Spoilers for the entire show. I’m going to assume you’ve either watched the anime already, or don’t care about spoilers.
Before we get into it, let me say a few things: visually it isn’t anything to write home about, the animation is what it is, and the sound design is decent. It doesn’t excel nor fail in any of these aspects, so there is little for me to elaborate on. I will also note that the cinematography isn’t much to write home about either.
This anime is adapted from a manga written by the same guy who wrote Elfen Lied, a story which is, I think, largely
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infamous for its gore, torture porn and excessive melodrama (a comprehensive example: in a to me particularly hilarious scene in Elfen Lied, the viewer is presented with a sugary montage of two characters we've known for maybe 20 minutes living a happy life, only to cut to the both of them exploding into bits because one of them had a bomb in their ass, or something like that at least). The author’s name is Lynn Okamoto, just for the record.
Whatever which way you slice it, Elfen Lied was an early 2000s phenomenon, and wildly popular with edgy teens well into the future. Can Gokukoku no Brynhildr live up to its predecessor?
Leeeeeeeet’s find out!!!
(The answer is no).
What first surprised me is how anachronistic this anime feels. It came out at the start of the isekai craze yet plops itself firmly in the previous era of anime, an era where things like high school battles, and things like Fate, were more popular, and it carries a specific type of edginess that later anime doesn’t have. If this came out in 2007ish I think it would make more sense, in other words. I initially thought that this was because the manga must have been written immediately after Elfen Lied, and was simply adapted late, but it turns out the manga came out in 2012. I guess the author isn’t interested in adopting new fads (good on him, I say, but I would have liked him to then at least bring a bit more to the table).
I don't envy this anime's release date. In the year it came out it had to compete with anime such as Mushishi S2, Akame ga Kill, Log Horizon 2, Psycho Pass, Tokyo Ghoul, and of course the big hitter Sword Art Online II (The gun gale online one, which was so boring I dropped it ten minutes into the first episode, but I digress). Compared to these works, Gokukoku no Brynhildr seems oddly quaint and not very exciting, and understandably it flew under the radar.
Then again, its competition can’t be fully responsible for its lacklustre reception, considering Elfen Lied aired concurrently to classics such as Fullmetal Alchemist, Samurai Champloo, and InuYasha back in 2004- but what Elfen Lied offered then was more in demand than what Gokukoku offers now- and that might just be the most important difference between these shows.
It’s more or less customary to summarise the premise at this point of the review, but since you can read the premise on the anime’s page on this very website, let me be succinct: a group of girls modified to use psychic / magic powers escape their moustache twirling torturers from the lab they were created in, and now have to survive being killed off, and they need to eat special pills every thirty hours to not turn into silly putty and die (I’m not joking, that’s a thing that happens). They have a rod in their neck that gives them magic powers, and if it is removed they also die. The hapless MC is along for the ride and helps them in various ways, motivated by the notion that one of the girls, Kuroha Neko (loosely translated: black cat) might be his childhood friend who ostensibly fell to her death years ago (he thinks she isn’t her, but the audience later learns she is). If they use their magic too much, they run out of the ability to use it.
In case you hadn’t noticed, this is dangerously close to being a complete narrative reskin of Elfen Lied, but while clearly still being within the writer’s comfort zone established with EL, Gokukoku is presented as less intensely tragic, making for an overall slightly more light-hearted tone. A character as edgy as Lucy doesn’t appear, for example (though one of the characters comes close).
To the anime’s credit, the magic system is actually quite coherent and the details of its mechanics are always used when it comes to combat (such as manually deactivating an enemy’s magic using the machine on their neck). Furthermore, the magic rod in their necks remains relevant throughout and never becomes a forgotten detail.
A general weakness of the story also involves the magic system, though. Despite the mechanics being comprehensive, they’re not as coherent as those in Elfen Lied. In the latter, every single psychic essentially had the same abilities- they have magic arms of various lengths that they manipulate things with, and they had a magic shield that stopped most attacks except for high calibre bullets. This limitation actually opened up for some interesting applications (such as using them to manipulate the prosthetic limbs of an otherwise limbless character).
