Shakugan no Shana: One big mistake

The Short Version:
[Season 1] - What would you do if on the first day of high school you found out that your existence was eaten by a demon and it's only a matter of time before what's left of you fades away, with nobody remembering you as ever existing?  Panic, that's what.  And when you're done panicking, what would you do with your remaining time?  This show answers that question.
[Seasons 2 and 3] - The show forgets what it's about, quickly turning into a poorly-written romantic drama for the first half of season two.  In the second half, deus ex machina and retcons are the only reason the heroes manage to win.  Then at the start of season three there's a twist which makes absolutely no sense and remains entirely unexplained, which is what made me give up all hope on the show.


I have a friend who's far more into anime than I am.  He's the kind of person who can get very obsessive and pushy.  His favorite anime is Shakugan no Shana, and he just wouldn't shut up about it.  Every time we talk, "Dude, you gotta watch Shakugan no Shana.  It's like the best anime ever!"  So I finally caved in and decided to watch it.

I should have known better.  This is the same friend who also recommended I watch 11 Eyes, Guilty Crown, and School Days, all of which are firmly on the Bad List.  Heck, I already wrote a review of Guilty Crown explaining why exactly the show sucks.

But Shakugan no Shana is not on the same level as those shows.  Those three shows provoked me straight to anger.  11 eyes suddenly gave up on the whole "making sense" thing and has characters become psychotic and stupid for no reason, Guilty Crown simply fell completely apart about half-way through with the attempts at salvaging it only making things worse, and School Days is just plain horrible.  Shakugan no Shana is a show which is clearly better than all of those, even at its worst moments.  It didn't anger me; it merely bored me and left me confused, or it would have left me confused had I still cared about it by the time I made it that far.

Another way that Shakugan no Shana is unlike these other anime is that it has multiple seasons.  Most anime is lucky to get just a single 13-episode season; Shakugan no Shana got three 24-episode seasons.  Each season provokes a different response from me and I have different responses to each of them.  Before I get into them, I'll try to explain the concept of the show.  Be warned, because this may take a while.

The setting is modern-day Japan, and our main character Sakai Yuji is an ordinary high school student, as per the cliche.  He also finds out that he's not so ordinary after all, as per the cliche, but only after being rescued from a demon attack by a magic-weilding girl he immediately falls in love with, as per three cliches.  Said girl is a "Flame Haze" known as Shana.  At first Shana finds Yuji to be nothing more than an annoyance, but over time she learns to love him, as per the cliche.  Okay, yeah, the show sounds very cliche, but that's because I'm getting all of them out of the way at once.

The show breaks the cliches when we discover just what the main character is: a "torch."  A torch is the leftovers of a person whose existence has already been devoured by a demon, meant to serve as a placeholder which will burn itself out over time as the universe "corrects" itself such that the torch never existed.  What this means is that Yuji is going to die very shortly, there's nothing he can do to stop it, and when he does die nobody will even remember his existence.  Thus Shana wants nothing to do with him because he's not even a real person and is just going to fade away no matter what.

The question of what Yuji is going to do with his remaining time left is answered throughout the first half of season one, which makes what would otherwise be a long and boring introduction to the show's setting shockingly interesting from a philosophical perspective.  As Yuji goes about his life, we learn just what kind of a person he is through his actions, and at the same time his actions are understandable coming from the mindset of somebody who knows he's going to die and be forgotten.  Unlike most people, he decides that in his remaining time he's going to do everything he can to help everyone he knows, not caring about his situation or taking advantage of it to have the best time of his life.  His concerns are with his family and friends.

Of course, the show would end if Yuji was to burn out, so the writers give him both a way out and a reason demons keep attacking him.  There are some torches, called "mystes," which are randomly chosen to house magical treasures.  Naturally Yuji is one of them, and his treasure is called "The Midnight Lost Child," which has the power to restore completely Yuji's existence every night at midnight.  As a source of potentially unlimited power, it's not hard to guess why demons would want it.

