Claymore is the latest in a string of Action Girl oriented anime shows on our list. The equation of Girl + Weapon + Kickass = Awesome has led us to some nifty shows in recent weeks. I’ve already reported on Noir and Ergo Proxy, and still have yet to write about Witchblade. This week, the show I’m writing about is Claymore.

Claymore’s premise gets laid down within the first five minutes of the opening episode. It’s a fantasy series. In it, humans are plagued by a species of monster called Yoma. These beasts feed on human flesh and can take the form of people, blending in with their prey perfectly. The only defense against them are a sect of warriors called Claymores – human/yoma hybrids that wield swords and have special Yoma powers to augment their natural strengths. A fairly standard setting. Nothing jumped out at me as unique when I first looked at it.

Yet I took a huge amount of joy from this show. It wasn’t just the protagonist and her struggle that did it for me – although yes, Clare scratches all of those itches in the best possible way. It was the action sequences in general. All the sword-fighting scenes were vastly superior to basically everything I’ve seen in other shows. I found it thrilling. I was genuinely pumped watching them. I couldn’t explain it at first – it was more than just the sharp visuals. It took me a while to figure out why I liked them so much in this series.

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“Noir. It is the name of an ancient fate – two maidens who govern death. To the depths of Hell’s fire, their black souls lure the lost children…”

Noir is a series Becki and I have been looking at for a long time, but we’ve held off actually buying it because it was too expensive for our usual entertainment budget. So, when we saw the full series available for £30, we couldn’t resist getting it. It’s gotten consistently high reviews from other consumers at Amazon, and came recommended from some of Becki’s friends from university.

Also, there are girls, and they have guns. Sold!

Now, that by itself isn’t a recipe for success – we’d just failed to finish a girls-and-guns style series called ‘Najica: Blitz Tactics’ because it went way too over the top with the fan service and was just generally not that interesting. But, let’s be honest here, beautiful women with guns is usually pretty damned cool.

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I loved the character design in Ergo Proxy without even reading the blurb. Just look at the cover – a woman all dressed in black, wielding an enormous shotgun. She looks capable, hard, and cynical. She is pretty, but probably doesn’t know it. She exudes an unmistakable aura of ‘You Don’t Fuck With This.’ Win.

So, I was sold on that picture alone. It pushes basically all of the Awesome Buttons in my mind. Then I read the back of the DVD case and was intrigued further – post-apocalyptic sci-fi setting, badass female protagonist, dark secrets at the heart of humanity’s surviving cities. Okay. I am intrigued by this story and wish to subscribe to its newsletter.

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Noein.

Wow.

Okay. The first thing I’ll say is also probably the most important thing you should take away from this review: Noein is extremely good. It’s the best show we’ve seen so far, in fact. We got it on a whim, thanks to Amazon’s automated recommendations. I wasn’t too impressed with the plot teaser offered by the site, but it was rated well enough by fans of the genre and the price was right, so we decided to go ahead and try it.

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Jyu-Oh-Sei is a sci-fi series. In it, Earth is destroyed. Humanity’s remnants live in another star system and have terraformed all the planets in it. The story centers around a youth named Thor. He and his twin brother, Ry, live on a space station with their mother and father, both of whom work for the government. When their parents are assassinated, the boys are subdued and sent to a prison world called Chimera. Chimera is a brutal place, where dangerous plant life covers most of the planet’s surface and survival is a constant struggle. The humans that survive on this place – criminals already – are hard, strong, and merciless people who fight among themselves for the honor of becoming the Beast King, the strongest and most capable man on the planet. It is a coveted position because the Beast King is the only one who is allowed to leave Chimera.

Thor decides that his only chance to avenge his parents’ death is to become the Beast King and get off Chimera, but he’s just a boy. It’s a quest that takes years, and it’s this journey that’s the focal point of the story.

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When I watched Divergence Eve – the series that taught me the meaning of Fan Service – I thought I’d seen the limits of how far series writers were willing to take it. ‘Surely, it can’t get more overt and over-the-top than this,’ I thought.

Then we picked up This Ugly Yet Beautiful World.

Oh, how wrong I was.

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Until I watched Divergence Eve, the term ‘Fan Service’ was not in my lexicon. So when I read the words ‘Uber Fan-Servicey’ in one of the blurbs on the back, I had no idea what to expect.

Now I know.

(Spoilers follow.)

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My ongoing quest to learn to appreciate Anime has actually gotten off to a surprisingly good start. No, I’m not being sarcastic – Elfen Lied is surprisingly entertaining, despite its reliance on a few annoying clichés. With the aid of a few bottles of cider, it was easy to have fun with this series.

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I have a rather strong bias toward Western media. I carry this bias with me across basically all the media I care to consume where the two can contrast – television shows, video games, and the occasional graphic novel. I prefer BioWare to Square Enix, cannot get into Manga at all, and tend not to enjoy anime either.

For me, it’s a story thing. This is especially true with Japanese-made video games. I find that it’s really quite easy for Japanese games to take a sudden and unexplainable turn toward the inscrutable, taking the plot in a direction that simply makes no sense to my American mind. Or, on occasion, the game or series will spend an awful lot of time developing characters and exploring plot points that have little or no significance to the story as a whole, and when it’s all over, I can’t understand why the writers bothered to go there in the first place. Sometimes, there is the occasional fatal mistranslation – when something one of the characters says or does just doesn’t translate to English very well, and the sudden weirdness of it shocks me out of the story.

To be fair, these are not just problems that occur in Japanese cultural products like Anime and JRPGs. This sort of thing kills Western-origin works, too. The nosedive into nonsense killed the Sword of Truth  for me in a lot of places, for example, and poor translation is what eventually killed my enjoyment of The Witcher, as well. But with Anime and other Japanese cultural items, I find it’s a matter of frequency. This kind of stuff seems to happen all the time in Japanese media, at least in my experience.

But some friends of mine – people whose interests I share and whose opinions I respect – are really into it. So I am willing to at least consider the possibility that I might have been wrong – that quality Anime exists, and that I am missing out.

So, in the interests of expanding my cultural horizons, I’m going to try to get into it myself. Because it’s not all bad – I do find the general art style to be visually appealing, and hell, I did enjoy some Japanese video games back in the day. Still, it is an intimidating prospect. I expect a certain amount of cringing and pain as I progress. After all, I hold my opinions about the genre for a reason, so I fully expect some false starts and whatnot as I get my feet wet.

Fortunately, I have a partner in crime in this. My girlfriend has decided to join me and has agreed to subject herself to the shows at the same time – after all, this was partly her idea, so it’s only fair that she suffer alongside me. This will make it fun even when the story itself isn’t very enjoyable – and, hey, when it gets really bad, we can always open the booze cabinet and imbibe until the tears stop.

Our first adventure will be Elfen Lied. Wish us luck.