Black Clover - Episode 81 [Review]

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Black Clover - Episode 81 [Review]

Coinciding with Langris' onslaught against his brother last week, Team G technically won the match because Team E's crystal got destroyed in the process. Elsewhere on the map, Leopold came this close to taking the enemy's crystal, but it looks like this is a day for the bad guys instead, which brings us back to the Black Bulls' stare-down with Langris. This episode rewinds a few moments to show us exactly how Asta and company managed to fly across the battlefield so quickly (Charmy catapulted them with her sheep), though I was wrapped up in the moment enough that I didn't think twice about it at the time.

This tournament is certainly going in a few unexpected directions now. Langris has gotten on Asta's naughty list, so our hero is demonstrating an uncharacteristic anger. The Wizard King is not opposed to letting these kids get a quick and dirty fight out of their system, but he also wants to keep everything within the confines of the exam. Since Asta and Langris' teams would be facing each other in the semi-finals anyway, their match is getting moved up to now, which seems weirdly unfair to the other teams waiting for their fights! I'm trying to think of another shonen anime that's done something like this. The Wizard King's just like, "Well, shoot. The emotions are running high now. Gotta keep that momentum going!"

So because Asta went and got all hot-headed against Langris, who's still digging his heels into the ground with overcompensating douchebaggery, his teammates have to get whisked into an unexpected battle as well, and this is where we get a lot of new Zora content. It turns out Zora's distaste for the Magic Knights comes from his dad, who was a peasant like Asta who managed to get in to the club with hard work. Zora's dad revered the Magic Knights and relished the opportunity to fight alongside them, but when he eventually died, Zora overheard his teammates mocking him for not being a wealthy noble like them. The idealistic vision of who the Magic Knights are supposed to be—compassionate warriors fighting to protect the weak—was ground into the dust. It turns out that this special group of heroes is inescapably tied to wealth and nepotism, even when it pretends not to be.

Langris makes an especially good antagonist for Zora, who rises to the challenge with a strong appetite. Langris is everything Zora could possibly hate about the Magic Knights, and by the end of this episode, Zora goes from looking like a bitter prankster to a genuinely swell dude biting back at the establishment's failure. It's not that the idea of the Magic Knights is bad, it's that vile people are constantly allowed to make a mockery of the name. This is an angle that Black Clover has always lightly explored, that the people who are supposed to be the good guys are low-key responsible for many of the world's problems, and I hope it can keep pushing these ideas. Even if someone like the Wizard King truly is a stand-up guy, is there a chance he's been complicit in some of the kingdom's ugliness and simply hopes to plant the seeds of progress in a new generation? Or perhaps he's secretly been scheming to fix the system from the inside? This thread has to go somewhere.

Things are getting much more intense in the Royal Knights exam, and this episode offers a healthy variety between the more atmospheric action and the flashbacks fleshing out Zora's story. Once again, the class themes are among Black Clover's greatest assets, allowing characters of different backgrounds to coexist meaningfully and sewing some honest-to-goodness world-building into the narrative. Thankfully, this tournament seems to have finally found its pulse.

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Black Clover - Episode 78 [Review]

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Black Clover - Episode 78 [Review]

The first round of the Royal Knights tournament has now concluded, meaning it's up to the winning teams to face off against each other. I'm still really lost as to who all is participating in these exams, because there are so many side characters left watching on the sidelines, and I figured that the first round's focus on weeding out fodder at least made sense considering there's bound to be hundreds of Magic Knights in the running. I've been flipping through this part of the manga every week, feeling like a crazy person for not being able to find some explanation like "you have to volunteer to be in the tournament" or "the Wizard King hand picked his favorite prospective knights" or something. I feel like I'm being told to just go with it after I've ordered chicken and been delivered only bones (and not even all the bones).

Anyway, it's time to commence Round Two, which begins with Asta, Mimosa, and Xerx (henceforth referred to as "Team B") competing with Magna, Sol, and Kirsch ("Team C"). We can even begin referring to Xerx as Zora, since his true name gets dropped in a flashback partway through the episode, so I'll just start calling him that from now on.

Going into this fight, the conflict appears to be between Mimosa and her brother Kirsch, as well as Zora's eagerness to fight a member of royalty, but what quickly takes center stage is Asta trying to get Zora to act like a team player. At the outset of the battle, Asta unleashes his new demon form, but only long enough to release the traps that Zora laid down ahead of time. I really like Asta this week, because he's more cheeky and smug than usual. He's not trying to rat Zora out for being a cheater, he just wants Zora to let his teammates in on the pranks. I think this is a good compromise for Zora's "arc" or whatever he's going through, where teamwork and friendship won't necessarily fix his bad attitude, just coexist with it. I like seeing Asta's enthusiasm as he puts his own team at a momentary disadvantage so they can form their secret prank cabal and make Zora feel like part of the gang. It's an ironic yet positive twist on the purpose of the tournament, which is to measure teamwork.