Upon Yuji's discovery of this, what would you expect him to do?  Perhaps he'd throw a party celebrating that he's not going to die.  No, he doesn't; he without any hesitation asks Shana to train him so that he can fight alongside her.  He knows that as of right now he's helpless, but he doesn't want to remain helpless.  And let me tell you something: he doesn't.  By the time the end of Season two is reached, he's more than capable of holding his own against the demons.  Considering that Flame Hazes have powerful magic and years upon years of training, Shana herself even having been trained from before she could even walk, that's beyond impressive.

But this is still season one, and in season one the show's still getting started.  Eventually an organized force of demons known as Bal Masque hatch a plan to take the Midnight Lost Child from Yuji and use it to power a "fountain of existence" which will allow demons to have unlimited power to materialize in the physical plane and wreck untold destruction against the humans.  Ultimately they fail, because otherwise there wouldn't be a second season, let alone third.  Still, the plan was solid and could have worked, if not for those pesky flame hazes.

Speaking of which, I never did explain exactly what flame hazes are.  Well, not all of the demons, properly known in the show as Crimson Denizens and Crimson Lords, are all that bad.  Some of them are even benevolent towards humans.  Quite a number of these make contracts with humans; these humans are known as Flame Hazes and are granted powerful magic in exchange for a life of hunting down rogue denizens who threaten humans, additionally cleaning up after the damage they cause so that the general populace remains unaware.  Naturally the people who enter into these contracts tend to be those who have been previously traumatized by rogue denizens and have a lust for revenge against them that will never be satisfied.

A key point about the Flame Hazes is that they don't get along with each other.  At best they can get in each others way, and at worst they may get into an argument about each others methods that leads to them fighting each other rather than the denizen they were originally trying to stop.

Through the course of the first season we are introduced to three recurring flame hazes.  Our first is Shana, who I previously described.  Second we have Margery Daw, an alcoholic with a penchant for chanting "Improvisational Poems of Slaughter."  She first meets the cast when on the tail of a denizen she bumps into Shana and the two get into a fight over which one of the two is the Flame Haze who protects that city.  Third is Wilhelmina Carmel, who helped raised Shana before she became a Flame Haze.  She's very much cold and logical, to the point that she correctly decides that the best course of action is to just kill Yuji so that the treasure he holds will teleport away and choose a random torch to settle in, simultaneously derailing the villains plans and sparing the city from suffering any more demon attacks.  Of course if she succeeded there'd be no show, so she fails to kill him and is convinced to let him live.  A shame too; I thought it would have made a great twist ending to the series.

Finally, most of the explanations are over!  Man, that was troublesome.  A great deal is established in the first season of Shakugan no Shana, and this establishing happens over time which keeps the show interesting.  Between the action, the extremely interesting character of Sakai Yuji, and the humor which comes up every now and then, Shakugan no Shana's first season was definitely an enjoyable experience.  I know I started this review saying that watching Shakugan no Shana was a mistake, but that certainly does not apply to this first season.  I hereby recommend Shakuga no Shana season one to all anime fans who are at least teenagers.

As for seasons 2 and 3, this is the part you've been waiting for.  In season two, the show falls completely apart.  Instead of nitpicking and nitpicking, I'll provide a few theories as to why it went so wrong.

Theory 1: Too many episodes.

The first season of Shakugan no Shana was a good show, but by no means legendary.  Chances are the writers were expecting only a 13-episode second season, and planned accordingly. When they were given another 24, they didn't know what to do, so they simply stretched out what they already had planned.  The result was a season that just seemed to drag on.

The first two episodes is an elongated battle against a denizen that also serves as a recap due to the nature of the denizen: its power is to trap victims in a dream composed of their memories of past events.  As Yuji gets caught in it, we get a recap of a few of the first season events which explain the setting.  This definitely works, though while watching it I had a lingering feeling that it didn't need to be two whole episodes long.