With this limited ability done away with in Gokukoku, we’re instead treated to a random assortment of powers that seemingly have no limit, as they include time travel, super hacking, mind reading, understanding animals, foresight, teleportation, and some other powers, the consequence of which is that it leads to plot conveniences not seen in Elfen Lied. If the cast needs a hacker, they miraculously have superhacker. If they can’t beat the enemy conventionally, there’s time travel. If they’re in no way of knowing about danger, there’s a future teller. It’s not egregious until the end, where powerups are introduced, but it doesn’t affect much of my enjoyment of the show. In short, it’s paradoxically less creative than Elfen Lied.
One thing I'd like to compliment the script on is that its pace is lightning fast and doesn't hesitate to dump buckets of shit on our main characters to keep the tension from never dropping. While there are a few awkward scenes here and there where the characters kind of just stand there in a big room talking, enough realistic threats are thrown at them that the anime plods along nicely.
The show, for example, doesn’t hesitate to always subvert what’s set up. Early on, the girls don’t have enough pills to survive. That’s a problem in itself. But, oops! Their house burns down and now they have zero pills. That’s tension. They track down the production factory for these pills, but- uh oh, the heroine tricked the MC to keep him safe while she goes and distracts the baddie, which kills her, but of course the MC won’t let this happen, and so on. Like I said, it plods along nicely, and doesn’t waste time with endless boring exposition. If something is exposited it happens in a line or two, and is always immediately relevant.
There is one exception to this, however. Emotional scenes can overstay their welcome a bit too long for my taste, and the director made sure to always throw in a small flashback and explanation to REALLY make sure you’re sad. Usually this becomes borderline comedic for me, since the characters mainly spend their most intensely emotional moments crying while gathered in a circle around a puddle of human milkshake- one of their friends melted! I was tapping my toes impatiently all the while, but it’s expected from the author considering his body of work.
The challenges the main characters face are consistently varied, which is good: this anime could have easily been a monster of the week type show (like jojo, for example- though jojo is considerably better than this) but thankfully it isn’t, and I’d like to commend the writer for introducing threats related directly to the functioning of the character’s magic and survival system and using these mechanics to let drama unfold, rather than just throwing an assassin at them every episode (and when an assassin does appear, there is generally a moral conundrum involved, as the assassins themselves are also manipulated into doing the evil guys’ bidding under the threat of death, and may not always be as loyal as they seem to their masters, so all in all a more complex scenario than “me bad guy me kill you” will be presented).
Furthermore, it could have also fallen in the incredibly tedious “powerlevel” trap, which to me is grounds to drop an anime instantly, but, despite having some sort of power ranking system, it basically never comes up, and only really denotes whether a magician has one or two abilities.
And hold on- you might be thinking that these are all very pedestrian elements and almost par for the course for any script to be interesting, but I still think some credit is due, especially considering how many tedious pitfalls this anime manages to avoid.
On to something recurring that I didn’t like: the opening. It might seem petty to focus on the opening, but remember that the opening is essentially the introduction to the show, and viewers are going to see it every week. It would make sense to have it be good.
The OP is poorly edited and has zero energy behind it. It seems more like an intern made it with PowerPoint than anything that had conscious attention paid to it. Just compare this opening to any of that of Toaru Majutsu no Index, an anime with a similar premise to this one that first came out seven years prior, and can show just how much of a discrepancy there is in terms of energy and hype between the two openings (and let's not kid ourselves; TMNI isn't a masterpiece either, so it's not like the bar has been set very high).
In general the music for the opening is alright but the visuals fail to take advantage of them, instead showing scenes with too little impact, edited with too slow a pace. It's a choir/classical track remixed as some sort of dubstep (it's 2014, we have to forgive it for having dubstep, it was popular at the time) that I don’t have much to say about- which is kind of a good and bad thing at the same time.
Compared to the opening of its predecessor Elfen Lied, this OP is generic and underwhelming. Say what you want about the anime, but Elfen Lied’s opening is still iconic today, featuring renditions of the main characters in the style of famous painter Gustav Klimt, and using a still popular song: “Lilium,” which is a melancholic opera/choir piece. At the moment this song has a combined view count of about 14 million on youtube. Impressive! The same can’t be said about Gokukoku’s opening. Not about the first opening at least- and yes, you read that right: the first opening; because this 13 episode anime has two openings. This 13 episode anime has two openings!