So far Kirsch and his cherry blossom magic are the stars of the opposing team, though as of this week we don't see him interacting with Mimosa all that much. He's the token snooty royal and the first victim of Asta and Zora's new traps. Kirsch thinks he's got the trap spells covered, but falls into a hand-dug pit on accident because he's so focused on magic that he can't predict a practical trap. Asta takes him out with his anti-magic (still not an interesting way to win every fight), and I hope Kirsch isn't completely out of the fight already, because he's the only thematically compelling opponent on hand right now.

We're getting into the thick of this tournament at last, so every match from this point forward should have something going for it. I'm a little frustrated at how poorly the conceit of this arc has been holding up, since tournaments are already blank slates that you don't have to bend over backwards to explain but this one still feels undercooked. Otherwise, we're getting back to the most engaging aspects of this story, like classism and Zora's complicated relationship with the Magic Knights. I'm fairly happy with where that stuff seems to be going.

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Black Clover - Episode 77 [Review]

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Black Clover - Episode 77 [Review]

We've got two new matches on the docket this week, the first of which features Luck and Klaus on a team together. Notably, Luck has upgraded some of his spells and Klaus has been doing some push-ups after Asta inspired him. There's not much to say about this one, but it's over quick. The most important fight this week is clearly Noelle and Yuno's team-up, which features way more substance than any of the other tournament matches so far. You have Noelle and Yuno bickering, Noelle's sibling rivalry coming to a head, and Yuno facing off against one of his own Golden Dawn comrades.

Noelle and Yuno's dynamic is pretty straightforward. They have the same royal/peasant relationship that Noelle has with Asta, except Yuno is skilled with magic, which makes Noelle feel even more inadequate. This isn't a source of conflict for the episode so much as an anchor to make the moment that cements Yuno's trust in Noelle even more meaningful. Yuno's strong enough that he probably could have taken the other team's crystal by himself, but Noelle wants to fight her brother and thus the tournament has an opportunity to reach emotional stakes beyond just winning and losing.

Honestly, that alone would have been enough story momentum for me. The tournament has been on auto-pilot until this point, so any emotional weight would have been refreshing, but there's also a more significant attempt to flesh out the side character participating in this fight. Yuno's opponent is Alecdora, a fellow Golden Dawn member who resents him for the preferential treatment he receives from their captain, William Vangeance. We get a flashback highlighting why Alecdora looks up to William so much—a little story about how William saved his life once and reminded him of a painting he saw as a child—and this gives us some added texture to the cult of personality that's been forming around William. However, Yuno could not be less impressed by Alecdora's jealous pity party.

Both Noelle and Yuno's victories this week have some punchy thematic work going for them. Noelle's fight is about how she doesn't need her siblings' acknowledgement anymore, since she's now been acknowledged by much cooler people like the Vermillions and the Black Bulls. Approval is one of those weird things where you might know that you shouldn't seek it from certain people, but it's hard to move on from that cycle until something better comes along. Truly, the power of friendship is the only constant in life. Yuno's victory is equally savage, but considerably less sweet. Alecdora believes he's more deserving of William's attention because he's working to make William's dream come true, to which Yuno replies, "I don't know anything about other people's dreams. The only dream I see is my own." That's so cold! Hopefully that pragmatism at least spares him from William's Voldemort-y side.

This is closer to what I expected from a Black Clover tournament arc, where the character work gets to be front and center. The animation is still keeping things chill, though it's not a drawback this week like it has been in the past, and there's a surprising amount of focus being put on the ancillary characters. I don't know if we'll see much of Alecdora or En Ringard, but the show went out of its way to fill us in on what they're fighting for, just to make the episode feel a little more dense. There's a good mix of humor, tragic backstories, and big uplifting speeches—just enough to deliver an entertaining episode.

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Black Clover - Episode 50 [Review]

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Black Clover - Episode 50 [Review]

With the Vetto fight finally over, it's time for some relaxation. Of all the big battles we've faced so far in Black Clover, the sentimental falling action feels more earned here than usual, but that's almost entirely because the fight itself was so good, because otherwise there are some tough shortcomings. It's going for a very One Piece-y vibe where the heroes end the arc all beaten and battered, and the locals patch them up and thank them as they leave. It'd be much sweeter and more beautiful if the arc's narrative strengths had anything to do with the people living in the Underwater Temple, which they certainly did not. (Aside from maybe Kahono)

Right off the bat we discover that the old man had lied about possessing the magic stone because he wanted to initiate the battle royale. It turns out he didn't even know what the magic stone was to begin with and the only reason the Black Bulls were able to obtain it was because Asta's bird just found it laying around offscreen during the fight. The whole battle royale set-up is still so baffling to me. Now that the arc's over we can see the through-line in full and it's a cooky old man holding his grandchildren's dreams hostage for fun so the viewers at home can watch a dull tournament that gets interrupted immediately, and none of it mattered on any conceivable level.

