So, as long-time readers will know, I’m a fan of silly theme months. This September, we’re going back to primary school by learning our ABCs… featuring a selection of shows with what could be taken as one-letter titles. First up is X, the letter everybody thinks is the coolest until they grow out of it. Or rather, the 2001 Shoujo apocalypse-themed urban fantasy battle anime that couldn’t even be bothered with a subtitle. Sometimes it gets called X/1999, but we’ll forgive that.
The genre mix up there – particularly the Shoujo demographic – may sound awkward, but this is based on a CLAMP manga, so I actually have decently high expectations going in.
Seconds into Episode 0, I’m reminded of why I love vintage anime. Nothing is happening, yet, but in just the first few frames there’s a gorgeous weight and intricacy that modern shows don’t replicate and only the absolute best recent offerings can match up to on the art side of things. Normally I think I’m pretty jaded after not just watching but reviewing anime for many years, but just a couple of seconds of this motion and detail can still get me hyped for a show.
That said, I know that the devil is in the detail. How does the show actually go?
We start properly with a bishie in the hospital, telling us that he is apparently a dragon, angel, and “dreamseer” prophet all in one. In his coma, he flashes back to his lost love and… yeah, this little prequel episode doesn’t really follow the characters we’ll actually care about beyond its role as an overture. We do name some names and get some important terms like “Dragons of Earth” (the Seven Angels) and “Dragons of Heaven” (The Seven Seals), but most of the opener is just scenes from presumably the rest of the show viewed through future sight, so let’s move on to the real opening for real this time.
We start actually properly with a bunch of supernaturally connected folks getting called to Tokyo. These are implied to be those Dragons of Heaven. More important still would be a boy called Kamui, who is supposed to be the most special of the lot. Kamui also returns to Tokyo, transferring into school with his childhood friends, Fuuma and Kotori.
However, as the mysterious transfer student, Kamui has a lot on his plate. Like brooding, and being perpetually angry, and keeping his friends at arm’s length, and never explaining anything to either the audience or other characters who misunderstand him.
I know the anime came out in 2001 but Kamui can’t quite wash the 90’s out of his hair.
And, it turns out pointlessly sparring with people may not be the best life choice, as Kamui gets severely injured in fairly short order. This, and the theft of the sacred sword he wanted, ends up getting him involved with some of the other loads of characters in this show.
Right at the start, in addition to Kamui and the siblings, we have two important Dragons of Heaven – an irreverent boy from an isolate monastery named Sorata, and a cool schoolgirl shrine maiden called Arashi. Arashi’s boss, and the heart of the Seven Seals, is a blind seer girl, Hinoto. Our antagonists seem to be led by Hinoto’s sister Kanoe. The first of her important supporters we’re introduced to is named Satsuki, but seems like more of a living peripheral for the ominous evil supercomputer, Beast.
Beast takes up a whole gigantic cavernous room and is blazoned with “666” as well as getting this Ghost in the Shell sort of interface.
Kanoe forces the info out that Kamui has the right to choose his destiny, whether he will side with the Dragons of Heaven or the Dragons of Earth. Given that siding with Earth means the world would get destroyed I’m not sure what his incentive is to do that, but he’s also not ready to sign on with the Heaven team and takes a vehement disliking to some of them and their methods.
As this comes out, we also meet another Dragon of Heaven – a middle school girl (Yuzuriha Nekoi) with a magic wolf-dog spirit (Inuki) that most people can’t see. Just, you know, to make sure I introduce at least a small and relevant subset of everybody.
While it’s certain that Kamui is our main character and that Fuuma and Kotori, despite not being said to be Dragons or anything like that, are also lynchpins, with Fuuma being called Kamui’s “twin star”, which seems to mean he has a similar destiny-capacity. But the show starts out with an ensemble sense where we spend a lot of time with these side characters. We even get a whole episode just for Satsuki.
