“The Tale of Sephiroth Goku” is an odd little piece of work. Effectively a parody of anime produced in 2011 by a very bored Lets Play commentator as the story of his “D&D character from [his] favorite animes”, it’s an oddly fun to listen to pastiche of direct references, bizarre genre conventions, and dead horses (and unicorns, having never been real) to beat. The whole thing is less than the full ten-minute runtime of the video that contains it – most of it is in the last four minutes – but it jams in a hilarious amount of plot summary and reference.
In 2013, Kakumeiki Valvrave (Valvrave the Liberator) appeared, apparently as an attempt to bring the Tale of Sephiroth Goku to the screen without actually violating any copyrights. As an attempt to properly represent a stream of consciousness nonsense from the internet it’s… wait, I was supposed to take this thing seriously? And it’s got two seasons?
So, Valvrave is… an odd beast. It has a pitch and concept that is, frankly, among the goofier you’ll see in what really presents as a serious action show. I know I made fun of Blassreiter for being Zombie Robots on Motorcycles, but that’s not nearly as absurd as Valvrave having mecha pilots that are vampires with strange body-swapping abilities, a high school becoming an independent nation, giant destruction beams that shoot out of a robot’s chest when it mimes seppuku… you get the idea. Yet Valvrave, like Blassreiter, delivers everything with a straight face, and further is a show that’s absolutely lousy with brutal death and the grim reality of war. I’ve heard others describe it as owing a lot to Gundam, and when that’s said, it means the bitterness and suffering.
I suppose I should start at the start, with normal boy Haruto. He goes to boarding school in the space future (with their school a module in a megastructure space station) with his friends, most particularly Shouko Sashinami, his childhood friend with whom he has a clear-to-everyone-but-the-two-of-them mutual crush. He’s working up the resolve to tell her in this opening, so of course everything goes to hell.
Said going to hell is an attack (perpetrated against all the holdings of their parent nation, Japan with the Serial Numbers Filed Off) by the Dorssian Military Pact Federation, who are basically fake Germans in space. The invaders rain hell down on the school and its attached town, gun people down, and even appear to kill poor Shouko. This last part drives Haruto a little crazy, so he gets in a giant robot he almost literally finds under a rock and mashes ‘Accept’ on a EULA that requires him to give up his humanity. The robot then turns him into a vampire and lets him pilot it, doing some ruinous damage to the Dorssian attack force. After he gets out of the robot, he encounters L-elf Karlstein, the seventeen-year-old tactical genius and one-man-army spec ops of Dorssia, and after being shot what should have been to death pops up and vampire bites L-elf, taking control of his body in the process and confounding the spec ops attack force, who think that L-elf has turned traitor.
In the aftermath, L-elf is properly imprisoned, Shouko is found alive and well, and there’s now this huge and uncomfortable secret Haruto has between him and confessing to his girlfriend, called being a vampire. This is the start of the the show yanking their chains.
Aside from that, L-elf is… an interesting character. In one notable episode, just after his proper imprisonment, he proves capable of predicting every turn of events that politics and combat will take, ultimately resulting in his best attempt to force the locals to follow his ruthless commands. His predictive abilities are… very close to being something that makes me want to boo the character. I’ve talked at length, specifically in my Guilty Crown review, of the trouble that over-precise amazing genius characters can bring to a show. To Valvrave’s credit, L-elf manages to dodge being a Gai-style Tzeentch sort of schemer. For one, while he has his prophetic moment, he is foiled later on, and fairly constantly, by the students acting like decent people rather than machines, his calculations being fallible against some of the more irrepressibly human individuals like Haruto and Shouko. Second, he is frequently placed in circumstances that strain even his abilities to the max, such as demands to get through a situation with no casualties, or being placed against his old captain, Cain, who really has his number. I don’t think he’s a particularly great character in the first season (he comes into his own in the second) but he is used well for the type he is.
The first season follows an amusing pattern. After negotiations to be protected by the space future’s other hyperpower, ARUS, fall through and L-elf is properly gotten on board, the school – Module 77 – detaches from their megastructure and sets sail for Earth’s moon, which is neutral territory in which Dorssia shouldn’t be able to touch them. Dorssia is disinclined to let the school and its super robots escape, and so attacks at every turn attempting to kill everyone and get the robots. We usually spark some disaster in Module 77, spar with one of L-elf’s former squad mates (Noble A-drei, psycho Q-vier, or… the other two) and get through it with action and death. Every few episodes, one of the side characters we’ve spent time with will get in a robot, waive their humanity, and help Haruto kick ass as a secret vampire mecha pilot (or “Kamitsuki” as one sweet girl coins the phrase before getting brutally axed).
