Overall, not a bad series. I enjoyed it fairly well on casual watching last year, and repeated exposure didn't ruin it for me; I'm still enjoying it, with just a touch left to work on. Spoiler-laden thoughts below the fold.
One of the biggest shortcomings of the series is that most of the characters are not, objectively speaking, nice people. It's one of the points of the show - the "noble" mages treat "peasants" badly, not even thinking that they're doing so. In the sense that most of the nobles we know (Guiche, Kirche, Mon-Mon, Malicorne, Mott, and most especially Louise) all evince this character flaw, it's pretty good writing - it helps make a fairly silly fantasy world "feel" real, or at least internally consistent.

But at the same time, it doesn't make them characters you'd like! The viewer is clearly intended to associate with Saito, and thus gets sucked squarely into the line of the argument; when Kirche decides to score, when Mott raids the local maid supply, when Louise breaks out the crop, our reaction is (rightly) "what an asshole!" But the assholes are, by and large, also the heroes of the story, which complicates matters somewhat.

Saito is also something of an asshole. Specifically, he's prone to lapsing into a kind of passive-aggressive state; rather than actually refuse to be treated like a sub-human, he concentrates on scoring points off his tormentors. Funny, but not endearing. I'd say that Saito definitely passes Steven's "does he get his shit together?" test, though. (It is, however, fair to ask if he is actually a masochist - hell, the show makes that joke in one of the extended previews. MOST people would be turned off by an angry loli whipping them on a regular basis...)

The biggest weakness of the series is that Louise doesn't get herself together nearly as well. Admittedly, she starts off in something like a class clown role - her total ineptitude at magic means that she's on the absolute bottom of the noble pecking order, and drafting Saito means that there's precisely one person in the world who is unequivocally beneath her and who she deals with on a regular basis. Naturally, all the crap that gets dropped on her, she rolls on downhill...

I think that the real flaw is that the characters, who are otherwise presented as at least moderately intelligent, educated, and curious people, have a bad habit of not asking questions. Most of the mysteries of the series are known by one person or the other, but conversations about them conveniently fail to happen until late in the show. Saito's carrying around Derf for most of the show, but never gets around to saying "so what exactly is going on here?" until near the end, and even then Derf leaves out a lot of the explanation which could be, y'know, useful to Saito.

There's also Louise - why does it take her almost the entire show to ask somebody, "Hey, uh, I seem to utterly suck at every known form of magic, and there's quite a bit of weirdness going on here... what do you know, exactly?" The latter would have been a big help... an awful lot of Louise's prickly nature is due to her defensiveness at being, well, terrible at things she's supposed to be good at; somebody poking her and saying "oh, by the way, it's actually because you're special in a fashion we don't understand" might have been a big confidence booster. In fact, that DID happen, even if it was the villains who did it, and gave her enough to think about that she took it to Osman...

I think I liked Guiche best of the secondary characters. Starts off as a fop, funny mole with weird birthmark and name carefully spelled to avoid copyright infringement... but he keeps getting sucked into situations where he's obliged to act in a courageous fashion, and despite the fact that he's absolutely not the hero type, manages to acquit himself well enough. It's always good to see a comic relief character make good (think the most flagrant example of that is Rokutanda from MB, but there you go.)

All told, I do like the show, even if I'm spending a lot of time picking at it. The scenario is interesting, the setting didn't end up feeling like "lol, more Harry Potter", the characters' banter is enjoyable, Siesta is lovely, pretty much everyone gets their moment to be cool in a believable fashion, and dragons versus WW2 fighter is a fun way to cap it off (though I wish they hadn't telegraphed it by putting the damn thing in the OP!) I hear the second season was an utter train wreck, though...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 10:46 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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