In fact, we get a few lower deck episodes. But, ultimately, we return to Kamui. He gives his backstory in detail, revealing things to Fuuma before his aunt (briefly encountered before) shows up to give him Holy Sword #2. Problem is, she has to “give birth” to it, which reduces her to high velocity blood spatter. Evidently, the same thing happened to the mom of the siblings to make Sword #1. Fuuma also gets to learn all of this. Kotori arrives late, but her sanity takes a big hit anyway.
Before we can process anything, yet another secret society shows up: CLAMP University, where they have a pentagram to seal the sacred sword until judgment day, important folk just dropping by helicopter into the shrine yard while Kotori has her blue screen moment. Speaking of that, in her shock-induced coma she meets the guy from Episode 0, who lets everyone know that she won’t be waking up for reason of things being too emotionally hard to bear. The CLAMP doctors take charge of her, but I don’t think you can fix magic dream comas.
Not that she has long for other reasons. Kamui finds himself deciding to side with the Dragons of Heaven, which activates that whole thing where Fuuma is his “twin star”, awakening Fuuma to a psycho evil side that will join the Dragons of Earth. For his introduction, he beats up Kamui and murders Kotori with the sacred sword. But, that episode 0 fellow is able to lend Kotori some power to hold onto the sword for the couple of seconds needed for the cavalry to arrive, such that Fuuma has to flee empty-handed after killing his sister.
Kamui is still pretty much just left with grief, though. He gets pulled out with a little mind dive help, and we kick off a new phase. Now, the Dragons of Heaven and Earth are in direct and bloody conflict, Kamui is a nice guy hurting from his best friend being lost to mystical crazy, and we can have showdowns for the fate of Earth.
The first showdown costs the Dragons of Earth one of their seven. But, in the process they kill a random helper from the Dragons of Heaven faction and strip one of the Dragons of Heaven of his ability to conjure Barrier Magic, which basically removes him from the group nonlethally.
So, brief aside, Barriers. This is a conceit that clearly has a lot of cultural recognition in Japan since it shows up without preamble in a ton of unrelated shows, but that is pretty unknown in Western media. I’ve reviewed shows that use it before, but since it’s plot relevant here, that gives me a chance to talk about it.
In most evocations, a Barrier creates a pocket-dimension that mirrors the real world – possibly with some weirdness, possibly not. They’re hard to enter and hard to escape if you get pulled into one while it’s being set up. In general, it usually seems that the world suffers no consequences for anything that may happen in the Barrier (since, you know, it’s just a copy), but people do (since they’re pulled in, and thus are their real selves). It’s a wonderful conceit since if somebody throws down a barrier, your Urban Fantasy fighters can go building-flattening all-out without having to worry about breaking the masquerade or slaughtering innocent bystanders. There are other forms, and other reasons it might be invoked, but frankly it’s surprising to me that it hasn’t caught on better with Urban Fantasy in the West because of how much freedom it gives you to show people doing cool stuff. Depending on the exact rules of the setting it can also get you a cage match or a quick escape. I may or may not be planning to use the conceit myself (foreshadowing that won’t pay off for quite some time).
In X in particular, the ability to form a Barrier field is the unique power of the Dragons of Heaven and is arguably why they’re “the Seven Seals”, and it’s strongly implied to be related to their ability to protect the world of humans from out-of-control magic BS. So getting divested of this ability – said to be because the barrier stems from its creator’s desire to protect and the Dragon/Seal lost what it was he wanted to protect in his heart of hearts – is bad news that the Dragons of Earth seem to not be crazy for thinking is on par with scoring a kill.
We follow this up with a couple scares that end without lasting consequences, but then dragons start suffering or dropping properly. Yuzuriha loses Inuki in a skirmish with Satsuki, but later gets a new Inuki spirit puppy from her resolve, while pursuing a romance with a JSDF soldier who also happens to be a Dragon of Earth. The humble office worker and christian call-girl of the Dragons of Heaven spar with the Dragon of Earth office worker, but their first match in inconclusive.
Finally, Kamui, Sorata, Arashi (who Sorata has a crush on, and who seems to reciprocate), and Yuzuriha end up in another conflict where the guys and gals get split up and Sorata gets thrashed sending remote support to save Arashi’s life. After this, Sorata has lost the use of one arm (but not died for his love as he was prophesied to do) and Arashi goes AWOL for several episodes.
