Review: Tokyo Ravens

Someone just farted.

3ET: Tokyo Ravens

Review Scale

Warning: The following review contains SPOILERS and ranting.

Sometimes, I get fooled into watching a bad show. I pick it up after three competent episodes, and it turns out I picked it up at its peak. Such is the risk I take by committing to a show, to the end, no matter what, on such a small sample size. Sometimes I think that I should have an out, maybe at the half-way point of two-cour shows or something like that. For now, I'm going to stick with bad shows that fool me into thinking they are good. I feel that watching bad shows from time to time gives me necessary contrast to what I consider to be good shows. And since I spent the entire introduction to a review of Tokyo Ravens about how I can be sucked into watching bad shows, that suggests I don't think this anime was good.

Also, what this show totally needed was an useless cute mascot. Totally.

That's not say that there aren't good moments in this show, there are a handful of them. The bro-tastic relationship between Harutora and his best friend Touji is a good one. The two boys care for each other and Touji's episode about controlling the ogre that lives inside him was one of the best episodes of the show An episode that was complete with him and Harutora having a moment of punching each other, as guys are supposedly wont to do from time to time. The other good moment was the death of Natsume, Harutora's cousin/master/love interest. She dies in his arms, and it's legitimately heartbreaking, as it calls back to an earlier moment in the show when Natsume's familiar and Harutora's friend, Hokuto, also dies in his arms. It caught me off guard at how effective it was, especially after sitting through the previous dozen or so episodes of crap.

The reason I think those episodes were crap was because they wasted time on plot points that were boring and/or obnoxious. The first one I'm going to hark on is Natsume's forced crossdressing. Natsume, a girl, has to go to school as a boy for what I am assumed are some arcane, reverse-kabuki theater, bullshit reasons. Now, this could be interesting, if they explored the difference of gender roles and challenge the idea that only men can inherit familial power. Which, of course, was never done. Instead, it was girls falling in love with the female Natsume, thinking she was a boy. And the boys-love obsessed teachers thinking that there was a thing going on between Natsume and Harutora, and fangirling over it, because they think they're both boys, get it? On top of the stale sexual confusion jokes, when the real reason for her crossdressing is revealed, it turns out it was trying to thwart the conspiracy that underlay the entire plot of Tokyo Ravens.

I know, Natsume, I know.

And that conspiracy was a dud. Apparently, a powerful onmyouji named Tsuchimikado Yakou, so an ancestor to Harutora and Natsume, caused a big spiritual disaster several decades ago and there was a cult trying to revive him. That's the main conflict of this show. Lots of fighting and behind-the-scenes dealings went on between characters trying to stop this from happening. The problem is that for most of the runtime, the high school kids are only tangentially related to the whole Yakou conspiracy. There is literally nothing for them to do, which wouldn't be as much of a problem if there were some characters involved in the Yakou conspiracy that were actually able to grab my interest.

Of course, no such character exists. That's because the side cast of Tokyo Ravens is bloated to a ridiculous extent. I'm usually able to keep track of characters in a large cast, but that requires me to actually care about the characters, which would require that they are given things like a personality and motivation. Instead, this show introduces a character, has someone talk about how he/she is super powerful, then it's time to start chanting and for stuff to explode or spirit disasters to be quelled. By the time the ending came around, the plot was a convoluted mess filled with people that I could not care less about.

This guy was involved in the final battle. For some reason that I can not recall.

And then there's the ending. There is no nice way to put this, the ending is shit. First off, the whole storyline of preventing Yakou from being reincarnated was a waste of time because it turns out that Harutora is said reincarnation and can handle the power of Yakou just fine. So, all the time spent on that arc was a waste. Then, in the last episode, there is some back story given to a moe familiar who has been following Harutora around the entire show and being mostly useless. She suddenly gets a lesson in badass and becomes powerful, for no other reason than the plot demanded it.

Then, the most egregious thing in the entire show happens. The last arc starts with Natsume dying, which was good. It gave Harutora something to fight for, and when the bad guys tempted him with the opportunity to revive her using the same forbidden ritual used in the first arc, it offers a real moral choice for him. But, instead of coming full circle with the idea that the dead are dead and there's nothing the living can do about it, the show goes full bullshit happy ending. Natsume comes back to life and the only consequence is that Harutora and Yakou are now one person, who turns out to be a less awkward and more badass version of Harutora. So, let me get this straight. It wasn't acceptable for the girl in the first arc to resurrect her brother because the ritual was forbidden. But, because Harutora-Yakou is so powerful, he can do it, it's morally acceptable, and nothing bad comes from it.

Oh, fuck off, show.

It should be no surprise that I'm giving this show a bad score. The most succinct way to put how I feel is that the plot points the show spent all its time trying to convince me were important did not matter in the end. Maybe one day I'll learn a lesson from shows like this (and the dull Red Data Girl from 2013). That lesson is that if I watch a show where the first three episodes are decent, but there is a sudden setting change to a special school where magical kids learn about their special powers, I need to run. In the opposite direction. Preferably screaming.

Final Score: 3/10