The next eight episodes, however, thoroughly provide evidence as to why exactly I made this theory.   At Yuji's school, there's a new transfer student, as per the cliche.  This transfer student looks exactly like a denizen who's part of Bal Masque, which naturally has the heroes in a panic.  Further investigation reveals that no, this student is really a normal human being, and it's all just a really bizarre coincidence   All is not well as the student basically glues herself to Yuji, making Shana and another love interest of his become completely jealous...which doesn't get resolved for another three episodes.  And then two more episodes are spend with this new annoying student clinging to Yuji.  Throughout all of this I was asking one question. This is Shakugan no Shana, a show about slaying denizens, SO HOW DID IT TURN INTO A POORLY WRITTEN SOAP OPERA!?  The only answer I can give is this theory of the writers not planning for a 24-episode season.

If you're smart you would have noticed that I only brought up six episodes.  That's because in the middle of the soap opera we have two episodes which look into the backstory of Margery Daw.  These two episodes have absolutely no bearing on the plot, nor do they reveal much if anything about Margery Daw, thus only serving as filler.  But at least it was about slaying denizens and not a soap opera.

Theory 2: The villains are too smart.

One of the greatest strengths of season two are the villains.  Bal Masque goes from being nearly cliche to some of the best I've ever seen.  Their new plan is one that is patient, accounts for every outcome, and has a huge number of diversions and false flags to throw the heroes off.  There is no reason the heroes should be able to win, aside from the writers leaving open the door to a third season, which is exactly what happens.

Remember that transfer student who looked exactly like a denizen?  She was a sleeper agent for Bal Masque.  Her goal was to earn the trust of the flame hazes and get close to Yuji.  Once that was accomplished, she was to wait for an opportune moment when the Flame Hazes were distracted and quickly do her job: "branding" the Midnight Lost Child within Yuji so that Bal Masque would always know exactly where he is.  She is completely successful, as she should be, because she waited for an unrelated denizen to attack the flame hazes and distract them when she made her move.

The problem arises later when the villains make their next move, which is to send multiple contract killers after Yuji and the flame hazes.  The true goal is for this to look like it's their major move when it isn't, but if the killers are successful the flame hazes will be out of the way and Yuji and thus the Midnight Lost Child will be captured.  Ultimately the heroes defeat the contract killers and let their guard down.

This is when Bal Masque makes their real move.  Yuji is separated from the others, none of which are expecting a followup attack so soon.  They create a solid seal around the area Yuji is in, and then take their time removing the Midnight Lost Child while the flame hazes are powerless to stop them.  They successfully remove it and being preparations to use it not in a fountain of existence, but a giant robot.  Why?

Theory 3: The writers just plain stopped caring.

There is no other explanation I can think of.  Throughout season two so many instances of deus ex machina and other lame tricks are used to allow the heroes to win.  Normally I'd be upset, but seeing as they only started in the second half, well after I had lost interest, I instead was laughing.  Some of them are just so outright impossible it's hilarious.  My favorite is how despite the villains explaining how exactly they accounted for the heroes winning in season one and why the same method won't possibly work, IT WORKS!  And no, there's no commentary from any of the villains explaining that they overlooked something; it just works as though this extremely important detail was never brought up.

There are also plenty of retcons of things previously established in season one.  A rather major one is the existence of the Outlaws.  The Outlaws is an intelligence network used by flame hazes.  Flame hazes, you know, the same kind of people who get in turf wars which cause more damage than the denizens they're trying to stop, as happened between Shana and Margery Daw back in season one.  And you're expecting me to accept that they have a whole intelligence gathering network that somehow never needed to be brought up in season one?  No, sorry, that contracits the establishment of how flame hazes work.

