Was D.Gray-Man Actually Any Good?

There are plenty of things that a lot of long-running shonen series have in common, from over-the-top fights to themes of friendship and perseverance. One common complaint often thrown at some of the bigger shounen series is the lack of permanence and weight in how death is handled. From Dragon Ball's abuse of resurrections to Fairy Tail's constant death fakeouts, these types of setups can sometimes lead to a lack of tension when characters are put in precarious situations. I am not saying that a shounen needs characters dying left and right in order for it to be good, and plot armor can sometimes force writers to get creative with escalating stakes. However, I think part of the reason that D.Gray-man, as a series, stood out to so many people is that it used death as an overarching aesthetic and theme.

The very concept around the D.Gray-man's central villain and how he leaves his mark on the world might be one of the strongest that I've seen in a while. In the first episode, our young soft boy protagonist Allen Walker is doing his best to protect a woman from a mysterious machine called an Akuma, which we later find out was created out of the soul of their former sister. A devilish being known as the Millennium Earl promises people that he can bring their deceased loved ones back to life, but like all deals with the devil, those promises come with a catch: the soul of the resurrected will be bound to a machine that wears the bodies of others like a suit in disguise, and they are forced to witness everything as the machine carries out its programming to evolve through killing as many people as possible. With a cross-shaped jewel on his deformed hand transforming into a giant claw, Allen is able to destroy the creature and free the soul inside.

Of course, D.Gray-man is not the first story to use the perversion of the wish to bring someone back to life as a central narrative device, but what I like about this show is how it takes advantage of the audience's recognition of that familiarity in order to establish a sense of scale. There are bound to be hundreds of thousands of people on this planet that might do anything to see their loved ones again, and the fact that we have a being who is basically amassing an army off of that grief is as simple to understand as it is impactful. In fact, in its later episodes, D.Gray-man drops us in the middle of a war that the good guys are arguably playing catch-up on, almost as if the show is leading with the idea that it's easier for people to fall into despair than it is for people to fight against it. I think it's very telling that the only thing that can destroy these machines is a power known as Innocence.

Allen Walker wants to be an exorcist and joins an organization hell-bent on taking down the Millennium Earl. The first quarter of the series is basically a bunch of mini adventures as Allen travels the world alongside fellow exorcists that make up the main cast in search of other pieces of Innocence. We have Yu Kanda, the swordsman with a permanent scowl, Lenalee Lee, the caring young woman with mountains of compassion, and Lavi, the goofball with hidden agendas. It's a typical set of personalities for these types of stories, but the fact that everyone is bound by some idea of loss or longing ties things together well thematically. In fact, the whole organization feels more and more like a home each time our heroes return to it after an adventure. Even if the first half is plagued with filler material that wasn't in the original manga, I didn't mind as much since every little story focusing on the rest of the exorcists gave me a stronger sense of everything that was at stake. Despite seeing so much death and despair, you really do get the sense that the good guys are bound together by a desire to make sure others don't suffer the same way that they have.

This holy energy Innocence appears to be sentient and can cause a variety of supernatural phenomena. They can possess items, influence people and the environment, or all of the above. The show does a good job of setting a mysterious tone and depicting supernatural phenomena in creative ways, and this is further enhanced by a soundtrack that sounds like something right out of old horror movies. The fact that Innocence can also cause suffering to other people also lends some interesting nuance to these supposedly holy entities. They aren't always doing universal good; it just depends on whose hands they're in.

Honestly, I think my favorite mini-arc from this beginning section is probably The Vampire of the Old Castle, which acts as a perfect encapsulation of what exactly the good guys are fighting for amidst the muddy gray area of death and sorrow that the show has established. The whole thing is sort of an homage to Count Dracula with one character, Arystar, clearly being inspired by the classic design. He thinks he's an actual vampire because every night he feels the urge to go out and drink human blood. However, we find out that the "people" that he's drinking from are Akuma in disguise, and that his teeth are actually made up of Innocence which instinctively seek out Akuma to kill, even if Arystar doesn't know that yet. It's a pretty unique and fascinating concept that both plays with something familiar and puts a unique modern twist on it that fits within the confines of this world's rules.

However, what elevates this arc for me personally is the emotional aspect of Alystar also being in love with a woman who happens to be an Akuma. Now while Akuma are basically machines that are powered by tortured souls, they can evolve and are able to gain sentience while also changing their physical appearance. Do these machines actually have minds of their own or are they just things driven by their instincts, kind of like how Alystar was driven to suck the blood of those Akuma that he thought were people? Surprisingly, the show really does entertain the possibility that these two could've probably lived a nice life together if they weren't literal instruments of this war, and I like that. None of this is reinventing the wheel or anything, but it strikes an emotional cord and lends some hefty dramatic weight to a relatively simple premise that still ties into that idea of grief and loss.