We then get a round two, with Satsuki, who has a thing with the Dragon of Earth office guy, joining the previous fight between him and those two Dragons of Heaven. This ends up leaving the call-girl and Dragon of Earth office worker dead and Satsuki consumed by a jealous Beast.
The next match ends up being Yuzuriha against a Dragon of Earth I hadn’t mentioned, the seemingly emotionless clone Nataku. The Heaven office worker and her JSDF crush spar on the side and have a little battle of ethics where we finally get a clear statement that the Dragon of Earth cause is basically every 90’s environmentalist “Humans are bad, remove them for the sake of the planet” kind of vibe. For those who weren’t around back then, it was pretty much the ‘sympathetic’ antagonist motivation of the era.
Well, at least it’s the motive for JSDF guy Kusanagi and maybe Evil Fuuma (aside from talking about everybody’s wishes like he’s the Snake of the Festival). Satsuki just kind of hated people, the office guy was explicitly in it just because, Nataku doesn’t really have his own motivation, we never got much out of the cherry blossom illusionist… Heck, even mastermind Kanoe was explicitly only doing this to spite her sister, who she hates because mom loved the dream-seeing sister better. They’re not the Kiraboshi Order of Questionable Cosplay, but they are a bit confused.
Kusanagi shows up when Yuzuriha is beaten, they have an honest talk, and then he gets in the way when Nataku tries to finish her off, basically flipping sides. Unfortunately for him, Arashi shows up and is revealed to be a defector the other way around when she slashes him good. And of course Sorata had ended up on-site to witness this.
While this is all happening, we get a subplot where it seems Hinoto has an evil alter ego (same body, different personality, not like the “twin star” stuff), who takes control of her as hope fades and tries to push everything towards ruin. As Evil Hinoto arranges the ultimate betrayal, Good Hinoto gets enough control back to stab herself to death. With her last breaths, she entrusts her hope to Kamui (who had been pretty scarce for a lot of these episodes) and lets him know that her demise will herald the final battle by undoing all the safeties she put on things. Oops.
The sum of this seems to be that Yuzuriha, Kusanagi, and the Heaven office worker are all out of the fight for injury or loss of power reasons, leaving Sorata and Kamui on one side and Nataku, Fuuma, and Traitor Arashi on the other. Arashi’s reason is also told to us, that she believes killing Kamui is the only way to save Sorata from the fate of dying for her.
Kamui takes up his sword, but the first clash of the final battle ends up being centered on Arashi. She first fights Kamiu, and gets the better of him. Sorata then enters the fight, and quite naturally neither she nor he can actually land blows on the other.
This is where Fuuma decides that Arashi has outlived her usefulness and moves to kill her, and Sorata takes the blow living up to his destined demise. He manages to supercharge his electric powers and actually disintegrate Fuuma in the process, though of course Fuuma somehow survives that. Still, he got a real hit in on the guy who had been the unassailable poetic villain since his turn to evil, so credit where it’s due. We even see later that while Fuuma teleported away, he got like half his body burned off, so he won’t be making snide monologues for a bit
Thus, Sorata is out of the fight for reason of death and Arashi for reason of heartbreak, while Fuuma is taking a breather. That means next must be Kamui versus Nataku! Nope, we’ve only got one episode left, so Fuuma deconstructs Nataku and uses his flesh to regenerate for the final battle.
They fight a little, Kamui gets his rear handed to him, but then all the thoughts and feelings of the Dragons of Heaven reach him and he realizes how to achieve his goal of both winning the Dragon struggle and redeeming Fuuma: he lets Fuuma kill him. This in turn allows him to pass his feelings on to Fuuma, which turns Fuuma back into his old self and means there’s nobody else left who’s going to destroy the world.
This finished airing about a year before Matrix Revolutions came out, by the way.
We see the surviving Dragons of Heaven (and Kusanagi) go on to good lives, visiting family or dating or what have you, and play out with a peaceful world. The End.