The second OP debuted in episode 10 (I guess they had enough of the budget left at that point to make a new one) and it’s pretty fucking sweet. It’s a complete tonal whiplash compared to the first OP, as it features fast paced death metal, quick cuts of cool scenes and dynamic editing. Good job lads! It made me feel like I was seeing something worth watching, and I liked being surprised.
With that out of the way, I’d like to go over the characters.
The MC is Ryouta, a high school student who has no real noteworthy characteristics beyond “anime protagonist”, that is: he has conventional morality, wants to “protect his friends!”, gets mortified by the sight of a naked woman, and delivers speeches. While his excellent memory is supposedly his peculiar talent, to me his ability to remain sensible in the face of danger is more extraordinary. Which, mind you, is something I like (though it’s not groundbreaking).
Overall, he isn’t stupid. Our MC comes up with some logical plans, such as getting a chemist to reverse engineer the pills the girls need, coming up with plans to defeat other magicians, and is all around sensible (though this sensible nature diminishes somewhat later on). He is also not completely impotent, and does his best to help the girls. How a high schooler could realistically help in these disastrous situations is dubious to me, but it could have something to do with the phenomenon where everyone’s IQ except his own drops to below room temperature levels anytime the chips are down. (particularly when he’s the only one to figure out you can just teleport the baddie they were fighting into captivity using Kotori’s power- Kotori is a character I’ll get to, but in short: she has the ability to swap two people’s locations using teleportation. This one stood out to me specifically because 1: I called this tactic immediately, while the show plays it off as an incredible stunt, and 2: Kotori herself, who should realistically know how to use her power the best simply by virtue of it being her power, instead comes up with a stupid and useless plan and needs the MC to think for her.) This occasionally makes it seem like the MC only exists to fill in for the stupidity of the other characters who seem to sometimes share a single braincell between the 4 of them, while on other occasions (such as when Ryouta is in danger) they’re able to make decent plans on their own.
This sensibility and usefulness in coming up with plans actually makes me question his excellent memory. He is said to have some sort of eidetic memory that allows him to instantly memorise something he sees. This is never explained and comes off as nothing more than a plot convenience, especially since, you know, cameras and notepads exist that let us record information for later use. The MC doesn’t need to be super special for this. I don’t know why the main character needs this ability (beyond plot convenience), but we’re stuck with it. Thankfully though, despite some conveniences like this, ass-pulls are kept to a minimum (more or less).
Of course, basically all the girls he meets immediately fall in love with him. Normally I clench my jaw and roll my eyes when confronted with these scenarios, but in the case of this anime I’m more lenient in judging it as boring pandering. My reasoning is that the cast consists of teenage girls who are all socially stunted due to time spent in a horrible testing facility. It would make sense they’d get a crush on the only boy they meet and interact with who is also trustworthy and motivated to help them out.
He is, however, not exactly a suave person. I’ll point out some of his “charming” one liners later on, but for now I’ll leave you with this scenario: when the gang finds out that they only have a three weeks’ supply of life sustaining medicine left (that they had to risk their life for to get previously), our hero MC points out that studying for exams is more important and that “they’ll get the pills somehow”. (they don’t, and later they’re forced to draw straws on who out of the 4 of them gets to live on with the remaining pills while the others die- that’s our MC! What a guy.)
Kuroha Neko is the main heroine, a girl with memory problems (which only exist for pointless drama) who is introduced wanting to save the MC’s life. He’s in danger because a rock is going to fall on his head.
After escaping a burning testing facility with her friends, and after receiving a cryptic prophecy, she runs away and transfers into MC’s school in order to save people who were predicted to die there.
She is actually the MC’s childhood friend, but due to the nature of her psychic power, she has forgotten it. Her psychic power inexplicably steals her memories away every time she uses it, something which is unique to her alone. We never get an explanation as to why she has to lose her memories, but boy oh boy does it come in handy for drama. Her mysterious memory loss makes her hesitant to use her power too much, except when she’s angry and she needs to break something because it’s funny epic haha.
Considering the MC’s selfless insistence on helping her, it’s no wonder she gets a thing for him, and due to her resemblance to his childhood friend, he is attracted to her as well. Her love for him even pays off in the ending, so colour me surprised. Not all anime have the guts for that.
Kuroha remains consistent throughout the anime, and without giving away too much, she doesn’t get given a narrow main heroine role of “supports and likes the MC”. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t get the stereotypical love interest treatment however- she does, completely with an indirect kissu. I do like that her goofy characteristics remain to be seen later in the runtime and they’ll also repeat the gag where she gets angry and breaks something, so look forward to that.