The first of those extra pilots is Saki Rukino, an idol. She plays off her suffering and isolation by acting like a nasty person, but it’s easy enough for the audience to see that she is, in fact, a bit of a depressive oddball with a serious thing for Haruto, which she’s able to pursue to a degree thanks to Haruto being locked in a dance of unspoken feelings with Shouko. Saki goes ahead and vampires up reasoning that humans suck so her humanity is a small price, and is all things considered one of the characters who gets the most development over the show.
The others are Kyuuma Inuzuka, a nice guy who gets in the robot when his girlfriend (the nice girl I mentioned earlier) dies horribly, and Raizou Yamada, an absolute meathead who doesn’t seem to understand anything except the fact this power will let him fight the bad guys. In the final episode of the season, the last mecha of the batch gets a pilot: Akira Renbokouji, the reclusive little sister of the (former) student council president who Shouko befriended and who went and got a robot when she was placed in mortal danger.
That’s two vampires thanks to you, Shouko.
As for notable events in this chain… I’ll be honest, very little matters; it’s all fights for survival, so you kind of know that the heroes have to win, and it’s just a matter of how many redshirts and occasional named characters will be added to the body count along the way. There is, however, one cluster of circumstances that I would be remiss if I did not address.
In the latter parts of the season, the school holds an election for Prime Minister of their new nation. Running on a platform of School Culture Festival and being a character who can actually smile naturally, Shouko is a serious contender. Haruto decides that if she wins, he’ll tell her everything, what he is and how he feels, and hopes she’ll accept him – this despite the fact that his vampiric hunger has gotten a little hard to control at times. On the night of the election, he ends up out on a hill, having a nice chat with Saki, when his vampire urges kick in. Only it’s not blood that berserk Vampire Haruto is after, and Saki gets pierced in an entirely different region.
This scene in Valvrave is infamous, and it’s hard to not see why. It’s not the most brutal rape scene I’ve witnessed in an anime (after all, Saki is… kind of into it. No, that award has to go to the third Garden of Sinners movie and I pray to Haruhi to not meet the scene that dethrones that), but it absolutely is one from our nice guy protagonist onto his secondary love interest who gets to carry that baggage in addition to questioning whether things would go better if they were sane. Shouko wins the election, but the entanglement with Saki puts the kibosh on Haruto coming clean to her, ensuring that their dance will continue unabated for the foreseeable future. And, to make matters worse, the scene… kind of comes out of nowhere. There had been a couple moments where affected Haruto acted a bit more like a confident playboy than a timid mouse (confusing the old Student Council Vice President who is used to having everyone wrapped around her finger) but bloodlust turning to regular lust with the mecha AI celebrating the sex to come? That’s new, arbitrary, and really clearly there for two reasons – shock value and keeping the couple who would otherwise have it too easy apart.
It’s not just that Valvrave goes for misery, it’s also kind of manipulative in its misery.
The final battle to reach safety is extra brutal, and, though Dorssia is ultimately fought off, sees tons of students killed by a giant drill, Cain (who has his own magic mecha with its own parallel super AI) shows off, a ship with Shouko’s dad held hostage gets blown up little does Haruto know when he does it, and something about secret cabals and space wizards… if this didn’t continue, it would be a horrible cut. Instead, we got season 2.
We pick up with Dorssia having been driven off and remaining unable to launch an overt attack on the module, but with the module’s political futures very much up in the air. Something to do with complex international politics, jurisdiction, and their having a schoolgirl for a prime minister. At first it looks like we might have a similar loop, but the show quickly moves on into a big arc that will end up taking the majority of the season: the mecha pilots, along with a small number of supportive staff, go to Earth. To get there, they run a Dorssian blockade, and things go a little pear shaped, resulting in the mechas (which it turns out aren’t great in normal atmosphere and gravity rather than space) and their friends end up stranded deep in Dorssian territory.
Here, we get a ton of development for L-elf. Honestly, while he was a well-used version of a stock character in season 1, in the Season 2 Earth arc, he really comes into his own and kind of steals the show.
The Earth Arc has two parts that run more or less side-by-side: pursuing L-elf’s backstory and learning more about the space vampire mecha pilots.
On the latter track, a concept is brought up of “Runes”. Runes are described as, essentially, being to information what atoms are to matter, being the essentially indivisible building blocks that make up all sorts of information. They exist in everything, but materials that carry a great degree of coded and compressed information, like human DNA or minds, are worth more. Runes are also the fuel for the awesome big robots, and the reason for vampire feeding is to acquire more (via the DNA bit, I guess. So why the rape? Never addressed.). However, the mechas can still take a toll on their pilots.