So, X is… flawed.
I think the first flaw I want to dig into is style over substance. X is desperate to feel big and meaningful, and as is so often the case with stories like that, it’s the desperation and not the meaning that comes across strongest. I’m not going to sugar coat it – epics are hard to do. There’s a very particular feel that you need to capture, and there’s yet to be a perfect formula derived to actually get there. Honestly, ignoring adaptations of established epics (like The Heike Story), I’d argue more anime stumbles into it than manages to get there on purpose.
X works some of the time. It has the right subject matter, and it has the right tone. But it relies a little too heavily on using swelling music, important-seeming speeches, floating feathers, and people perching in high places to craft the image. You can feel the hand of the artist, and the artificiality of it, at least some of the time, and that’s never great.
Speaking of elements that are overused, often in service of trying to get the “epic” feel, we have flashbacks and flash-forwards moments. I could have rolled them in above, but by Haruhi this is the real excess of X, so I wanted to take it on in its own paragraph. Between all the dream-seeing prophets in this show and all the times somebody has to think back on something momentous that happened in an effort to make it seem more momentous, you’re never going to watch an important scene in X just once. It’s rarely as effective as the writers hope and often comes across as a sloppy way to save a few yen on animation, eating up huge chunks of episodes with things you’d already shown the audience. I guess given the time period the gorgeousness of X did need to be covered somehow, but it hurts from a writing stand point.
Part of that lets me segue onto the next issue: the prophecy plot. For newcomers, I’ll make my stance pretty clear: I don’t think prophecies and future sight are generally good plot devices to base stories on. In fact, I find they usually do more harm that good. I can pick out ones that work well, like The Dark Crystal or Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn that I always bring up, but by in large when this sort of thing is included, the work loses more than it gains.
When I dug into this in A Dark Rabbit Has Seven Lives, it was the vague “prophecy” trying to plaster over the plot holes, and that was really bad. Here in X, it’s not plastering over plot holes, it legitimately is the plot. And because we’re trying to feel oh so important and setting up this legendary tragedy, we’re told again and again that there is only one future and everything has already been decided.
Pardon me, but from a writing angle, that’s bunk. It’s one thing when as in the myth of Oedipus you have someone with future knowledge try to escape a bad outcome and through means that mortals couldn’t foresee causes it to happen. In fact, X kind of has that with Arashi and Sorata and Arashi’s attempt to avert Sorata’s death directly leading to the moment where he dies. But there are loads of important dreamseers, they all seem to agree, and despite being invested most of them never try to tip the scales of destiny even in petty ways. When that boy who was attending Hinoto dies and it breaks her heart, she knew that was coming, but she didn’t even tell him to not go, she just moped about it.
This really does hit Hinoto worst of all, since at least the prologue dreamseer had trauma around what was apparently an attempt by him to change the future, where as she’s a protagonist who supposedly wants to actively escape the future she’s dreamed of. Except apparently only Kamui can decide fate, despite all the things she does that keep things moving along in the direction of fate.
I’m not really a fan of The Matrix, but even that had a better discussion of predestination than X does, when they visit the Oracle and she mentions the pot that gets broken a second later, and she acknowledges that it’s questionable whether or not it would have been broken if she didn’t say anything. It doesn’t try to produce an answer, but at least it asks the right questions. And I feel comfortable referencing it, because it came out around the same time X did (hence why I pointed out the similarity of the endings earlier).
All of this makes X a hard one to rate. Most of the episodes were quite watchable. Most of the characters had good scenes and good dimensions. But the show also had this huge problem with most of the action happening because the script said so and there are characters privileged to read the script, and a lot of little things with its repeat scenes and artifice. The grade for this show is clearly getting hammered by its problems.
That said, I do think the baseline bar is… reasonably high. At its best, X isn’t amazing, but it is reasonably strong. The best, however, is not all of what’s on screen.
In the end, I’m issuing X a C+, which is basically a full letter grade down from where it would be on the raw force of its peak ability. Unfortunate, perhaps, but I’m here to grade what I watched and not what it could have been.