CHRONO CRUSADE (2003-04)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological, metaphysical*

Some time has passed since I read the eight-volume collection of the 1998-2004 manga series CHRONO CRUSADE, but assorted online essays have made clear that the one-season anime adaptation did not follow the manga closely. Concept-creator Daisuke Moriyama was not involved in the project, and the anime was in production before the manga had been completed, so that the writers at Studio Gonzo evidently felt free to follow their own course in some particulars.

The protagonists and their general situation are essentially the same. In both media, CRUSADE takes place in “Roaring Twenties” America, albeit with some major alternate-world changes, and it’s one of the few Japanese manga to sport no Asian characters at all, only Caucasian Americans and Europeans. In this alternate world, demons are known by all to be real phenomena (though the anime’s interpretation of their nature swerves from that of the manga). In response to the demons’ depredations, a special interfaith organization, the Order of the Magdalene, came into being roughly at the same time as the Protestant Revolution. (Liner notes claim that the Order is dominantly Protestant, despite the fact that most of the members run around in outfits clearly based on the garb of Catholic priests and nuns.)

The most ferocious of the Order’s “killer nuns” is Sister Rosette Christopher. Rosette, despite the pronounced Christian associations of both her names, proves to be a thoroughly extroverted woman whose conduct utterly contravenes the expectations of real-world nuns, whether she’s vaulting into demon-fighting battles with guns blazing or crushing on her slightly older priest-perceptor. In addition, she has a peculiar relationship with her male partner Chrono, who assists her in demon-slaying even though he himself is a demon. Despite his true nature, Chrono is the more passive partner, looking on with incredulity as the rowdy Rosette pursues her mission with often comical results.

Despite this “odd couple” vibe, tragedy underlines the bond between raucous nun and passive demon. In her younger years, Rosette was the older sister to her sickly brother Joshua. (The choice of a name that’s a variant on “Yeshua/Jesus” is probably no coincidence.) Then one day the two young people encounter Chrono, cast out from demon-kind for having opposed the will of their master Aion. The mortals’ friendship with Chrono costs them. When Aion cast out Chrono, he broke off Chrono’s horns, a major source of every demon’s power. Aion then decides to make a demonic pact with Joshua, who desires to transcend his weak body, so that Joshua takes on Chrono’s horns and becomes Aion’s pawn in his far-reaching plot to efface the boundaries between Heaven and Earth. Rosette vows to join the Order to defeat Aion and to save her brother, but she too needs more than mortal power. Thus she makes a demon-contract with Chrono to make use of his powers, though every time he does so, that usage shortens Rosette’s life-span. (The names of both Chrono and Aion are derived from archaic deities associated with the phenomenon of time.)

CRUSADE, despite being chock-full of Christian images and themes, does not have a specifically Christian message a la C.S. Lewis. There are some sobering meditations on mortality amid all of the hard-hitting shonen violence and titillation, but Moriyama probably could have put across the same content using any belief-system. Since the characters wear quasi-Catholic attire but are not explicitly Catholics, Moriyama may only have wanted to play upon the associations of Catholicism with respect to expelling demons, ranging from the 1897 DRACULA to the 1972 EXORCIST. At the same time, in my initial reading I found the manga a little too haphazard in terms of its mythopoeic virtues. During the final arc Moriyama introduces the odd notion that the demons have some sort of extraterrestrial lineage. For me this undermines the mythopoeic scheme of the earlier stories. It makes conceptual sense to banish demons with bullets dipped in “holy oil.” Aliens—not so much.

Because the CRUSADE anime is more concentrated on its plot-arcs than the manga, I find that it qualifies as one of the few serial programs that manages to sustain a mythopoeic concrescence, as seen previously in CLAYMORE and in AEONFLUX. Of particular interest is the “changeling trope,” in which Chrono is symbolically exchanged for Joshua. On one hand, Chrono becomes a “substitute brother” for Rosette, in that she constantly bullies him or bosses him around during their demon-killing expeditions. On the other, their relationship takes the form of a tragic “woman and her demon lover” trope, since their very closeness, despite their growing attraction, spells doom for Rosette. Yet though the anime’s conclusion is somewhat more hurried than that of the manga, both versions of CRUSADE are successful in showing the main characters’ acceptance of their fate, and through that fate, their role in redeeming the fallen world.