This is seen when one girl, in desperation, boards Haruto’s mech to get people out of a jam. The AI recognizes her and warns her to not, because though she’s forgotten it, she was a pilot before, and washed out when something inside her broke, causing her to leak runes and consequently forget her life up to that point. However, the need is great, so she goes on and drives the robot, rapidly losing all the memories she’d made since her first incident and ultimately being rendered braindead (and proper dead) as all her runes are sucked away. So that seems… bad, but supposedly the bugs were worked out, right?
And no, it is never addressed nor given a reason why they couldn’t gas the mechs up with terabytes (or whatever the space future is on. Exabytes? Yottabytes? A human genome is only like 800 megabytes with modern transcription schemes so it’s not like we can’t eclipse that on thumb drives already) worth of downloaded whatever on junk hard drives, which should logically be chock full of runes. I guess magic future space mechas with intelligent AIs that get broken up about eating their pilot friends are still too picky to not go for the organic options.
Eventually, in Dorssia, the gang finds a pack of captured scientists led by Haruto’s dad. Most of the others are open to being rescued and brought back to their families, but dad is just excited his research on the whole rune reactor and big robot matters is moving forward at pace. He also lets slip that the reason the school kids were able to become vampires at all is that everyone there was genetically engineered to be a pilot candidate. Class act, dad.
On L-elf’s side, we visit (and split the party at) the facility where he was trained from childhood to be a supersoldier, and also get his background, being deeply attached to the young (former) princess of Dorssia. She was the only person to ever be kind to him, but since the monarchy no longer has power, she’s an imprisoned pawn. L-elf wants to rescue her, and everything he’s done has been to change the world into a space where such a plan isn’t an immediate dead end. They go through hell and back to get her, but then we get something of the horrible truth.
The princess that L-elf knew was, as long as she knew him, a Magius – one of a secret order of bodysnatching alien rune-lifeforms who have manipulated humanity from the shadows for ages. We’ve seen them both running Dorssia, with the current Fuhrer being one of them, and pulling the strings of ARUS. It’s not clear what the Magius want or why they’re dominating all sides of the equation, except their firm belief that if they tried to live openly… it wouldn’t work out. We’re never really clued in on the purpose or endgame of the Magius group, but we know that the Princess was something of a renegade, and was being kept rune-starved in order to limit her power.
L-elf cares about her no matter what, though, which, when the launch back to space starts to go really south thanks to Cain (also a Magius) getting involved, she sacrifices her existence to do the space rune magic needed to get everybody home.
Well, I say everybody but in all the excitement, the final head count isn’t quite all there. Nobody important got left behind though… just Saki. I suppose she is the one character we know is going to be okay: there have been some flash-forwards to generations later when the kids of Module 77 have apparently become the founders of a space empire, and Saki, being an immortal vampire mecha pilot space wizard, is still around at that point in the timeline, so she alone can’t get axed in the present.
And, while those cuts to the future are staggeringly useless for the most part, I wanted to bring them up because of a fun little conspiracy theory about Valvrave’s production. You see, Valvrave is two seasons… but rumor has it, it was supposed to be three seasons, and the production team only had it confirmed that they had to finish in two somewhere in the production of the second season, forcing them to scramble. I mention this, because if it’s true it explains a great deal about the final arc of Season 2 once everyone gets back from the grueling trip to Earth’s surface. Up until this point, Valvrave had been very deliberately paced. Some of its arcs were even particularly draggy, clearly playing for a longer running time. And, you’ve got those future cuts which, I’ll go ahead and say, we don’t catch up to. We don’t even leave the present in a state where it’s clear how the kids could have possibly achieved anything, much less imperial foundation, from the state they’re left in. There’s a huge missing chunk of story, and some seriously annoying choices in the ending run to get us something that passes for closure.
In any case, once everybody is back in space, they try to figure out what to do about the Magius threat, even capturing a Magius space ship where humans are being siphoned of runes to feed the bodysnatchers. While preparing to drop that bombshell, though, the Magius council preempts them, getting a reporter into the ship (which was secret even from most of the students and which has been loaded out with some of the rescued parents) and holding their own press conference where a captive Saki is killed on live TV to demonstrate that she can regenerate from wounds, and therefore must be some kind of inhuman monster. ARUS and Dorssia together declare ALL the students dangerous inhuman monsters and prepare to exterminate harder than a Dalek on speed. The students, meanwhile, turn on the pilots, believing all the worst things about them despite their being clear elements of a setup. Shouko faces potential coup material, and turns her back on Haruto when it turns out he’s forgotten their super important meeting (due to rune depletion already eating his memories for some reason, as it’s suddenly an acute problem after being revealed in someone else despite a whole season and a half without the issue).
