Ruin Explorer
Legend
So Bleach is possibly my favourite anime ever, certainly for a certain value of favourite, and er assuming you skip some entire seasons.
So I was excited when I found out the guy who created it, and who isn't responsible for the bad seasons (they're filler), had done another manga that was set in the same universe, but in London (!!! the previous one was set in a small city in Japan and honestly raised a lot of totally unanswered questions about the rest of the world) and which was new-ish, called Burn The Witch.
Unfortunately...
Burn The Witch is pretty bad. For two main reasons:
1) The main characters are a non-entity (the lead!), a shrieking zero-charm sex pest, and "angry blonde anime girl: the stereotype".
Bleach had a really charming central pair in Ichigo and Rukia (who as a bonus, weren't romantically entangled), both with strong, clear personalities, both good-hearted and likeable but also at odds frequently. They had a nuclear ton of other characters most of whom were at least interesting. One stood out as dire - Kon, an animated stuffed toy who was also a sex pest and shrieked constantly. Dire but you just skipped any episode centered on him (which was very few). Some were a little weaker, like Ichigo's quasi-girlfriend Orohime, whose personality traits were basically "pleasant and soft-spoken" and "boobs" (she developed a bit over time, but never had the real arc you might expect despite going through insane peril, having unique and supposedly amazing powers, and fighting off some of the peril herself. Indeed her powers practically made her a "Potential Man"-type in a story which already had one with Hitsugaya).
And so who are the main characters here? Yes, it's a human boy who is basically Kon in human form, a creepy little guy with zero relatability, great, amazing, good work. And the lead? Why it's basically Orohime again, right down to "boobs" being her second main personality trait after "soft-spoken". There is a third character, but who most resembles another weaker Bleach character, Hiyori, in that she's a small very angry blonde girl who also complains and hits people constantly.
2) A perfect demonstration of how mindless-seeming "subverting expectations" can undermine your entire story and vibe.
In Bleach, they always, without fail, end up talking to their opponents (even if they kill them after that, though they often don't), and engaging with them, and it's half the charm and interest. In Burn The Witch, they just kill often-beautiful, sentient dragons, over and over, and repeatedly lampshade the fact that they're not talking to them, not trying to negotiate, not trying to reason with them - two characters do try, and they're just mocked and sneered at by their allies. But because the dragons are amazing, and seemingly fully sentient, this seems very weird and not in a good way (especially as they apparently use their body parts after they're dead, which brings in whaling comparisons).
Now, given the writer, it's entirely possible he's playing a long game and that we will find the people who want to kill the dragons are actually bad (not the main characters but the people in charge of them), and that the situation is more complex, but it's a very bad first impression because it looks like aggressive peeing on audience expectations, and makes the sneering main characters look kind of despicable, and it's lampshaded so hard and without any subtlety at all.
So I was excited when I found out the guy who created it, and who isn't responsible for the bad seasons (they're filler), had done another manga that was set in the same universe, but in London (!!! the previous one was set in a small city in Japan and honestly raised a lot of totally unanswered questions about the rest of the world) and which was new-ish, called Burn The Witch.
Unfortunately...
Burn The Witch is pretty bad. For two main reasons:
1) The main characters are a non-entity (the lead!), a shrieking zero-charm sex pest, and "angry blonde anime girl: the stereotype".
Bleach had a really charming central pair in Ichigo and Rukia (who as a bonus, weren't romantically entangled), both with strong, clear personalities, both good-hearted and likeable but also at odds frequently. They had a nuclear ton of other characters most of whom were at least interesting. One stood out as dire - Kon, an animated stuffed toy who was also a sex pest and shrieked constantly. Dire but you just skipped any episode centered on him (which was very few). Some were a little weaker, like Ichigo's quasi-girlfriend Orohime, whose personality traits were basically "pleasant and soft-spoken" and "boobs" (she developed a bit over time, but never had the real arc you might expect despite going through insane peril, having unique and supposedly amazing powers, and fighting off some of the peril herself. Indeed her powers practically made her a "Potential Man"-type in a story which already had one with Hitsugaya).
And so who are the main characters here? Yes, it's a human boy who is basically Kon in human form, a creepy little guy with zero relatability, great, amazing, good work. And the lead? Why it's basically Orohime again, right down to "boobs" being her second main personality trait after "soft-spoken". There is a third character, but who most resembles another weaker Bleach character, Hiyori, in that she's a small very angry blonde girl who also complains and hits people constantly.
2) A perfect demonstration of how mindless-seeming "subverting expectations" can undermine your entire story and vibe.
In Bleach, they always, without fail, end up talking to their opponents (even if they kill them after that, though they often don't), and engaging with them, and it's half the charm and interest. In Burn The Witch, they just kill often-beautiful, sentient dragons, over and over, and repeatedly lampshade the fact that they're not talking to them, not trying to negotiate, not trying to reason with them - two characters do try, and they're just mocked and sneered at by their allies. But because the dragons are amazing, and seemingly fully sentient, this seems very weird and not in a good way (especially as they apparently use their body parts after they're dead, which brings in whaling comparisons).
Now, given the writer, it's entirely possible he's playing a long game and that we will find the people who want to kill the dragons are actually bad (not the main characters but the people in charge of them), and that the situation is more complex, but it's a very bad first impression because it looks like aggressive peeing on audience expectations, and makes the sneering main characters look kind of despicable, and it's lampshaded so hard and without any subtlety at all.
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