And finally, every hero character with the exception of Yuji becomes stupid.  They can't figure out even the most obvious of hints.  Here's one example.  Carmel, after requesting intel from the Outlaws, explains that normally the Outlaws are very good about things, but now they're just sending all sorts of random and useless information at her.  Let's see here, an intelligence agency is sending out a bunch of junk instead of actually servicing requests.  Maybe it's just me, but it's incredibly obvious that the Outlaws were somehow compromised.  It takes five episodes or so for Carmel to FINALLY figure this out, and that was only after she found a message hidden inside the lousy intel outright explaining that yes, they've under attack by Bal Masque and are rapidly losing outposts.  And I thought my congressman was an idiot.

Still, Season two does have some redeeming qualities.  Namely, Yuji takes major levels in awesomeness.  Once he's branded, he realizes that there can be no more hiding; Bal Masque will find him and there will be a fight.  He quits screwing around and demands his training be ramped up significantly.  He successfully learns advanced swordfighting techniques, throwing fireballs courtesy of the show's magic system, and gains possession of a demonic sword with the power to inflict injuries even if his opponents block, all by manipulating his friends.  Note to everyone: DO NOT MESS WITH SAKAI YUJI.  His character singlehandedly made season two bearable to watch.

Overall, though, I can't recommend Shakugan no Shana's second season.  To be honest, it sucked the whole way through.  Though the manner in which it sucked is in a way that's ripe for a good parody.  I eagerly await this parody to be made, because then season two would be worth watching.

Season three I don't have much to say about, and for good reason.  Between season two and three, a ton of stuff happens that isn't explained.  In the first few episodes of season three I had no idea what was going on because nothing was explained at all.  Look, when Axe Cop, a comic quite literally written by a five year old, makes more sense than a show written by professional writers, YOUR SHOW SUCKS.  I gave up after only two and a half episodes.  I absolutely do not recommend season three because it's impossible to figure out what's going on.

Watching Shakugan no Shana is one of the biggest mistakes I've made in regards to anime.  I even got my hopes up after watching the first season, which was actually good, but the second season thoroughly ruins the entire show, with the third season finishing the deal by making no sense.  If you're into anime, watch the first season and only the first season.  Do not be tempted into watching the second season, for you will regret it.  I'm honestly thankful that I didn't watch the third season to completion, because I just know it's going to suck.  Perhaps I'm wrong.  Perhaps later in the third season suddenly everything will make perfect sense and the show will redeem itself.  Perhaps manbearpig is real.  I'm not going to waste my time watching a show I can't stand unless I'm paid to.

Still, there's something to be learned from this experience: never, EVER, trust my friend's recommendations.

Anime Review: A Certain Magical Index

The Short Version:

A completely luckless loser with the ability to cancel out supernatural phenomenon keeps getting worse and worse luck.  It all starts when he finds a nun named Index laying on the balcony of his dorm, and gets worse when he discovers that sorcerers are trying to kill her.

A Certain Magical Index is an animated action-comedy TV series from Japan.  It is based on a series of light novels by the same name.  The show itself takes place in a fantastical version of modern-day earth, where Japan, especially the fictitious Academy City where the show takes place, is the center for research into psychic powers, referred to as ESP.  Meanwhile, the Church of England is the center for research into magical arts, despite the real-life Bible outright forbidding sorcery and magic.  Just go along with it; they don't mean any offense.

Our hero is the extraordinarily unextraordinary Toma Kamijo, whose only special ability is the ability to cancel out other special abilities.  This makes him a complete failure at school, as mandatory testing for ESP powers always gives him a score of zero, no matter how many remedial classes they make him take, or how painfully obvious it is that his power is easily the strongest in the entire city.  His only other traits are his strong desire for justice - which usually results in him getting his butt kicked, and having an outstanding ability to bluff - even after having one of his arms gruesomely cut off.

The story starts out with Toma running like hell from a street gang, after trying to help a girl who was being harassed by one of the members.  He ends up getting saved by the girl he tried to help, who turns out to be an extremely powerful ESPer.  Mikoto Misaka, or Railgun, specializes in generating and manipulating electricity, specifically to fire projectiles at extremely high velocities, hence her nickname. Against all common sense, he picks a fight with her, and survives.