This leads to a pretty stupid arc where the last survivors of Module 77 are flung out of earth-adjacent space in ships that are little more than giant space dumpsters and the remaining pilots (Saki imprisoned and the nice boy sacrificing himself to protect the escapees despite them brutally rejecting him as a monster minutes before and… not really coming around after said heroic sacrifice), with L-elf to help, work to turn the tables on the Magius by assassinating the prime minister of Dorssia on live TV and showing that he can regenerate too.
This kicks off a global witch hunt that is strongly implied to destroy the secretive Magius (and also catch a lot of other decision-makers in the crossfire), but Cain is still a rather immediate threat. Haruto manages to beat him, but in the process loses all his memories and is strongly implied but never quite confirmed to die like the other girl. But I guess if the ship with Shouko isn’t going to sail, he doesn’t have a lot to live for anyway.
In the later era, we see that a number of the notable characters are still alive in the space empire they made, at the last including Shouko – wearing the same red pilot suit Haruto did and making first contact with unknown alien life in a nice hall that has a statue of him among the other first gen pilots, hoping that her humanity can be friends with these other aliens that are totally unknown and don’t connect to anything. The end.
I’ll be honest, I hate the final arc – not just in how it decides to pretty much have everyone grab the idiot ball and then punish each other with it for no reason, but in how rushed it is and how much it just throws all the emotions we could have cared about in the bin.
L-elf’s beloved and reason for doing anything is dead, so he spends most of the arc little more than catatonic before teaming up with Haruto for some revenge. Saki is captured so we can’t see her and Haruto play off each other, which usually worked (including a scene where Haruto offered to marry her and she refused because she knew it was out of guilt for the rape and not love). Haruto’s romance with Shouko, over which the viewer had been yanked around for the better part of two seasons, is abruptly thrown under the bus… as is Haruto for that matter. His rune depletion hitting core memories, the fact that vampirism doesn’t seem to help him when it’s supposed to be an offset, and the rate at which it catches up from “little kid memory missing” to “braindead” are all extremely quick, seemingly done just to get him the hell out of the show. At the same time, they don’t actually show his eyes go blank and his vitals flatline like the other girl, like the writers were unsure as to if they could bring him back in a third season in some kind of amnesiac state.
The Magius are, for all their buildup, also really lame villains. The only motivation they actually tell us is that if humans found out about them, humans would kill them. And wouldn’t you know it, they’re proved pretty much 100% right about that in the ending. They fear our leads and their potential, but at the same time there’s not a lot of effort in explaining their proper villainy. They’re certainly doing evil things, but there’s not much rhyme or reason to it. They needed more time to really weave their web, maybe show an evil plan with some agency. They didn’t have it. Just add that into things that could have been fixed if we got a third season.
On the pros, Valvrave looks good, with some nice action, well-designed characters, and decent direction. A couple of the characters are also fun. Shouko is probably “love her or hate her” material with her relentless positive attitude. I skew towards liking her, but I also have to admit a fondness for Saki’s theatrical cynicism. And L-elf is ultimately a good study of this “trained from nearly birth” super-intelligent super-soldier and what drives him, an inhuman facade with the most human of motives underneath, where we get to see him at his coldest, at his warmest, breaking, and rebuilding himself.
On the cons, though, the plot is plodding; Valvrave is a rather character-focused show, except most of the main and secondary characters aren’t actually that good and don’t stand up to getting focused. Then, right at the end, it goes off its rocker. Valvrave is miserable, in a way that feels downright spiteful to the characters and viewers alike. Don’t get me wrong, I would be a hell of a hypocrite if I didn’t accept the occasional sucker punch – even big deal sucker punch – from media. But you have to know how to execute it, and you can’t just constantly yank the audience’s chain and deliver sucker punches by the barrage and expect them to keep taking it. A surgical strike works way better than a carpet bombing when it comes to that kind of material, at least when you are ostensibly telling an action scifi story rather than a dramatic tragedy. Valvrave doesn’t know when enough is enough. Even Haruto seems to catch on to the fact that fate (or rather the writing staff) is actually hostile, bemoaning his inability to catch a break after his last communication with Shouko where they don’t totally make up.
I’m not going to call Valvrave actually bad… but it’s not worthwhile. Yeah, it might have been better if we got a third season to spruce up the ending and actually connect the dots between a couple score pieces of spam in cans being flung out into space and having a glorious space empire, but it might also have just meant having to slog through thirty-six episodes of general hostility rather than twenty four. Valvrave doesn’t hate its viewers the way Texhnolyze does – it has far too much in the way of fan-pleasing explosions for that – but it’s closer than any show should be, without the theoretical payoff.
At the end of it all, I’m going to give Valvrave a C-… but rather than wasting 10 hours of your time on Valvrave, consider looking up the Tale of Sephiroth Goku and only spending 10 minutes, in which you should be far more entertained.