Although a flashback scene pins a “chosen one” prophecy on her, and she is seemingly the same person as the MC’s childhood friend, there’s not much to make her interesting. Her helpless, sometimes naive demeanour can be cute, I’ll admit, and this attitude does serve to bite her in the ass later (briefly), so it’s not all bad, especially since she breaks through this to an extent during the climax.
Now if this exploration of her character seems kind of bland and kind of like a copout, that’s because it is. There’s nothing much to say about her beyond what I just did.
In the movie "Johnny Got his Gun", a WW1 trench soldier has his arms and legs blown off by a landmine, and he lost his ability to speak, see and hear. Kana, one of the main characters, is in a similar situation- that is, she's completely paralysed. She can't move her body at all except for her left fingers, and also she can swallow. She can see and hear, also, and she has some sort of keyboard that she can type on with her left hand which speaks for her, similar to how it works with Stephen Hawking, except it broadcasts an anime girl voice and not Microsoft Sam. So, essentially, that's her. She lays on a bed or sits completely still in a chair while chattering away with her keyboard, occasionally getting a prophetic vision of one of her friends dying (which is a consistent source of drama and impetus in the show.)
While in Johnny Got his gun, the character's situation is presented as the hell on earth it is, in this anime, Kana, the paraplegic cripple who will melt to death when her friend doesn't feed her pills and has no autonomy whatsoever, is more concerned with things like whether the MC touches her boobie while he carries her out of a burning building and calling him a pervert.
Now, of course this type of subversion of expectations is funny and kind of shows her as a strong person who isn't defined by her disability, but at the same time I find it odd that the anime doesn't even take a second to show us her inner world and how she really feels, since all I kept thinking about was the anguish this character must undoubtedly feel whenever she's wheeled outside to witness the other characters frolic freely while she's confined to the prison that is her body. How she isn't constantly using her talking device to scream in existential horror is beyond me. I know I wouldn't have that kind of resolve. The anime doesn't address this enormously interesting premise, though it does attempt to explain why she chooses to remain in this state when it’s revealed she can undo it at any moment.
By the way, guess what the MC says to charm her?
He says that he doesn't mind carrying her lifeless body around on his back at all because she's just like his school backpack... Yeah, really. Cue the slide whistle sound effect and let's move on to a more superficial complaint.
Out of all the members of the cast, this immobile girl wears the most complicated outfit: a complete gothic lolita dress. I guess this is pandering to the audience because muh quiet gothic loli, but one second of thinking reveals how retarded this is. She's paraplegic. She can't move any part of her body except her left fingers. That's it. Why the hell would you dress her in anything other than, like, a onesie? Or a pyjama? Or a hospital gown? Who has time to dress what's basically a meaty mannequin in the most complicated outfit in the show every single day? On a metaphoric level, it's supposed to show that she's "like a doll", but to me it's just plain stupid.
Her character plays a more pivotal role early on, but she gradually turns into the houseplant she really is by the end of the anime, and it’s kind of darkly comical to see her in wide shots with all the characters just sitting there staring up. Pitiful as it is, she exists to be the main characters’ sentient alarm system until the finale, when an asspull allows her to save the day.
To help the gang break into a pill factory, they conveniently know a super hacker magician who will help them- Kazumi Schlierenzauer (yes that’s a name: you say it like this: “shlee-ren-tsow-uhr”). An interesting titbit is that she shares this name with a famous ski jump champion- Lynn Okamoto seems to be a fan, since he released a manga about ski jumping. Anyway, besides hacking, it seems her main role is to provide sassy comments that mainly boil down to lascivious remarks, and showing her naked body to the MC, and molesting her friends- more on that later. She doesn’t do much beyond what I’ll describe later, but her character does get a surprising bit of depth when it’s revealed she’s quite selfless despite her seemingly careless behaviour, and shown to be quite sensitive in a scene I could almost call poignant, where it’s revealed that the magical pills most likely can’t be produced soon enough to save them, and she goes off to cry on her own.
