Familiar of Zero is an action-comedy about a teenage boy, Saito, who is summoned as the familiar of a young mage girl from another world, Louise.
Louise is voiced by Rie Kugimiya. If you don’t know who that is, that’s fine; I myself am not usually one to follow actors or voice actors; I’d rather see/hear the character. She is, however, very prolific and very talented. I first heard her work (though I didn’t know there was any significance to it at the time) as Alphonse Elric in Fullmetal Alchemist, but she is perhaps best known for her Tsundere voice roles. And more than that, her short, flat-chested, loud-mouthed Tsunderes with firecracker tempers. Louise is exactly one of those roles. That is, in fact, how and why I found this show. I liked Shana (Shakugan no Shana) and Taiga Aisaka (Toradora!) and was in the mood for another enjoyable character in the same vein.
What I got was Familiar of Zero. What does that mean? Allow me to explain.
The basic outlay of the show is simple.
Louise, a noble mage from a fantasy world not dissimilar to medieval
Europe, is really bad at being a mage. In fact, she only seems able
to conjure spell failure explosions, earning her the nickname “Louise
the Zero”. When the time comes to summon her familiar, she manages
a little better… and a little stranger: She summons Saito, an
ordinary (?) Japanese teenage boy.
Louise is not pleased with this turn of
events. Familiars are supposed to be some sort of spirit animal, and
she got a ‘commoner’ instead. Saito isn’t exactly happy with the
arrangement either; not only is he trapped in a foreign world that’s
technologically and socially backwards with no obvious way to get
home, but Louise treats him like a dog. A disobedient,
trouble-making dog. Thus begins the typical romance with a Tsundere.
Now, Louise’s treatment of Saito would
be seriously abusive if we took it in a realistic manner – she hits
him with a riding crop fairly frequently. No matter what anime may
tell you, if a prospective partner hits you with a riding crop and
it’s not because you’re into that and asked for it, get out.
However, there’s a lot of leeway in animated comedy for things to not
be taken seriously. The riding crop stuff is treated like a rolled
up newspaper… which makes sense when you think about the fact that
Louise starts out seeing Saito as, essentially, a miserably untrained
pet. It makes sense, given what a Familiar normally is, and part of
Louise’s character growth is coming to see Saito as a person in his
own right, which makes the animal handling imagery thematically
important.
Overall, the show has a lot of
puttering… but not too much. The main plot, for twelve episodes,
goes about like this. In the first arc (after a long bit of setup so
we understand the status quo of this world), a magic-using thief
steals a powerful weapon from the magic school that Louise attends.
Saito and Louise get it back and capture the thief; however, the
theif appears to have ties to a revolutionary party in a nearby
nation. Dealing with that is the subject of the second broad arc,
including a stolen magic ring of impressive power, a foreign
rebellion, and ultimately an attack by the ‘rebel’ forces against
Louise’s home kingdom.
The pacing throughout is good. Even
though the show doesn’t do a whole lot compared to some other runs of
twelve episodes, the way we follow the characters means it doesn’t
feel drawn out. We see more than enough of their lives, and the
sub-arcs are dramatic enough that it’s perfectly fine. What’s more,
the characters are mostly fun. Saito quickly becomes something of a
rival for a pompous playboy classmate of Louise named Guiche and
honestly… Guiche usually gets at least a little bit of a laugh out
of me. Similarly, he becomes an object of pursuit for Kirche,
another classmate of Louise, and one who seems inclined to make moves
on her familiar just to humiliate her because their families are
rivals. And, because three’s a harem, he also befriends Siesta, a
kind and attentive maid at the magic school who develops a good bit
of hero worship for Saito.
Throughout the show, there are three really good ideas that are thrown into the “kind of used” pile. The first and better utilized is the fact that Saito is not the first earthling to end up in the Fantasy World. Indeed, it seems that the barrier between worlds is quite permeable, because people and objects can be called across by magic or even just ‘slip through the cracks’ when the stars are right. For instance, early on a particular lord covets an ‘otherworldly book’ that was conjured some time ago by accident, but because of its alien nature is one-of-a-kind. It turns out to be a smutty magazine. The powerful weapon, called the ‘Staff of Destruction’ that the thief steals? It’s a military rocket launcher that crossed over with its owner. And Siesta, it seems, is the descendant of a World War II Japanese pilot who happened to fly across in his Zero fighter plane in the exact right (or wrong, depending on how you look at it) moment. The plane ends up becoming a critical plot trinket, and makes for some very cool moments in the season’s climax when Saito uses it to fight off the invasion force and save Louise rather than using it to go home. In a lot of isekai stories, the lead’s out-of-context nature feels somewhere between bizarre and tacked on. True, other shows can use the bizarre one-off deal to good effect, but it’s kind of refreshing that Saito fits into the larger context of his setting, and that it feels like there’s a reason to use an earthling rather than just asking if the show couldn’t work better with a pure native cast.
