This Week in Anime

Was the Zodiac War Worth Fighting For?

Jacob
SOMEONE hasn't been skipping leg day.

Yeah, he and all his new "friends" deserved a better show.

Except these douchebags, they deserve what they got:

The fact that they got two focus episodes and Rabbit got zero sums up several of Zodiac War's problems already.

Sweet, I guess we can have our own little Zodiac War then. We'll battle over whether the show worth your time or not.

Jacob, Warrior of Enter-taint-ment, killing with rhetoric and rant!

Well you know what they say, last to arrive first to...die?

And so the pattern continues for the rest of the show. Right from the beginning, you know how it's going to middle and end. I was not in love with this choice for a number of reasons. So, saying that genres have "rules" isn't entirely true. It's storytelling, rules exist to be broken. But if you're breaking a rule, you should probably do it for a reason that works for your audience. That said, here are the "rules" of a killing game story that Zodiac War breaks.

1) -Not knowing who's going to go next- As we mentioned, it's reverse zodiac order (with the exception of Snake who dies before the story starts because why not pointlessly break your own rules too), so that basic appeal is out.
2) -Having a stake in who wins for what reason, which may change over time depending on how alliances shift and characters develop- It's established right away that this is a proxy war between parties we never learn about, so it doesn't really matter who wins beyond the warriors' personal motivations. That would be fine, but most of these warriors aren't given a compelling reason to win, and the majority are even deliberately flat and unsympathetic.
3) -Twist surrounding the climax that changes the stakes or what beating the game means for the participants- This doesn't really happen either. The game's function remains straightforward until the end, and we don't ever learn much about it to begin with except that it serves the interests of unknown shadow governments.

Basically, this is a battle royale story that is probably not going to please battle royale fans and kinda seems like it was not even written with them in mind. So what is it aiming to do? And does it accomplish that? These become the new questions, and I'm still not sure of the answer to the first one, so my answer to the second one is "I don't think so".

Yeah, that holds up! I don't like Nisio, and I don't like this anime.

It's mostly frustrating because there are things that I like about the show. The character designs are excellent. There's some great compelling imagery, creative concepts for weird warrior superpowers, that kinda thing.

Crows haunting zombies, that's a cool shot.

And crows carrying stick grenades, that's pretty rad!

But it doesn't come together in a satisfying way, it deliberately becomes less surprising or engaging as it goes (again, the complete opposite of intended killing game story momentum), and I don't particularly care for what Nisio was (I think?) trying to say through it, which is all delivered at the end through blunt monologue instead of being threaded thematically through the fights themselves. But I'll get into that later, I'm curious what you liked most about it.

It is certainly a highlight.

The philosophical stuff didn't work for me because Nisio's style of discourse is usually not my speed. I thought his ideas in this show were cliche and underdeveloped. But that's okay, you can have that in splatterfest entertainment, it was his style of dialogue that particularly killed the momentum of a killing game. I feel like this was just not his genre as a guy who tends to bludgeon you with redundant prose, because jesus christ will these fighters STOP DESCRIBING WHAT I CAN SEE HAPPENING ONSCREEN ALL THE TIME.

The most egregious moment is when we spend an entire episode with Sheep detailing all his plans for potentially negotiating with other characters (some of whom are already dead and he doesn't know). We hear every little detail of his A plans and B plans for winning the game, wasting maybe ten minutes of time before Tiger just kills him because he underestimated her. And that doesn't have much thematic resonance because regardless of their personality, basically everyone gets killed by unpredictable surprise or generic underestimation in this thing. It doesn't even fit Monkey's character for that to happen to her, but that's just how she ends up going!

I guess I chafe against the idea that just portraying a meaningless war is the same as communicating a message about the meaninglessness of war, which is very different and takes a great deal more effort and nuance. I don't think that Nisio succeeded in the latter, I think he just succeeded at the former.

As a fan of the battle royale genre myself, I think you can write a killing game story to convey a message of hope, even one that rejects the killing game as pointless and frames the combatants as allies in humanity against a true oppressor. The Hunger Games did it, Danganronpa did it, the best killing game stories that speak to people for the longest time do that very well. Zodiac War isn't really interested in doing that, as exemplified by who wins the war and what he spends his wish on.

So this is Rat. He's a real charmer.

Unlike the participants, he's not especially motivated by anything in life, but he has the Dark Souls-esque power of trying out endless (okay 100) possibilities until one sticks. So he's guaranteed to win the war, the process is just going to be very unpleasant for him.

Sure, but this is the problem I run into with Nisio's work a lot, which is that it might be interesting in a vacuum but doesn't bear much relevance to real-world issues—that would be fine if he wasn't trying to write about real-world conflicts, but he definitely is. I think the term for this phenomenon is "too clever by half."

Basically, Juni Taisen is only clever in an "elaborate shaggy-dog-length pun" sort of way. Rat wins by "riding Ox (and Monkey) to the finishing line", but I'm not sure what Nisio is trying to say through that.

Is it that wars are won by people who don't care about them? That isn't true. Neither are fictional killing games. Rat only won because he had a superpower, which technically required him to give a shit against his will.

And if that superpower is supposed to be Super Anxiety, (it's at least an accurate term for how it affects him), what is Nisio trying to say about that? I'm honestly not sure. Rat is made happy by deciding to care even less about the world than he did before. Is true happiness supposed to be not giving a shit about anything? Wouldn't this conclusion be more striking if it were given to someone who started out by caring too much instead of too little?

It's all too clever by half all the time, and it's hard to relate to or pull anything meaningful from besides Nisio once again writing a story where he elevates some asshole teenager whose passivity is rewarded by everyone pretending it's interesting I guess? I DON'T GET IT. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Eh, I don't need twelve episodes of weird poorly-written anticlimax to tell me that war is bad without really exploring why. I just want a compelling story, themes or no themes, and Zodiac War didn't quite get there. Although TWO EPISODES spent on the slither twins certainly didn't help.

That Adobe AfterEffects fire package...

I guess if I could throw out a wish for the show to be something, anything else that's not too ambitious and wouldn't detract from the "fighting is bad" thing, it would be more focus on that intended character stuff, which I found very weak. The last episode begins to approach this, but doesn't really follow through on because Rat doesn't care about anybody. But I like the show's largely untapped idea that you can't judge any of these guys based on appearances. The story only uses this to surprise someone with a superpower or hidden knowledge that leads to a death, but I would've liked for it to have more thematic resonance.

Because all those little throwaway surprises at the end were great! I laughed out loud at most of them.

(Boar's wish was pretty #relatable lbr)

But I felt like the show didn't really do anything with it because what, empathy? Not in this show!

If this show gets a continuation of any kind, I want to know what happened in the JUNI TAISEN IN SPACE.

Because holy shit there was a juni taisen IN SPACE

Uggggh, Nisio.

I'm tellin ya, Too Clever By Half.