Revenger – 12 (End) and Series Review

Here are a couple things I know after almost 12 years of writing about anime:

• There are times when I’m simply not going to agree with the general zeitgeist, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
• When it comes to the very popular – be they writers, studios, or something else – very often my favorites are among their least popular works.

I don’t know if it’s fair to talk about Urobuchi Gen as if he were a power player in anime these days – his name doesn’t have the cachet it used to.  But he’s written some extremely powerful and influential stuff – influential to the point where he’s sort of become a sub-genre of his own, with many imitators inhabiting it.  What I find is that Urobuchi seems most engaged these days when he’s doing the least “anime” projects – be they Chinese puppet series, or homages to old jidaigeki dramas like Hissatsu Shigotonin.  And engagement is everything with Urobutcher, who even at his commercial peak tended to check out long before one of his series was finished.

He didn’t check out with Revenger – not in my opinion.  As I said in last week’s post, the advantage of original anime in the hands of a good writer is that they can craft a story to fit the schedule it inhabits.  I never got the sense that there were any asspulls or U-turns with this show – Urobuchi wrote it in its entirety, knew how it would start, progress, and end.  He was free from the constraints of anime tropes in a way that clearly liberated him, and the end product was as much a slightly stylized live-action drama in style as it was anime.  That – along with Futamata Jun’s gorgeous soundtrack – worked splendidly for me.

If anything I’m reminded of Mars Red here.  Not so much by the material itself, though both share a very non-traditional approach to anime.  It’s more about the reception, which amounted more than anything to widespread indifference.  My esteem for both series is vastly out of step with both their popularity and widespread opinion.  Mars Red is the better of the two series to be sure, and even more non-traditional (as befits a show adapted from a staged reading).  But Revenger is awfully, awfully good – and it remained true to itself (and its creator) right till the end.

In that sense, it probably wouldn’t have been unrealistic to expect an “everybody dies” ending – I certainly didn’t discount the possibility, though I wouldn’t say I expected it.  Raizou has, as Sada said, been looking for a place to die for pretty much the entire series.  I suppose it would have been a greater penance for him to go on living, as was reflected in his indifference towards creating any art that didn’t give vent to his anguish and guilt.  As to the others, that was an open question.  I don’t think Raizou was the only one prepared to die on the day of the final confrontation (in the end, he didn’t).  And I think what this amounts to for Yuuen and the others is a reprieve, not a pardon.

In point of fact, I strongly suspected that it would be Sute who would be the instrument of Raizou’s demise, though I was half-expecting it to be on that fateful night.  He disappeared from the screen in such a fashion that it was clear his role in the story was not finished.  That story found Yuuen and Nio going to Shishido’s villa to deal with that half of Liu’s revenge, while the others went to the island where Sada and his team awaited them.  Both settings were rather gripping in their own way, though there was more certitude about the outcome with Yuuen and Nio.

The most revealing moment of that storyline for me was Nio’s reaction to the death of Shishido’s tiger, on some level the first real sign of compassion we’ve seen from him.  This whole scene was the Reben-ji with the mask ripped off.  There was no art or artifice to it – it was mass-produced slaughter, the logical end product of what they do.  There were no room for anything else, and no pretending that all those people – simply hired hands, no more – deserved their fate any more than the tiger did.  Shishido is evil in a way the Reben-ji are not, undeniably.  But the path they’ve chosen is one way (I’ve said that before, too).  Maybe it’s bleakly hopeful that Nio – the youngest and most cold-hearted among them – is capable of feeling empathy for anything, even if it’s not another person.

On the island, it simply comes down to the fact that the Reben-ji are better than Sada’s men.  Maybe it’s because they’re fighting for a cause of sorts, something more than money anyway.  Any sense of idealism rings hollow, but with Sada it truly could not be more detached and craven – it’s just about getting paid and the details don’t matter.  The strength Raizou found to complete the tasks came both from the fact that he was not prepared to let the world face what would happen if he failed, and because he truly harbored no ambition to survive.  He had both more to gain and less to lose than Sada, and that in the end was the difference.

The Reben-ji continue on, then – still in the service of Kanou, it seems, though there are no pretenses between them now.  But they do the unthinkable and break their oath – though in a sense they did “kill” Raizou, leaving Taishin in his place.  It’s interesting that Raizou finally met his end in the place where his part in this story really began, under that bridge – which makes me wonder if he went there with an intention to do just that.  Perhaps he never would have found the strength to end his life as a samurai, thinking himself undeserving of that – we’ll never know, thanks to Sute.

This was a fascinating and sad tale, start, middle, and end.  I don’t know if there was really any difference between the Reben-ji and Sada’s group in the end, apart from their self-perception.  But it’s undeniable that there exists a bond between these men, and Nio too.  They were complicated human beings in a complicated world, where morality was opaque and Urobuchi’s obsession with consequentialism was put to the test.  Revenger spared us the histrionics and anime cliches and told its story in its own way and at its own pace, resisting the lure of offering easy answers.  In an era where original anime are rarely worthy of the name, it was a breath of fresh air and a welcome outlier.