What the hell have I gotten myself into?
Seriously, I am struggling to recall a time when just the first episode of a show threw out so much bloody insane stuff all at once. Normally, if we’re to be introduced to a setting that’ gone utterly mad, there’s some sort of… introduction, something where you can follow what’s going on in the immediate and play along as it teaches you about the world. Here, you’re just thrown right in to what I can only assume to be the anime rendition of “What if Mad Max were directed by David Lynch, working on the notes of Isaac Asimov on every Schedule I drug at once? Produced by Michael Bay.”
Does that sound disjointed, unstable, disturbing, and hard to read? Good, because that describes episode 1 here pretty well.
So, before I try to untangle the mess for you, a word on where this even comes from and why I’m looking at it. Black★Rock Shooter is a franchise with an… interesting history. It started as a single illustration, which inspired a Hatsune Miku song that got loads of attention, and expanded out from there. I previously looked at an anime entry, which was about ordinary girls with colorful counterparts in an alternate dimension, representing their emotions and trauma. However, one of the odd and interesting things about the Black★Rock Shooter franchise is that literally every entry is completely different: they keep the names (mostly) and the designs of the colorful characters, but the world, the premise, and the plot have no relation between that anime, any of the video game renditions, or the latest entry, Dawn Fall.
What I can piece together from this episode indicates that the story goes something like this: in the future, humanity creates a system of robots that are supposed to bring about utopia, but the AI in control, called Artemis, goes rogue and starts destroying the world and hunting down humankind. Somewhere along the line, Black Rock Shooter (also called Empress) and the other beings like her (of which we see Strength and Dead Master, assuming they keep the same titles) are created as artificial humanoids of an unknown nature (looks like nanotech) and fight against the forces of Artemis. Something happened that took Black Rock Shooter off the field, and an unknown amount of time later she wakes up and emerges from the tank she was in, in the ruins of a lab, bereft of her memories to discover the truth of the world and herself and fight once more.
This is a mix of guesswork and assembly, because nothing is told in such a concise or clear manner. We start with Strength and Dead Master in battle, calling for Empress as they get overwhelmed by their foes, only to cut to Black Rock Shooter, on the ground and seemingly defeated, as her enemy gives this strange speech about futility and she slowly falls unconscious. Is this a flashback to how BRS ended up in the tank we later find her in? A flash forward to the end of the show? I have no idea!
Cut to 2062 San Francisco as it looks like there’s been some sort of alien invasion, leaving the world a ruined wasteland hellscape where giant cubic striders “deliver humans to the iron sea” spitting people in weird globs into an embarrassing cgi liquid to thrash helplessly, while distant from this action some military figures observe, helpless to intervene before moving on with their small convoy.
Cut to… actually, it’s not made clear when or where. We can presume we’re close in space and time, but we have a brief and disjointed dream vision of a naked girl (Empress/BRS) observing a place before awakening in a tank of blood-like fluid. It opens, spilling the contents onto the floor, and the girl struggles to move, eventually finding she’s attached to the machine by hoses and wires and disconnecting them. Completely disoriented, she looks around, and ends up opening a compartment where a few items appear to be kept.
Cut to a more ruined section of lab and we have a couple of scavengers, a boy and his heterochromic sister, who are poking around the place, seemingly looking for things to retrieve. They come across a glowing door and, in the crack of the partially opened door, a strange girl (Shooter, now dressed in her iconic outfit). The boy doesn’t want to mess with this weirdness, but a warbot arrives and while he puts in a good effort, he’s not really able to deal damage to it. This causes the sister to ultimately clear the blockage from the door as the girl within claims she’ll be able to fight. She pretty effectively takes out the warbot with hand to hand, evidently not knowing how to use her gun (this is corrected) and they establish that she is utterly without memory, clearly isn’t human as she doesn’t need a mask to breathe or heavy protective gear, and that they all need to get out.
The escape sees Shooter blast through more warbots that can’t seem to hit the broad side of a barn (in the typical “gunfire for on-screen spectacle sort of way”, but when it seems like there are too many for her to get out with the kids, a cool motorbike sort of thing appears, guns down the warbot wave, and introduces itself as Black Rock Biker, and pleased to serve Empress (naming her as such) once again. Thus, the trio escapes on the talking bike, pursued by more warbots.
Cut to a gigantic vehicular fortress in stark white and gold, attended by kewpie dolls and legions of individuals with either identical yellow smiling clown masks or identical yellow smiling clown faces, where a human woman is being raped to death by a buff android with a nutcracker jaw.
Just another Friday night in 2062 San Francisco, I guess?
The nutcracker has a guest, a strange and presumably robot girl who has him put away his junk (resulting in Ken Doll anatomy when the line-of-sight censor is removed – this show is disturbing as hell with its imagery but not technically explicit) and tells him that a Heimiteos Unit has been detected awakening – Shooter, presumably – so he’s expected to respond with full force. The nutcracker puts on his best cape (and nothing else), addresses his smiley-face minions with a bizarre speech about knowledge, machinery, what it means to be human and how the highest good is to take a human’s place, and then has them deploy as loads of weird vehicles fanning out across the desert from the mothership vehicle.
This was written by a fifteen-year-old who just got done watching Fury Road for the tenth time, right?
Back to Shooter and the kids, they’re still in a chase scene which gets interrupted by the military convoy by before, who blow away the warbots and then address Shooter (finally using the “Black Rock Shooter” name as well as “Empress”). Here, the backstory about humans making Artemis, it rebelling, and the Heimiteos Units (name dropped but not explained) being made to fight them is dropped extremely quickly, finally confirming that this is a robot uprising and not an alien invasion like I’d been thinking, and similarly quickly we’re told that Artemis is building a space elevator that would allow countless legions from the moon to reach Earth and spell the end of everything and that Empress was born for the purpose of destroying that elevator before it can be completed and –
Oh, hey, another interruption. Some more warbots arrive, including a heavy artillery type that makes a good show of blowing up the convoy. Shooter also refuses to go with the convoy, since they wanted to leave the kids behind, and opts to take the kids and her bike to go to their home in a secret hollowed out mountain nearby. The artillery ends up chasing her, and even knocks everyone on the bike, which causes Shooter to unlock new memories and powers when she does (presumably nanotech) magic to protect everyone from the fall. This also lets her know that she can reconstruct a destroyed warbot into a giant laser cannon and use it to shoot down the artillery, so that’s what she does.
However, her cannon was good for only one shot before dissolving into dust and the artillery decides it’s not quite dead, putting Shooter and the kids in a tight spot until the sudden arrival of Strength, who finishes off the enemy and then, with a cry of “Yo, Empress!” leaps at the camera to end the episode.
I’ll reiterate: what the hell have I gotten myself into?
Well, from the looks of it, what I’ve gotten myself into is the kind of madness you’d probably have expected the first time when just given the Black Rock Shooter illustration and maybe the Miku song PV to go on. Worldbuilding is whatever seemed cool or twisted for a moment, with a strong theme of “Just go with it!” that’s in line with the image of a young woman in a bikini top and short-shorts, one eye blazing with blue flames and a colossal oversized gun in hand. Pacing is a myth, we just jump from one setup that someone thought would look awesome to another, with only gunfire and the ravings of a madman who spent 72 hours binge-reading classic science fiction interspersed with pages from the Necronomicon to hold it together.
And, frankly, the show seems quite proud of that. It’s utterly indulgent, going the whole way with everything it does, and taking its madness as far as it can in every direction. When I started the episode, I didn’t know what to expect. Last time we got school girls dealing with their feelings. This time, it’s total madness… and I at least need to chronicle where it goes from here.