The second conceit that could be
critically interesting is used less is the magic in this world: Mages
typical have a specialty in one of the four classical elements, and
those who can use more than one can get special titles, like Triangle
mages being capable of using three elements. However, pentagrams are
a constant symbol throughout the magic school, and there’s even some
cryptic talk about ‘the pentagram’, implying a fifth magic. It
wasn’t a hard pull to guess Louise was a natural with that magic,
explaining her incompetence with every conventional form of
spellcraft despite her apparently impressive raw power and only
slightly more of a jump to guess the proper element (It’s Void, by
the way. My line of deductive reasoning to guess as much while
watching was that a ‘Null’ or ‘Void’ specialty would let her keep the
Zero title for new reasons even after gaining powerful magic). What
that means, both for Louise and the world is… not addressed.
However, Louise only seems to unlock her Void Magic at all in the
show’s climax, so it’s clear that really making something of it would
be an exercise for follow-up material.
Third and finally, there’s the social
status of the land. Which is to say, from a viewpoint like Saito’s,
it’s pretty cruddy. Nobles are magic-users and vise versa, leaving
commoners with no powers and no rights. The first real ‘adventure’
we indulge in is Saito risking his neck to rescue Siesta from a creep
of a lord who has every intention of making her a concubine because,
well, she doesn’t have the right to say ‘no’. And Saito is
introduced to the idea that so much as raising his hand against a
noble, regardless of that noble’s actions, would be grounds for a
summary death sentence. So it’s pretty clear from the outset that
while most of our noble characters seem like pretty decent people, up
to and including the princess (soon to be queen) Henrietta, there are
a lot of them who abuse their power and authority in petty and
disgusting ways. After that setup, when we’re introduced to the
thief, we’re told that she has only robbed nobles. Granted, nobles
seem like the only folks with anything worth stealing, but there’s
still the hint, however mild, that maybe she’s some kind of Robin
Hood… though perhaps not as noble as that; she could steal from the
rich out of spite but keep everything for herself. And the rebellion
in a neighboring land that threatens to spread and our heroes get
involved in? It’s initially called out as being something of a
peasant revolt. A populist revolution.
Now, I typically hate the narrative
where someone with ‘modern’ viewpoints waltzes into a classical
society, however brutal by our standards, and becomes a soapbox
crusader for social change. That sort of thing reeks of dull message
fiction, usually directed at straw men, so to an extent I’m glad
Familiar of Zero didn’t go that way… but there was a great setup, a
golden opportunity, to have a legitimately two-sided conflict, with
wrongs and rights on both sides. Henrietta is a good person and
wants to be a good ruler, but when it comes to her own aristocracy
her hands are tied, and her ability to rein in their abuses are
explicitly fairly limited. On the other hand, the rebels initially
feel something like the Russian Revolution – coming from a place of
honest and justified dissatisfaction with the current establishment,
but also full of unsavory elements. I know Familiar of Zero is more
a comedy show, it’s lighter material, but it does raise these
ideas… it just doesn’t follow through with them. The thief, and
the revolutionary high-ups she serves, are revealed as fairly bland
villains, just pulling the strings (with magic, even) for their own
nefarious and not entirely specified goals. There’s no ideology to
them, and the idea that they might have hijacked something of value
is allowed to pass in the night. It was there, and then it was gone.
But… I can’t fault a show too much
for simply not living up to an imaginary might-have-been scenario.
It doesn’t win any points for its treatment of that subject, but it
doesn’t lose any either.
If I had to, I’d probably grade Familiar of Zero at a C+. It’s not amazing. The characters play off each other nicely (the three most major girls being fairly good counterpoints in how they treat Saito), but they aren’t the most dimensional cast out there. The stories told are harmless, missing out on great drama while taking themselves too seriously to get riotous laughter rather than the occasional chuckle. There’s some annoying ‘chosen one’ stuff around Saito, but for Isekai it’s actually kind of downplayed, and he did need something to tread water in a world of magic. It’s not totally bland, but it is mostly inoffensive. Rie Kugimiya gives a solid performance as Louise, but she’s not given a great script so there’s only so far she can take it, and most of the rest of the cast is… unremarkable. It’s not like they did badly, but nobody else really stood out.
In the end, I guess I enjoyed it well
enough. I think there are better shows – a lot of them, in fact –
but I don’t begrudge it what it is.
The second season, on the other hand…
(Tune in next week!)