Black Bullet – 13 Review

Yep, Rentaro’s loli-harem produces a deus-ex-machina for the finale! Good for them! And finally normal little girls and Cursed Children are working together! That’s what Rentaro has been working for all along! I mean, it’s not like there’s more to humanity than getting little girls hooked on a specific dick. Really, this series DEFINITELY has no problem acknowledging female characters above the age of 25. There’s like… wait, let me count… one and like, uhm, let me count again… a couple hundred who are under 25, it seems. So, it’s JUST LIKE IN REAL LIFE – RIGHT, GUYS?!

Does Black Bullet deserve a second season? Actually, no. I mean, I like this first season overall. It’s not a complete disaster. But this wishy-washy adaptation of the Light-Novel-series is hardly doing the series any favours. Just read the Light Novel series for God’s sake! Looking back on it, though, I really wish its main-character could’ve been Kisara. Rentaro is just a spineless, irrelevant character! Who gives a shit that this pretty boy who’s sorta like Robocop can kick ass and spout moralistic bullshit…?! Meanwhile, there’s Kisara, a girl growing up in a power-obsessed corrupt influential family with a penchant for justice and she’s just going nuts faced with the horrible nature of humanity on display in her family. That’s a fucking story! In contrast, Rentaro barely has any sort of a character-arc in this series. He’s forced to be a bad person by bad events but he doesn’t like it. Boo-fucking-hoo! Nobody gives a shit about that sort of tepid character-drama.

Black Bullet – 12 Review

Rentaro demonstrates some riveting leadership-skills by threatening to kill anybody who doesn’t agree with him. Way to go, Rentaro! That will surely put him into the big-boy-league!

Why do serious series always like to believe that they are meaningful? Not every dipshit who doesn’t like to see tigers turned into carpets has something meaningful to say. Serious stories are just like that. ‘Meaningful’ doesn’t mean having a message. There needs to be a certain elegance to it that offers an interesting point-of-view for the audience. Because ‘meaningful’ doesn’t mean everything that has a ‘meaning’. Your doctor washing his hands before doing a health-check-up is meaningful. That doctor values cleanliness. There’s your meaning. But is anybody blown away by that interpretation? Of course he washed his hands! Of course he cares about cleanliness! He’s a fucking doctor after all! But now imagine finding out that he hadn’t washed his hands after holding a ding-dong in his hands (probably his own) and it had urinated the stuff his liver described as “Fuck this. Just dump this stuff somewhere outside our body.”. THAT is meaningful. But serious stories always go for the same platitudes thinking they’re saying something important about the human existence. Luckily Black Bullet has come one step closer to being somewhat meaningful with this episode – by making Rentaro a bit of an asshole.

Black Bullet – 11 Review

How selfless of Rentaro to answer that notion with the thought that only HE should take responsibility!

Exactly at what point is the audience allowed to laugh at macho-heroism? There IS a line, right? The fact that Rocky didn’t break 10 world-records in boxing at the end of Rocky I benefited the story and yet as the movie-series went on, Rocky became a heroic figure that did unbelieavable shit for no other reason than in service of a cheesy trope. Honor, glory, power, love… all that is fine and dandy but a male character should never do something irrational just to keep up appearances. I mean, it’s the same thing with female characters as well, just with different tropes. Not every series needs self-awareness in its story, although in a post-modern world every story needs to have some sort of self-awareness, but there’s nothing wrong with committing to a certain type of story no matter how cheesy it ends up being. But a story really has to go for extremes in that regard. Take 300 for example, that movie is FAR from being anything anyone should take serious and yet it’s VERY serious in tone and themes. If something’s that ludicrous I can overlook any lack of self-awareness. But Black Bullet isn’t at that level of ludicrousness so when Rentaro is being a complete dick in the disguise of honor and whatnot, then it results in bullshit. If he weren’t the strongest dick in town, his honor-fueled stupidity would’ve killed him a hundred times over already, I think.

Black Bullet – 10 Review

This is how romance works in Black Bullet: The more powerful the dick the more women (no matter what age) want to fuck the guy. Look, it’s not about gender, it’s ALL about power! It’s just that women have no dicks and are naturally somewhat weaker than men because of that (Kisara, Rentaro’s love-interest, got a disease-thingy because of that!). And that’s why women need to fuck a guy so that they can be protected from the bad, bad, evil world.

Series like Black Bullet frustrate me. I can see why someone would turn it into an anime because it has potential to be a really good series. This series does stuff few animes do and it has a really good grasp on portraying horrible human hehavior. But in the end there’s just TOO much anime-bullshit to really capitalize on those attempts. With series like Game Of Thrones and other stuff on TV that give no shits whatsoever in worrying about who will watch it and just chase its own vision of faithfully adapting cool fantasy-novels, when will come the point when Young-Adult-media stops being a thing? I mean, there’s value in talking about stuff that matters to teenagers by having a story mainly focus on teenagers but at this point nearly everyone is flooded by all sorts of media that isn’t necessarily aimed at them. At some point in the past parents would be able to control what kinds of media a child or teenager would consume but nowadays…? I don’t think it’s really possible to control what your child does in the internet and what he or she finds there. At that point what’s really the point of limiting artistic output for the sake of some target-audience that might as well have already consumed media without such limitations? I’m saying that because Black Bullet has some interesting grim story-elements – but the series doesn’t really commit to them (at least in the anime-version). Furthermore, there are a ton of other cheesy story-elements distracting from those far more interesting ones. And when those edgier ones reappear it happens without proper build-up and incoherently tone-wise.

