To be honest, I kind of forgot about Baraou no Souretsu in the avalanche of premieres these past two weeks.  I may have even thought it was a split cour for some reason, I’m not really sure – but I did a bit of a metaphorical spit-take when I realized my mistake.  Spring was always going to be a tough environment for this series to hang on – my time is limited and it has a lot more competition for it than it did in winter.  But I think too much for this show to drop it without a word, that’s for certain.

Yes, the lack of animation and even faces on much of the cast still bothers me.  More than ever, possibly.  It’s frustrating because Baraou is a series that does some really good things, and as preposterous as the story gets I still find it pretty compelling.  It’s an interesting mashup of written history, Shakespeare, original fancy and even bits and pieces from The True Tragedy of Richard III, the anonymously-written play that beat Bill the Bard to the presses by several years.  It deserves a better-produced adaptation than this, but this is the one we’re getting.

You would have expected there’d be a timeskip after the events of the first cour’s finale, and indeed there was.  The King now has a pair of young sons and has descended into a “fall of Rome” kind of sybaritic insanity.  George has gone full-on drunkard and embarrassed Edward to often he’s gotten himself demoted to Duke of Clarence (to Richard’s benefit).  As for our hero he has a son of his own – but both parents and I suspect much of the court knows that the real father is the late Edward Lancaster (Richard is decent to both mother and son in spite of this).  It’s implied (not least by George) that Richard and Anne have never been intimate.  And in Richard’s position, it’s hardly surprising he would make that choice.

The main new player here is a court lady named Jane (Kaida Yuko), who manoeuvers her way into the King’s bed and peddles her potions on him.  I’m assuming this is Jane Shore, who featured prominently in that “other” Richard III play and was an important figure (and certainly one of Edward’s mistresses) at the time these events happened.  The Duke of Buckingham is here too, all grown up and voiced by Sugita Tomokazu.  He’s still pushing for Richard to claim the throne for himself and may be in love with him now too because, well – everyone else is (including the King’s teenage daughter – and Catesby admits he is, too).

There’s a lot of fuffering about cursed doughnuts and orgies, but the essence of this is that George is so out of control he’s become a threat to the House of York and as usual, it falls to Richard to do the dirty work.  Buckingham is the one he asks to do it, and he concocts a plan to use George’s death to weaken the Woodvilles, against whom George provided a bit of a check and balance.  Edward sentences George to die, talks himself out of it, but George dies anyway at the hands of Buckingham’s assassin, James Tyrell (a name well known to anyone versed in the events depicted here).

What strikes me in watching all this is how sad and pathetic these people are, which is probably not far off the historical truth.  It’s all plots and murders and conspiracies, all for the sake of a circlet and a throne that’s really more of a poisoned chalice.  One thing that seems pretty clear is that Shakespeare did a real hatchet job on Richard III.  His slanderous portrayal has defined history’s view of Richard for more than four centuries, but the truth seems a lot more complicated.  It’s nice to see another fictional take that despite the bizarre slant it’s taken on Richard’s character, paints him in a much more sympathetic light.

I’m not sure whether I’ll keep covering Baraou no Souretsu regularly – both its progress and that of the new season will influence that decision,  I may stick with it, I may do intermittent posts, or just come back with a series review at the end – at this point any of those is possible.  I’ll certainly keep watching it though, and doing so rather wistfully as I think about what it might have been with a real adaptation from a different studio.