The next morning, he wakes up in his apartment to discover an unconscious nun hanging over the railing of his balcony, who's also hungry enough to try to bite Toma's arm off.  This nun is named Index, and is the titular Certain Magical Index this show is about.  It turns out that she's being relentlessly pursued by sorcerers who want her dead because of the 103,000 grimoires she has memorized, and she just happened to end up at Toma's place so she asks for his help.  He's extremely skeptical of the whole thing, and remains so until he returns home after classes to find her bleeding to death on the ground, with a self-proclaimed sorcerer taking the credit.

All of that is the first episode.  The story appears fairly simple, but in reality has its fair share of twists and turns.  The next five episodes alone have an extremely well-thought-out and executed plotline.  If you're already interested in watching the show, then consider this a Spoiler Alert until the text returns back to normal.

The sorcerers who attacked Index are actually on her side.  Basically, the knowledge of the 103,000 grimoires she has memorized greatly limits how long she can go without having her memory routinely wiped every year, which the sorcerers have no choice but to do.  Somewhere along the way Index started to see them as assassins trying to kill her, which is right in a sense, expect that they're really on the same side and hate doing what they have to do to her.  This doesn't at all sit right with Toma, so he resists them, at least until Index becomes seriously ill.  With that, he has no choice but to hand her over, but he isn't giving up yet.  After doing research on how the mind works, he discovers that even with her photographic memory and all those books memorized, there's no way Index's mind could ever become full, meaning that there's another reason Index fell ill, and another reason the sorcerers have to dump her memories.  Most likely, it's a spell meant to ensure that Index is always loyal to the Church, and that she won't fall into the wrong hands, and the sorcerers themselves weren't let in on this at all.  He attempts to use his ability to cancel it out, but all he succeeds in doing is activating a trap which causes Index to mindlessly attack him with spells, something the Church claims she should be unable to do.  Eventually he succeeds in nullifying the spell, but at great cost; a final attack spell sent by Index hits Toma square on the head, bypassing his ability causing severe brain damage.  Thanks to the highly sophisticated medical technology at Academy city, he was able to make a complete recovery...at least as far as everybody else is concerned.  Just between him and the doctor, every last one of his memories were destroyed, and there's no hope of ever recovering them.  Index is none the wiser, and demands that Toma continue to be her guardian after he heroically saved her life from the sorcerers, who she still doesn't know are on her side.  Toma is now stuck guarding her just so that he can hide the truth, and is now forced to bluff his way through the rest of his life just to hide what happened to him.

That is one long paragraph, and this is the END OF THE SPOILER ALERT.  That's also just the first six episodes of 24.  The plot itself continues to have intelligent twists and turns, and Toma's loss of memory [oops, forgot to mark this one] comes back to bite him big time when he has to meet his family and doesn't remember a thing about them.  Still, the process of Toma rediscovering everyone he knows while covering it up and solving his struggles not by simply using his fists, but by using his fists with intelligence, makes the show an absolute blast to watch.  Add to it plenty of comedic elements, and you have a recipe for an fun and surprisingly smart adventure.

By no means is A Certain Magical Index without its flaws, but those flaws are relatively minor.  They hold the show back from becoming one of my favorites, but it's still a very enjoyable experience with its unique take on an overused plot element.  I officially recommend this to anyone who can put up with bloody violence and foul language.  In terms of a family-friendliness rating, I give this a upper teens rating, younger with parental approval, and like most Anime, NOT FOR YOUNG CHILDREN.

A Certain Magical Index is licensed by FUNimation in the United States and can be found streaming on Hulu.  All episodes are available for free in Japanese with English subtitles, and as of writing this review the first four episodes are also available with an English-language dub.  Horribly-overpriced DVDs are also available, but if you're like me you'd rather put up with short commercial breaks every episode than spend $100 to get both parts of the series on DVD.