Well, it’s not a terrible show or anything, but I have mixed feelings.
We’ll start with the good. It’s a very artistic and visually interesting anime in a way I don’t feel like I typically see, with music that, while not game-changing, did grow on me a lot as the series went on (gonna have “jiri-jiri to” stuck in my head forever) and the mysteries aren’t bad either, with the solution of the last one being particularly interesting, though they’re very Holmes in terms of how difficult-to-impossible they are to solve based on the clues you're given. Its clear research and attention to detail is also
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very impressive. Given anime’s usual track record both with adapting public domain characters and depicting European languages, history, and locations, I was very surprised to learn from my German friends that the German on the background newspaper in the vampire arc had no mistakes, and that even small details like the long-defunct railway used by a character were historically accurate. Indeed, such accuracy is actually what drew me to watch the show - the only thing I knew about it was that it contained Holmes and Watson, and from a screenshot I was sent I found that it was far and above the most accurate depiction of them I’ve ever seen in anime - down to the body types, face shapes, and Holmes’s gray eyes. Holmes adaptations in general are notorious for “yassifying” these unique-looking men who spend much of the series in middle-age into generic youthful pretty boys, so to find one that didn’t felt like a goddamn miracle. Then, for me to watch it and find that it didn’t make Watson an inept idiot, kept Mycroft fat instead of making him skinny, and portrayed Holmes as having a good relationship with both Watson and Mycroft instead of inventing needless cruelty for cheap drama?? That alone is enough to make me want to fly across the world for the sole purpose of giving the creator a hearty slap on the back, because it is difficult to understate how rare of a gift accurate characterization is in the myriad Holmes adaptations that distort him based on pop culture falsities. I’ve never read Jules Verne, but <em>Around the World in 80 Days’s</em> Phileas Fogg and Passepartout also avoided the yassification disease and looked charmingly like anime versions of realistic older men. Absolutely bravo to that. The show even made me think about actually reading Jules Verne, something I had not yet considered, just because I was so pleased by their designs.
But here’s where we start running into trouble. You see, Undead Murder Farce’s biggest problem is that it has way, way, <em>way</em> too many characters. You have the main three characters to start, and when they’re in the vampire mystery arc, you just have them and the vampire family and that’s pretty tight and self-contained. But the second they go to London everything goes off the rails. Suddenly, they’re trying to keep a jewel from being stolen from Phileas Fogg and Passepartout by Arsene Lupin, who is working with the Phantom of the Opera (in what I can only describe as the world’s strangest and most poorly-negotiated dom/sub relationship - also they are unfortunately not free of the yassification beam). They try to catch him with the help of Holmes and Watson and Lestrade, while also going against a group of genocidal monster hunters from an insurance company called Royce (four of their members are shown in the series - two here, two in the third arc), while <em>also</em> going against the villainous crime group Banquet, led by “M” (take a wild guess what that M stands for) and his four underlings - real human man Alesteir Crowley, this universe’s version of Jack the Ripper, Frankenstein’s monster (inexplicably named Victor in what I can only imagine is a reverse joke on people thinking Frankenstein is the name of the monster), and Carmilla, who is the number one character that I wish wasn’t in the show (more on that later). If you’re thinking that that seems like an insanely excessive number of characters to have to follow over the span of an arc, then imagine how it feels for the bounty hunter gang and Banquet to follow the three main characters to the location of their third arc… which consists of <em>two entire villages full of people.</em> And all of these characters are contained within thirteen episodes, the first four of which feature none of these added side characters at all. Not only does it make the show a lot harder to keep track of than it needs to be (and ends up artificially-lengthening the mysteries in a way that feels confusing and unnatural - one thing that becomes increasingly clear in this show is that the episodes rarely end in a way that doesn’t feel unplanned and abrupt), it also means that we don’t spend nearly enough time on most individual characters to really care about them. Why did Lupin lose his last assistant, and why on Earth did he feel the need to kidnap the Phantom to replace him? (And why on Earth was the Phantom just… cool with Lupin “owning” him when he straight up could have left and Lupin would have let him?? That felt weird and vaguely horny. Speak on that.) Why does Victor have a more positive relationship with the main characters than anyone else in “M”’s organization, and