Another thing that I think keeps everything anchored is the fact that we primarily see things through the perspective of our soft boy protagonist, Allen. The amount of shit this poor child has been through is staggering, and you just want to give the boy a hug at the end of almost every episode because even when he wins, it almost always feels like a pyrrhic victory. This is a kid who grew up on the streets, lost his paternal father figure, was cursed, and was ostracized from people due to the Innocence in his arm making him look like a monster. If that wasn't enough, the fact that he is the only one able to see the actual soul inside of these Akuma means that he is literally witnessing tortured souls every time he completes a job. One of my favorite moments in the entire series is towards the end when an Akuma evolves to a version that looks almost like a baby angel and when Allen tries to see what the soul inside of it looks like, he ends up throwing up. It's established that the soul inside the Akuma becomes more twisted as the machine evolves, but we the audience don't get to see what Allen saw.

Then we find out that Allen might not even be his own person! So The Millennium Earl has a family called Noah who all appear to be humans that are connected to God and the actual Noah from the story of Noah's Ark. After a few of those aforementioned mini adventures, the series focuses on these guys being the main antagonists with a stronger focus on biblical lore. Turns out Allen had a Noah implanted inside of him and needs to fight for possession of his own body while also making both sides of this war wary of him. It's possible that the show is going for a sort of Jesus allegory to coincide with the abundance of religious references, but even if Allen and the rest of his friends are arguably agents of God, I wouldn't say that Allen is infallible. He does still make mistakes and loses just as many fights as he wins throughout the show. I think the series does a good job of establishing that he is not invincible, he just has really bad luck which puts him directly in the line of fire of all of the show's major players, which humanizes him and really makes me want to see him succeed even though the odds of that happening feel like they get lower with each passing arc.

The anime simplifies the designs of the original manga, and I would be fine with that if it led to more instances of animation fluidity. However, animation-wise, the D.Gray-man anime isn't anything impressive, which was pretty standard for a long-running series at the time this show was airing. There are a lot of off-model shots and still frames that take away from the sense of speed and power in the action. There are some nice still frames when it comes to establishing the uncomfortable nature of the Earl and the Noah, but we don't get those scenes till much later on in the series. Things do get a lot flashier in the second half: attacks have more weight behind them, the designs of the Akuma become much more varied and menacing, and we even get more unique powers from the Exorcists as well as the Noah themselves. I would say the fight between Allen and Tyki Mikk is a highlight in particular.

Besides its early unremarkable presentation, the biggest issue with the D.Gray-man anime is the fact that it arguably ended up overreaching, being more interested in introducing twists that end up taking attention away from other plot points. The most egregious example of this is the Heart, which is considered to be a piece of Innocence that could change the tide of the war. It becomes the thing that both sides are vying for, with the Earl trying to destroy all pieces of Innocence hoping that one of them is the Heart, while the organization tries to acquire it so that they can win the war. This is the clearest goal set up early on in the series during those aforementioned mini adventures. There is a pretty solid mystery revolving around what exactly this Heart is and where it might be. There are actually an impressive amount of gotcha moments in the show where we think that something might be the heart or at the very least connected to it, only for it to potentially be something else. This keeps us guessing and I like that, but after a certain point, it felt like the show was taking advantage of the vagueness of what exactly Innocence is in order to handwave the clues that lead us to think where the Heart might be. Then the questions start piling up with no answers as the story gets bogged down by other plot points that suddenly make the Heart feel less important. Oh no, Allen got his Heart pierced and his arm destroyed! But wait, his Innocence evolved and saved his life by fixing his Heart. Cool, does that mean Allen's innocence was the Heart the whole time? Well…maybe! Oh look at that over there!

You get the sense that the creator, Katsura Hoshino, wanted to create a lore-rich narrative that will slowly unravel over the course of this war and all of these plot points would tie back into this one solid idea. However, because the series isn't done and the writer arguably took way too much time in establishing those plot points, what we are left with is a show that basically leaves you hanging with everything but the kitchen sink and you have no idea when you're going to be able to put everything together. That's a shame, because the lore is interesting, but just when you feel like the show is going to elaborate on those plot points, it sort of just introduces a new piece of lore to spend a significant amount of time on instead.

Honestly, I'd rather the anime take a break and then revisit those ideas later instead of trying to go for some kind of messy anime original ending that tried to tie everything together. However, it doesn't change the fact that the best way to describe D.Grey-Man is that it's incomplete. It's a bunch of interesting ideas and world-building with a solid heart that doesn't get the opportunity to reach its full potential. Even though D.Grey-Man doesn't do anything particularly new or inventive with the shounen formula, I can see why it was popular at the time and why some people might still hold out hope that the series will actually reach a conclusion in either manga or animated form. Due to the writer's poor health, the series had changed magazines and went on hiatus numerous times. Naturally I would love for the creator to prioritize their own well-being over their job, but it would be nice if the series did reach a proper conclusion at some point in the near future. This is a series that recognizes the tropes that it's playing with but uses them to establish a rather unique world that is both capable of creating a large-scale underdog story on top of telling emotionally rich bite-size stories. Allen Walker is an endearing protagonist that I want to see have a happy ending and it's just a shame that we won't get a chance to fully see an end to all the suffering that he sees every day.