Black Bullet – 08/09 Review

Look, Rentaro’s strong and there’s a bunch of weak lolis running around town. Of course he creates a fucking loli-harem! It’s all for the sake of their protection naturally…

Maybe I was too optimistic when I reviewed the start of this series. There was potential there, sure, but potential isn’t very entertaining, is it? You don’t watch the series it could’ve been after all. At this point, therefore, I have all but given up hope for this series to ever become good. It’s not a total waste of time but it certainly lacks commitment to its story, characters and plot and instead just uses generic trope after generic trope to create something resembling a story, a fairly uninteresting one, I would say after the 9th episode.

Black Bullet – 07 Review

Guess in the distant future they don’t rate your tests like they used to…

I was THIS close to dropping this series as well. This whole arc about Tina, the assassin, was just terrible. How could you make it any worse than delivering bland drama with the depth of a dirty puddle? And it wasn’t even just stereotypical, apparently that wasn’t enough, no, this episode made an effort to be SO contrived that the only trouble ended up being – stubbornness. I mean, I DO understand where these last three episodes were coming from. In a world filled with Kaiju-monsters who are also a deadly plague and some tyrants who like to make shady deals and order assassinations, isn’t it natural that the biggest challenge anyone faces is realizing – that we live in a very beautiful world? I bet everyone knows what this arc is talking about: There’s this person who for some reason is totally flabbergasted by the notion that butterflies cause tornadoes to keep the earth from standing still (which would be a bad thing) and they meet you, a nice person, who doesn’t eat at 7 in the morning a donut while crying yourself awake. But then… the shocking truth! Turns out that you just befriended – a terrorist! Or maybe a professional assassin. You’re not sure whether your new friend is doing it for religion or money. So you do what all good friends do during a conflict of interest: You beat the shit out of your friend! And thank God that you’re that violent! Because guess who had a real revelation because of that: Your friend! (who may or may not be a terrorist and if not that then at least your friend’s a professional assassin…) your friend realized that he or she really doesn’t have to work in the killing-people-industry. Those people don’t even have a union! And no health-insurance – or life-insurance! And so you can ride off into the sunset with your new friend (who’s technically an old friend) but at least you can fully trust him or her now since you know that you can beat the shit out of him or her at any point. It’s a real happy ending.

Black Bullet – 05/06 Review

Hmm, I’m pretty sure that’s not how swords work.

So, at what point does a main-character qualify as having a harem? Does being loved by every female character count? Or does he have to go through each girl’s personal route first before he can call her part of his harem? I mean, Rentaro is acting like he doesn’t care except that he feels responsible for all those female characters as if he’s the only one they can rely on. And the female characters actually do rely on him to protect them and say serious shit so that they can be impressed and  get all emotional. Well, naturally Rentaro is completely oblivious in regards to that situation so it doesn’t really matter, I guess. And he does have a love-interest which should make things easier romance-wise except that this series seems to really love the “Will They, Won’t They”-bullshit-routine.

Review-Roundup: Black Bullet 04, Sidonia no Kishi 04, Hitsugi no Chaika 03-04

Jesus, Rentaro already said that he would kill her before she turned into a monster! No need to be such a dick about it…

There isn’t really always something interesting to say about each episode of each anime I watch but I guess sometimes gathering together various snapshots of animes to talk about some topic or other is a good enough solution, I feel like. This time around I want to talk about how differently these three series deal with the subject of consequences. Well, and I also share some other stuff about them as well… The point is, I didn’t have enough to say about each of those to warrant their own post so they get this one instead.

Black Bullet – 01-03 Review

There are SO many animes that start out with poor characters who make this kind of joke. But seriously what’s supposed to be so funny about someone being so poor that he goes hungry throughout the day…?

I guess guns do solve some problems, monster-problems for example. But in this case it takes a special bullet because you always want to use the special bullet for such special occasions like shooting a monster, right? And those Gastrea-Kaiju-wannabes are really something damn special. Because they are also a plague! Like a nasty cold your co-worker has that makes him bark like a dog the whole day because so repetitive his sneezes and coughing has gotten that his metabolism gets reduced to making these pathetic animal-like sounds… and there’s snot, it’s just everywhere, he apologizes, out of breath from all the sneezing and he wipes the snot hurriedly away but you KNOW… you KNOW it’s there, you can see the stains in the light left from the wiping, you KNOW but you look at the clock and you know that you can’t leave for another four hours and after that it won’t matter what you KNOW because now you have the same cold your co-worker has…. And that’s basically what the Gastrea-plague was like, I imagine. Only with less snot and more monsters.