what is his history with Aya? What are the motivations of and relationships between literally any of the characters in Royce, who are barely developed at all and feel like the most unnecessary characters in the entire series? We already have villains in the form of “M”’s organization, and the fact that both villain groups were clashing meant that on multiple occasions you see fight scenes where both characters involved suck as people and you literally don’t care who wins, lives or dies. And speaking of unnecessary, as pleased as I was about the accurate depiction of Holmes and Watson, why are they in this show at all when Aya is already a detective and solves nearly everything in the Lupin case without their help? They spend so much time just kind of… existing and doing nothing, and it doesn’t really serve the plot or do much interesting with their characters. Jack the Ripper’s barely there and has zero interesting qualities other than “real good at killing” and “wants to become even better at killing”, and Carmilla only seems to exist to be the world’s most exploitative and hideously-sexualized representation of the creator’s lesbian rape fetish. (Especially when the show seems to suggest at the end that Shizuku actually <em>wanted</em> it. What the fuck?) Even with the leading trio and their occasional bits of banter, filled with hard-to-translate puns and rakugo references courtesy of Tsugaru, it doesn’t really feel like you get to know them very well beyond the surface, which is a shame because I did like them and wanted to know more. If this show had cut its cast in half and done a tighter focus on the mysteries and the characters involved in them, it would have been both easier to follow and much more compelling.
There are other issues with the show (like its strangely flippant attitude toward death in the werewolf arc, and its incredibly fatalistic attitude toward civil rightst - Aya and Tsugaru straight up say after both monster cases that nothing will ever change or get better between humans and monsters, suggesting that striving for social equality is a worthless endeavor and all but saying we should, what, go back to killing each other?? - and especially its general attitude toward women - every single murder victim is a woman, and almost all the women that don’t die end up in a sexual situation or have comments regarding sex or their attractiveness made about them), and combining those problems with what I'd previously mentioned above made a show I genuinely did like aspects of, and want to like even more, hard for me to recommend. Like I said, I didn’t hate the show - I finished it to the end, after all, and finishing television is very difficult for me even when it’s short shows like this - but it consistently felt both way too overstuffed and not deep enough, and thus left me not interested enough to seek out the novels or the manga, or wait for another season, because I didn’t feel the payoff of those unanswered questions would be worth the result.
P. S. Funniest part of the anime was watching the vampire family eat blood out of bowls with spoons. Girl just drink it
Sep 16, 2024
Undead Girl Murder Farce
(Anime)
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Well, it’s not a terrible show or anything, but I have mixed feelings.
We’ll start with the good. It’s a very artistic and visually interesting anime in a way I don’t feel like I typically see, with music that, while not game-changing, did grow on me a lot as the series went on (gonna have “jiri-jiri to” stuck in my head forever) and the mysteries aren’t bad either, with the solution of the last one being particularly interesting, though they’re very Holmes in terms of how difficult-to-impossible they are to solve based on the clues you're given. Its clear research and attention to detail is also ... 
Nov 5, 2021
Zombieland Saga
(Anime)
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Whenever I hear that something is a comedy anime, I have a tendency to hear "comedy" in auditory quotes. I say this not because I have hoity-toity standards for humor (trust me, I just wrote a review explaining why I love Gakuen Handsome), but because a lot of anime seems to think that morally uncomfortable ecchi tropes or moe with no punchline passes for comedy. Comedy also doesn't always translate well between two wildly different languages, especially given that sarcasm works differently in English and Japanese, so that makes things even harder. I also haven't watched much in the way of idol anime (I'm a
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Nov 20, 2019
Happy if You Died
(Manga)
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If you knew me in real life, you'd know I'm intensely picky about romance. It doesn't really seem like I should have to be picky - I suppose it doesn't make sense to me that I should have to be picky - but lord, there is so much romance that is contrived or problematic or misogynist or all of the above. Nowhere have I encountered these issues more (well, nowhere except for the shonen-ai genre, in which a healthy, natural romance is a needle in a haystack) than in shoujo and in josei. Yet, I believe I encountered this as one of the most highly-rated
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