Certain episodes of anime are always included in the darkest moments of TV lists, while others are considered some of the most vapid moments of TV. This past weekend however the fall season of anime hit a dark spot as three different shows had emotional and dramatic episodes.
Blue Lock premiered just as dark and edgy as it promised to be, though perhaps darker than viewers had truly believed it would be. Witch From Mercury dove directly into trying to destroy multiple characters’ entire lives and dreams with subtle graphics that drove the emotions home. And Spy x Family deviated from its traditionally light-hearted humor into a riveting and gripping episode that leaned heavily into the true cost of war.
Blue Lock
Blue Lock is an anime that purports to be soccer mixed with Squid Games. 300 young strikers are summoned to a facility where they will be trained to become the best players in the world. The studio did warn potential fans that this show would not tout the traditional ideals of soccer, or sports in general, but that it would rather glorify ego, brutality, and the desire to win above all else.
Of course this left viewers expecting an edgy suspenseful drama in the same vein as Squid Games. Those viewers were certainly not disappointed by this first episode. It started edgy, but reasonable with a soccer game and summons to the Blue Lock facility. It spike a little bit with Ego’s speech about the need for egoism to be an elite athlete. But what really drove the point home about the dark tone of this series was the game of tag played at the end. Unlike Squid Games no one died, but also unlike Squid Games, the atmosphere of humanity and confusion was dropped nearly immediately. It took only seconds for the high school-aged boys to turn on one another, resorting to dirty tactics and attempting to establish themselves hierarchically by taking out the supposed top dog. The sudden lack of humanity and empathy from children who had already been established as relatively normal people leaves the viewer with a certain sense of nihilism and a single question. Is this how psychopaths are made?
Mobile Suit Gundam: Witch From Mercury
The darkness in the second episode in Mobile Suit Gundam was less of a surprise to veterans of the franchise. The creators have never shied away from clearly depicting the horrors of war before. Plus, the prequel episode for this particular sub franchise made it clear that Witch from Mercury would be no different. However, the particular style of darkness felt more like depression than trauma in this episode. The visuals of Suletta crying herself to sleep, alone, floating above a mattress that could offer her no comfort in zero-g were strong enough on their own. Combined with her breakdown over the brief near-kindness shown to her in the next scene her mental state was very clearly demonstrated to viewers at home.
Miorine was in no better state, although her scene was perhaps the only hopeful note in the episode. She stood up to her father and fought back against the pressures. Though it also emphasized the fact that this young woman had been forced against her will into a situation so vile that she had finally snapped. Her own father drove her to the point where she felt that her only way out was to volunteer another, similarly trapped, young woman to gamble everything that mattered in her life in a desperate bid to save both of their situations.
Spy x Family
Any anime that seeks to emulate the cold war and the state of Berlin under the epoch of the Berlin Wall guarantees that there will be some more tragic moments undercutting the general atmosphere of levity. However, Handler’s speech goes so far beyond what is expected from a simple show about a spy, telepath, and assassin trying to create a family together. She graphically and vividly describes the horrors of war, what it drives people to do, how it breaks them by stripping them of everything that makes them feel human, and finally what the results of such a spiritual beating are. She delivers this speech, coldly, while brandishing a pistol against college students who are bound and blindfolded in front of her.
Her speech could have perhaps been balanced out against casual jokes, or elementary school shenanigans, however, Anya had no chance to get involved in humorous innocent hijinks. Instead, she was faced with a graphic vision telling her that unless she saved him her father would die and she would find his body, bloodied and broken amongst the rubble of a bomb. Anya fled the scene of her kidnappers' pursuit and desperately fought against her own inadequacies with the help of Mister Dog to try to save her father’s life. With the jokes being limited to Anya’s inability to read a clock to figure out when the bomb would go off to Anya not knowing how to disable a bomb there was no humorous respite for viewers this week.
Dark moments in storytelling can either set the tone for a piece, create a sort of rock bottom for the characters, or remind the audience of just what the stakes are exactly in their tale. It is likely that each of the aforementioned shows was attempting a different one of these tasks. Blue Lock wanted to set the tone, Spy x Family likely wanted to remind viewers what the stakes were for Anya and Twilight. And Witch from Mercury seems to have wanted to create a rock bottom for Suletta and Miorine that they will now have to claw their way back from in the coming episodes. It was simply unfortunate for viewers that all three chose darkness in the same week.