Mind you, this is the same character who not a few episodes earlier presented herself spread eagle to the MC after knowing him for about two hours, and he gets a full frontal show of her “sacred garden,” during an obligatory hot spring scene, which makes it less easy to take her seriously and mostly raises the question whether or not, considering her pink hair, the carpet matches the drapes (we never find out). She basically has the unenviable role of “pervert” among the group, which translates into having an average teenager’s interest in sex (though she’s also quick to be obsessed about the other girls’ breast sizes, for some reason other than fanservice I’m sure). Inexcusably stupid however is when she later demands to take the MC’s virginity if she gets a higher test score than him (she doesn’t- if I was in the MC’s place I’d deliberately get the lowest score possible, but oh well).
It is revealed that she’s the one who helped Kuroha enter Ryouta’s high school using her hacker skills, and she herself also transfers in to get access to the astronomy building where they are safe, as no one uses it. Speaking of safety, there is an aspect of the plot that confuses me.
The gang of girls all join the school, where they can be seen by hundreds of people both inside the school as well as while commuting to and from the school, JUST so that they can use a building to stay hidden. To me it seems to have been a lot safer to just stay in the astronomy building without transferring, and installing some sort of sensor on the door for whenever someone approaches so they can hide on time. Does this make sense to anyone?
Introduced later is another transfer student (number 3 at this point- nobody got suspicious?), who coincidentally is also a magician/psychic who seemingly gets in contact with the main characters for nefarious reasons. Kotori is her name, and her character is that she has da big booby and also she's an idiot airhead (though later she turns into a McGuffin- oh boy!) Her special magic ability is that she can swap the places of herself and another person, essentially teleportation. The other characters somehow think this is underwhelming, which is surprising to me. By far the most impressive ability displayed so far (besides literal time travel) is "underwhelming". Well, I guess once you've seen time travel everything is underwhelming in comparison. Some drama occurs when the ever present Japanese trope of the misunderstanding pops up. Kana sees a future where Kotori seemingly kills both Ryouta and Kuroha, though it turns out that she’s not actually a double agent spy and instead happened to be present when someone else was busy killing Kuroha. The misunderstanding is resolved, but that leaves us with some questions: how did she not only join the school where all the other main characters go to, but also specifically join the astrology club? These coincidences would make sense if she was an assassin out for blood and had intel on the main characters fed to her, but since that’s not the case and she’s innocent and clueless, does it mean she miraculously joined the astrology club by coincidence, without knowing that other friendly magicians used it as an HQ? At least it was explained that her late friend was able to hack the school system for her. Never mind that though- more importantly, Kotori is going to die!
Earlier, her hacker friend (yes, another hacker. Two hackers, people! Two hackers in the same show) sacrificed herself by giving Kotori all her pills, so she could live to experience her 16th birthday.
Once this day comes around, after she met the main cast, she refuses to take any more of anyone else’s pills like she did with her best friend, and decides to die. Of course, the main characters and the MC won’t accept this, and it’s up to the MC to use “talk no jutsu” to convince her to live instead of melting into paste in front of their eyes.
Now- imagine. What would YOU, the reader, say to someone like this?
"Don't let your friend’s sacrifice go to waste by dying here!" or something of the sort?
If something like that came up in your mind, then congrats, you're a better writer than the author. Our MC instead convinces her to stay alive because: "if you're dead we won't have enough members for the astronomy club to stay open".
Now, I don't know in which universe this anime takes place in where that's a good reason for someone to not kill themselves, but if it was me, I'd let myself turn into flubber out of spite.
I’m assuming it’s trying to be one of those supposedly profound Japanese manner of speech things, like using “the moon is pretty” to say I love you, and “I want you to make me miso soup every day” to say marry me, but guess what? I don’t care. It’s dumb.
Not much is shown of the villains. They’re an organisation that decided to turn teenage girls into superheroes in favour of, just a suggestion, trained and loyal soldiers (I’m sure there’s a reason for this). Also they research aliens. Because that’s a thing. Aliens are a thing in this anime. They never become relevant but they sure do exist. Aliens exist. Magic wasn’t enough. We also have aliens.
An important question to ask is whether the anime utilises the characters to their fullest extent. I’ve already given my opinion on Kana, and surprisingly each character will get at least a tiny bit of depth, especially Kazumi. They’ll always have this or that to do in the plot, and pipe up when it’s time for the perfunctory emotional scenes, and I think that’s enough considering the length of the anime and the size of the cast. Furthermore, when the cast threatens to get bloated, the author isn’t afraid to get rid of a character after having their development pay off.
