GUILTY CROWN (2011)

 

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

If I hadn't known while watching this two-season anime show was an original TV production, I might have assumed that a lot of the narrative lacunae stemmed from the writers dropping out segments from a slower-moving manga or prose series. Instead, I think the flaws of pacing and character development came about from the writers trying to cram too much into the show's 22 episodes. That said, the writers did manage to bring the entire concept to a mostly satisfying close, in marked contrast to such "left-up-in-the-air" adaptations as NISEKOI and HEAVEN'S LOST PROPERTY. 

The story commences with a seemingly ordinary Japanese high school student, Shu Ouma, who lives in a Japan subjected to a humiliating fate. Ten years previous, an outbreak known as the Apocalypse Virus originates in Japan, and other Earth-nations place the nation under their control in order to manage the virus. The other nations are not specified, though one broad characterization looks American, and it seems likely that the scripters had in mind some parallels with the Commodore Perry intrusion upon Japan's sovereignty. An organization named the GHQ uses its medically based, UN-derived authority to usurp control of Japan, and its agents and their mecha-- respectively "Anti Bodies" and "Endlaves"-- are none too gentle about enforcing their will. An anti-GHQ organization, Funeral Parlor, appears to oppose this rule by outsiders.

Shu accidentally gets mixed up with Funeral Parlor when he meets Inori, a pop-singer who's one of the Parlor's agents. She entrusts him with a genome-weapon stolen from GHQ, but Shu triggers the weapon so as to infect himself. He develops the unique power to draw "Voids" out of other human beings, which are energy-manifestations that look like physical objects-- a sword, shears, even healing bandages. Shu then can then wield these objects against the enemies of Japan, so Funeral Parlor pressures the high-schooler to join. Shu gets involved partly because of his attraction to Inori, but he really wants to live an ordinary life. Funeral Parlor's leader is the demanding Gai, with whom Shu butts heads, but he's drawn into friend-like relationships with such ensemble-characters as courageous paraplegic Ayase and freaky hacker Tsugumi. Some of Shu's high-school acquaintances also become part of the ensemble, though they become more significant in the show's second season.

The most mythic aspect of CROWN is its concept of Voids, which are generated from the soulfulness of whatever human they're taken from. For many years I've noted that anime and manga make substantial use of a trope in which human beings get turned into weapons, conspicuous in the 2003 manga BECAUSE I'M THE GODDESS.  In CROWN, since the weapons are expressions of people's heart-deep feelings, Shu becomes the conduit through which young Japanese people assert themselves against the foreign powers, which embrace their rule of Japan with too much gusto. 

At the same time, Shu's head is uneasy now that he wears "the crown" of responsibility for his people's fate. One episode of the second season, in which Shu and his friends (including the Funeral Parlor agents, masquerading as students) hole up at school when GHQ turns up the heat. Briefly Shu almost does a Paul Atreides, becoming a petty tyrant because of the death of a woman who loves him (but whose love he didn't return). The writers get him out of that funk rather quickly, but I give them credit for giving the "nice ordinary guy" some potential for corruption.

On the matter of the protagonist's ordinary nature, the first season drops hints that he isn't really so quotidian, particularly since his adoptive mother works in genome studies. The end of the first season reveals that Inori is actually an android who is supposed to be the receptacle for the first victim of the Apocalypse Virus, and that said victim is none other than-- Shu's older sister Mana, whom Shu conveniently forgets for most of the first season. The second season burrows even deeper into the strange triangle between Shu, Gai and Inori/Mana, but overall I enjoyed the hyper-dramatics, since they were grounded within a concrescent application of psychology and sociology.