful place and believable chance. The latter would have been very stock, but it would have been better than this.
In the end, A Dark Rabbit Has Seven Lives gets a D. There’s almost no substance here, but that’s the key word: almost. There are some scenes that are actually quite good in the micro, some hints of decent characters behind where they’re trapped in stasis in annoying arcs, and while the main plot is an illusion created by spouting important-sounding words with no real comprehension of their meaning, some of the arcs execute themselves with the minimum competence. This and the animation that I’ve praised before and will take this moment to praise again – which has a distinct visual style for both characters and magic that feel different and unique – save it from the depths of the trash heap… but they don’t get it far enough to make it a really watchable show. It’s one I simply can’t and don’t recommend.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off in search of a better vampire.