At the same time, the relationship between characters is regretably shallow and built out of necessity. There's never a moment where they can share their thoughts and feelings. There's never a time to breathe and collect. The characters swear up and down that they would die for each other, but why they would realistically do this beyond "because muh friends!!!" is never shown to a satisfying degree. The pacing of this show can be a virtue in one sense, but it works as a detriment in this case.
There is also a borderline disgustingly tone-deaf atmosphere. Let me explain:
At one point, Kazumi, with who the main character has mostly had some unbearable banter about her boob size and “sacred garden” (guess what that means), is alone together with the MC in his bedroom.
After helping him track down a location they need to get to, she sits down on his bed and takes her panties of. Then, she requests the MC to bang her, a request which he relentlessly denies, until through some haha hilarious hijinks she's completely naked and he's on top of her (he keeps denying her though, and she remains unbanged).
Now of course we can immediately brush this off as fan service that would ideally induce some sort of arousal in the viewers, but let's look at how harrowing this situation actually is.
This girl is looking for a human connection in a world that's literally out to kill her, a world in which she's seen her friends melt into paste and a world where she might only have a month to live before she herself turns into paste. So, in what I imagine is a desperate attempt at being loved in one form of another, she makes a pass at the MC. Now I don't know about you guys but to me that's downright tragic. She's isolated and hopeful that MAYBE the dense MC likes her and returns some sort of love, especially since the MC was going to go on a potentially lethal journey the next day and this might be the last time she sees him (and, considering he risked his life to save her and the other girls, and he's the only non mage who interacts with her, this is pretty distressing for her). But, of course, this concentrated tragedy is, in a completely tasteless manner, presented to the viewer only as an opportunity for getting a boner, while to me it was just downright horrifying and sad and gave me a kind of empty, depressed feeling. What's more, it's played from the angle that this is "woah so awkward" for the MC, because, you know, that's the important takeaway from this situation.
Anyway, she's naked, and what does our hero do? Does he console her and convince her that maybe this isn't a good idea? No, of course not. All our heroic MC does is go "uh g'duh whuh???" and, again, reiterates that her boobs are too small because lol funny (and, of course, because the only pillar a relationship rests on is whether a girl has the guy's preferred tit size). Now, is it realistic for a male to be short-sighted or dense? Yes, of course. Is it a male's responsibility to gently deny female advances? Considering the situation, yeah, to an extent, but not really in the broad sense. However, what's important is: is it sympathetic? Is this a good way to present the MC in a manner that makes the audience not hate him? I'll let you be the judge.
Then later, when they're sleeping in bed together, the MC considers that "huh, it's kinda weird that a girl is next to me in bed" as if the previous scene didn’t happen at all. Now, in an anime like "Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai " a similar premise appeared but it was understandable there. In this case, however, I want to reach my hands through the screen and strangle the fucker.
What's interesting, by the way, is that this ecchi fanservice first appears around episode 4 or 5 and is non-existent previously. What I imagine happened is that the editor for the original manga observed that the manga wasn't selling enough, and thus instructed the author to add more fanservice or else the manga would be cancelled, and so, in chapter 5 (I guess) the fanservice started.
Speaking of the fanservice, the version I watched was uncensored, so I got to see (gasp!) about a total of ten seconds worth of nipples. I was not amused by the fanservice in the slightest though, mostly because of the context it was in. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some redditor fedora wearing whiteknight who hates fanservice outright (though it doesn’t exactly titillate me either- nothing a TV anime can show me will ever be better than what you could easily find on, let’s say, n-hentai).
I’m specifically talking about the context of the characters being presented as fanservice-bait here. I don't imagine anyone watching will think: "Holy crap, these girls must go through tremendous mental suffering knowing they will either be murdered at any second, or melt into paste if they don't get their extremely rare medicine on time... but fuck that, BOOBIES OMG!!!!"... I wasn't thinking that at least.
Like I said, presenting these tragic characters this way is tasteless in my opinion.
I suppose the argument can be made that these girls, now that they are relatively safe, can enjoy a normal teenage life (to an extent) and thus, experience some form of sexuality, which is of course a part of growing up. I'd like to counter that this sexual aspect of the teenage experience could be presented as something more subtle than putting titties in the faces of the viewers.
