I’ve put off starting the “Zeno-hen” OVAs for so long it’s gotten kind of comical.  There are a bunch of reasons for this, some of which I understand and some I probably don’t.  First among them is that these are the last Akatsuki no Yona anime we’re ever going to see, almost surely, and that makes me want to delay the moment.  But there’s also the fact that the part of the story depicted here is incredibly painful – brilliant, but difficult to read (never mind watch).  But as the man said about the wine, there’s no point in saving it for a special occasion because with a wine like that, whenever you open it is the special occasion.

I really do hold Akatsuki no Yona in that level of esteem.  The anime is fantastic, some of the best work Studio Pierrot has ever done.  And the manga is even better if anything, because it just keeps building on its legacy of brilliant plot construction and character development.  There’s not much point in me doing a traditional episodic post, given that we’re so far past the release date on these OVAs that anyone interested in watching them probably did so long ago.  But I wanted to at least make note that I’ve finally taken the plunge, though exactly when I’ll watch the second “Zeno” OVA I can’t say for sure.

If any character was shortchanged in the anime adaptation of Akatsuki no Yona, it was certainly Zeno.  It’s not through any shortcoming of the adaptation – it’s simply a matter of where it stopped.  At that point we knew much more about everyone else in the core cast than we did about Zeno, so he came off as kind of a lightweight character.  Nothing could be further from the truth, as this arc proves, but Yoneda-sensei and his team never even tried to explore this route in the TV version, knowing they simply didn’t have time.  It was a painful choice, but certainly the right one.

If you know Zeno’s backstory, you don’t need to hear my nattering about it.  And if you don’t you shouldn’t really be reading this anyway.  I’ll just say that few arcs in manga have every made me change the way I feel about a character the way this one did with Zeno.  A close reading of this arc certainly offers some clues about where the main plotline of Akatsuki no Yona may eventually be headed, but mostly it’s about Zeno – about a man who’s given up far more than any man should ever have to, who carries more on his back than any man should be able to, and smiles far more than any man with his life story should ever be inclined to.

I’ve read a lot of high fantasy manga and watched plenty of high fantasy anime, and there’s just not much out there that holds a candle to Akatsuki no Yona.  You can call it shoujo because of where it’s published (and that makes it about the best shoujo fantasy there is), but it’s meaningless in my view – this series transcends demographic labels and generally disdains demographic tropes.  It’s just a first-rate fantasy epic that happens to have a female main character.  Whatever you wish to call it this series is an absolute classic, and even if we never see more of it in anime form, it continues to set the standard for fantasy manga.