This Week in Anime

Does Gen Urobuchi's Name Mean Anything Anymore?

Chris
Nick, I know that Steve and Nicky just discussed Yoko Taro and his odd love of puppetry. And that got me thinking, why don't we check in this season with anime's other master of puppets?

Yes, you might not know it, but ol' Boochy the Rock has a new series out this season centered on one of those most primal acts immortalized in storytelling: That of the Revenger.

No relation to the concurrent Tokyo variety. This probably only increases how much Urobuchi's new show has been overshadowed.

It says a lot that the primary reaction I, and others in my periphery, had to Revenger's airing had less to do with its actual content and more provoked a simple semi-shrug of "Oh right, Urobuchi's got a new thing out." This is only...a little bit buck-wild when you consider what a major draw the man's name was considered seemingly only a few years ago.

Even in the early days, just as Madoka was getting started, Urobuchi's name still provoked interest in being attached to that anime project (I am pretty sure no one ever talked about Phantom: Requiem for the Phantom). At this point, he was mostly known for writing visual novels for Nitro+, like Saya no Uta, which was known in circles for its, let's just say, unique subject matter.

With that foreshadowing Madoka Magica's famous swerves, it's easy to see why he picked up such a discourse-worthy reputation.

It's true! For several years after Madoka, it seemed like just announcing him as a writer attached to something worked as a promotional gimmick. Speaking as someone who was there, I still remember the fervor in 2013 when it came out that Toei would let the Madoka Magica guy write the next Kamen Rider.

Immediately there were questions of what kind of grimdark twists Urobuchi would include in this Sunday-morning kids' show. And while Kamen Rider Gaim did go to some rather dark, surprising places, in retrospect, a lot of it wasn't anything that hadn't been seen in other, earlier entries.

Hey, now, that's a reductive description that shortchanges the inherent drama of the series.

There are also Pokémon battles.

Absolutely not. These are serious fruit-lock dance-stage monster battles waged by Armored Riders acting out stories with depth worthy of being broadcast on HBO over here.

Indeed, for the time, the deployment of The Booch worked. That year, the turnout for Kamen Rider cosplayers, particularly of the Gaim variety, was huge at my go-to anime convention. And that's for this weird Japanese Power Rangers thing that was way more niche in 2013 than it is now. So you can imagine how red-hot this writer's reputation was when applied as a promotional tool to other series of the era.

That point where a creator is credited with "Story Concept" apart from any actual episode scripts, though Urobuchi did at least contribute the first and last ones for Gargantia. And yeah, I recall a lot of discussion around that one as it was airing, including people trying to suss out if Gargantia would feature a defining "twist," like Madoka or Saya no Uta. It probably says a lot that the primary audience takeaway was "Chamber is the goodest robot boy ever."

The man does love dismantling the dehumanizing effects of abusive systems, and praising Gargantia for the bits that benefitted from Urobuchi not being the only writer is interesting. Slapping his name on a series as a selling point but outsourcing the actual writing to other parties is generally credited as where things go astray, IE: All of Psycho-Pass after the first season.

And right around that period, you see that pattern of Urobuchi, or at least his name, being utilized in the way I mentioned earlier. Game/anime franchises that no one talks about anymore, like Gunslinger Stratos, where he's just credited with the "Original Scenario." The disastrous Chaos Dragon, where one of its selling points was that Boochy played one of the characters in the source tabletop campaign. Heck, just last year, you and I looked at RWBY: Ice Queendom, which promoted itself with Urobuchi on "Animation Concept," seemingly to get people talking about "A RWBY anime by the Madoka Magica writer?!"

I mean, it's not like he wasn't keeping busy. I certainly don't begrudge the man for hopping off to fall in love with a whole new medium and indulging in multiple seasons of an interconnected universe of puppet violence.

But as much as we all (including Urobuchi himself) love Thunderbolt Fantasy, his level of engagement with it only stands out compared to the anime projects bearing his name from the same time. "Gen Urobuchi" had become but a brand name, a franchise akin to "Tom Clancy," whose creations can be smashed together like action figures in crossover fighting games.

I can't believe he got help from two other writers on Bubble, and that movie still felt as thin as it did.

Though to Urobuchi's, uh, "credit," Bubble was clearly a situation where production was trying to throw every big name they could get to will a blockbuster into being, so maybe that was just a case of Too Many Cooks. Even Hiroyuki Sawano sounds watered-down in that one.

Small wonder that after all that, when it was time to return to scripts for the small screen of TV anime, Urobuchi opted to continue with his Thunderbolt-style comfort zone of dudes with swords cutting each other up real good.

Even apart from my personal, critical feelings on the show, which I can get to in a bit, the response to Revenger clearly indicates how much the Urobuchi brand has slipped in just these last few years. Gone is the all-consuming chatter of Madoka Magica or the franchise-altering success of Fate/Zero, and in its place, you have...a show that hasn't gotten past #14 on our weekly rankings. An anime that has yet to crack the Top 10 once on Anitrendz.

Most damning, though? If you go and search, the series only fills up a partial page of Pixiv results!

It makes me glad I just made time for his Wooser's Hand-to-Mouth Life episode instead, even if that one only drove home how commodified Booch and his work had become by that point.

Concrete Revolutio is one I need to make time to go back and watch the back half of one of these days. That seems like the sandbox that would do well from bringing Urobuchi in to play as a guest for a session. Huh, I wonder if he would touch on foreign powers exerting their influence in any of his later works?

The Gin-Chan's Odd Jobs crew is looking a little off these days...

Jokes aside, though, Urobuchi has woven a plot twist into Revenger, and it's that this feels the most like an Urobuchi joint written by Urobuchi for Urobuchi in years.

As you said, it's not amazing by the standards of his more storied work, but there are clearly like, ideas and concepts he's playing with beyond just slapping his name on the scenario and including an eldritch girlfriend or someone becoming a god.

That's fair. I can feel myself checking out during any of its explanations of trade union politics or law enforcement jurisdiction manipulation. But then it will dip into the thing that is entirely my jam, relevant to this overall discussion of the man's work that led us here. That is the idea of the main ex-Samurai Raizo acting as a meta-textual examination of Urobuchi himself: Someone who's decided he doesn't want to be pigeonholed as the grimdark violence guy anymore and wants to explore expressing different artistic subject matter.

True, it's very much the concept I'm glomming onto with Revenger here (apart from the occasional cool scene of some dudes getting killed real good with gold leaf or kite strings). And reading it that way certainly begs the question of Urobuchi taking his own advice. It means we won't have an answer on that whole angle until the very end of the show. Or afterward, even as we wait to find out what he does after writing up all this revenge!

Careful there, you know how getting your hopes up in Urobuchi's works tends to go.