If this was some generic SoL romcom I wouldn’t have given a shit, but this story is ostensibly serious. Just do ANYTHING else with the characters instead of dedicating fan service scenes to them. I think the story should be strong enough to stand on it’s own without them.
The ending of the anime goes about as you’d expect; after the obligatory beach scene complete with girls losing their bikini top, the finale begins.
The villains (who I didn’t talk about much because they do nothing interesting except be reminiscent of Neon Genesis Evangelion’s SEELE) are tired of not killing teenage girls and decide to spring into action- for realsies this time. They release this anime’s equivalent of shadow the hedgehog, SSS tier fighter “La Gata Blanca”; in other words; we’re introduced to a white palette swap of Kuroha (they had the mental wherewithal not to call her “shiroha”). This character is completely deranged, will kill randomly, and is intent on following her master’s orders.
The gang finds out about her, but isn’t too concerned, and instead decides it was a good time to have an onsen trip. At this point a new character is introduced who exists to erase the threat of death with her healing powers and the plot becomes a bit more exciting when the ghost of a dead character that haunts the MC’s brain (this is real) tells him to “YOLO just overclock your GF”, but this ends up not being necessary due to deus ex machina (which appears in the form of literal clergy- very appropriate). Only later does Kuroha push the metaphoric “turbo” button on the PC stuck in her neck.
It is also at this point that the show reveals it’s literally a ripoff of the End of Evangelion. I’m serious- a special clone has the power to wipe out all of humanity due to her having an ancient alien inside her, so a beam of light shoots up into the atmosphere to envelop the earth to signify this event is happening. This is literally just what happens with Rei during the third impact in EoE. On top of that, the main villain endeavours to resurrect his loved one (just like Gendo and his wife in Evangelion) while secretly working against a council of shady villains (SEELE) who want to reset the world and humanity (kinda like how SEELE wants to turn everyone into primordial soup as a superconsciousness of humanity in Evangelion).
I want to be positive about the ending, because here and there it shines, but it’s difficult. The climax introduces too many variables that should’ve ideally had more time to let sink in, and as a consequence everything plays out as a bizarrely fast paced collection of shit that kind of happens out of nowhere. That being said, there is a surprising narrative elegance to be found in the ending if you look for it- Kuroha’s character arc gets completed (then destroyed, because this anime can’t do anything right), and the ending mirrors the inciting incident in reverse, where the MC is finally able to save Kuroha, which he wasn't able to do as a child. Is that enough to redeem it all? No. While it’s admirable that the adaptation tries to tie a neat bow around the ending, the pieces don’t fit. In the manga, this is obviously just the ending to an arc, so getting introduced to a million new concepts doesn’t matter- but it doesn’t quite work as an ending to an anime.
So, what does this all add up to? Well, not much. Most of the runtime is tedious, the dialogue is not noteworthy, and the anime insists on ecchi romcom hijinks which completely destroy the tone. It then insists on destroying any tension by reversing all but one of the bad things that happened during the ending. Due to its reluctance to be as gory or edgy as Elfen Lied, Gokukoku leaves little to offer. Its attempt at having a more intricate plot falls flat as it’s confusing and rushed (and derivative).
Did this show need to exist? Did it bring anything new to the table?
A lot can be said about Elfen Lied, but at least it stood out head and shoulders over its contemporaries despite some serious competition due to its content- and it’s still remembered today for a reason.
By contrast, Gokukoku is an anime that just kind of exists as an echo of an era already long gone, drowned out by better shows while bringing nothing new to the table, and which to me ends up feeling like the author just wanted to write Elfen Lied again but with a different coat of paint. It struggles to come up with a new unique story and doesn’t take the time to address interesting parts of its characters. Unfortunately, a lot has changed in anime since Elfen Lied came out, and Gokukoku no Brynhildr just wasn’t able to keep up.
Sep 6, 2021
Gokukoku no Brynhildr
(Anime)
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Spoilers for the entire show. I’m going to assume you’ve either watched the anime already, or don’t care about spoilers.
Before we get into it, let me say a few things: visually it isn’t anything to write home about, the animation is what it is, and the sound design is decent. It doesn’t excel nor fail in any of these aspects, so there is little for me to elaborate on. I will also note that the cinematography isn’t much to write home about either. This anime is adapted from a manga written by the same guy who wrote Elfen Lied, a story which is, I think, largely ... |