Which brings us Kahono and Kiato, who have suffered the most in the fallout of the Vetto fight. Kahono's lost her vocal chords and Kiato lost his leg. Even though she's lost most of her voice, Kahono can still speak to Noelle telepathically and they share a nice moment together. Kahono's a good girl and you hope she can recover sooner than later, and her friendship with Noelle is a genuine and heartfelt beat that I wish could have been explored with more lucidity in the arc itself.

Also in need of some rest and relaxation is Asta, who's broken both of his arms and gets to spend the episode dual-weilding a pair of slings. It's a really funny visual, but more so I really appreciate the scene where he and Yami pay their respects to Vetto's corpse. Vetto was by far the show's most effective villain yet, and he isn't simply knocked-out or imprisoned. He's straight-up dead, and it's not without recognizing that there's some kind of injustice at the heart of the Clover Kingdom giving birth to villains like the Eye of the Midnight Sun. I thought the extraordinarily entertaining fight was enough to warrant a moment of silence, but the show offers Vetto sincere sympathy for the ambiguous despair he's been carrying throughout his life.

So that's a wrap on the Underwater Temple arc. It was like a delicious sandwich being held proudly together by two slices of stale, moldy bread. The Vetto fight alone is enough to call this the best arc of the series to date, and it's a good thing that it makes up about 80% of the arc because it exists in spite of some honestly garbage material. This is a conservatively animated conclusion that in equal parts cuts to the heart of its most important characters and suffers from the fundamentally weak storytelling that kickstarted the arc. I want to say I really enjoyed myself, and I did, but it still has some serious issues.

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Black Clover - Episode 46 [Review]

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Black Clover - Episode 46 [Review]

Now this is more like it. While the strength of episode 35 (the only other episode I've given an 'A') was being slickly animated, this week's installment has something completely different going for it. Animation-wise we're still pretty stiff and repetitive, but now there's finally enough energy and personality to pick up the slack. This episode is dirty and violent and weird in all the right ways.

We continue where we left off last week with Noelle and Kahono breaking in on Asta and Kiato's fight with Vetto. This is the first time we've gotten to see Kiato and Kahono, a dancer and a singer respectively, fight in unison. I love how Kahono's singing actually impacts the soundtrack of the episode. Her lullaby makes for a solid insert song to punctuate the fight. Unfortunately, neither are a match for Vetto, who proceeds to cut Kiato's leg off and beat Kahono within an inch of her life. The modern Shonen Jump pillars rarely feel as indulgently violent as they used to, so seeing a safer one like Black Clover go for the carnage was a nice change of pace, and Vetto feels threatening in a way he didn't before.

I already liked Kahono just fine, but seeing her "yeah, screw you too" face while she's at the villain's mercy made me really like her, and from there the fight rests on Noelle's shoulders. This is our chance to see how much stronger she's gotten after the past few arcs, giving it her all with a final water spell that blows Vetto's arm clean off. I enjoy how even Vetto remarks on the Silva family's corruption, implying that he thinks Noelle's royal power is an extension of the evil that he and the Midnight Sun is trying to fight the Clover Kingdom over. Of course, we know that Noelle's power is her own and that she's fighting on the behalf of her friends, not her clan.

Despite taking the brunt of Noelle's attack, Vetto has an awakening of his own: a third eye that opens along with a boost in power. The end of the episode sees Asta using his anti-magic to protect Noelle from Vetto's counterattack, and the shot of him standing in front of her with the ground carved out around them from the energy blast just screams "iconic". Asta and Noelle both come across marvelously heroic this week.

This is such a good episode that it makes me wish the lead-up to it was better constructed. I still think the way the battle royale game transitioned into the Midnight Sun fight is clunky as hell, but this is a rare moment of clarity where Black Clover succeeds at being the kind of shonen action show that it's trying to be. There's a great push and pull between the heroes and villains, and the show finally feels like it has an ounce of personality that isn't just an echo of shonen battle manga before it. This is Black Clover's best episode yet.

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Black Clover - Episode 30 [Review]

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Black Clover - Episode 30 [Review]

The day has finally arrived to discuss Gauche Adlai, the little sister enthusiast of the Black Bulls. Even as a one-note joke, I find his presence unpleasant. It feels weird to embrace his particular archetype as just another arrow in the quiver of your shonen anime cast. A wannabe ladies' man with boundary issues is about where my line for tolerance lies, but so far Gauche's entire character has been constant nosebleeds at the mere thought of his (very young) sister Marie.

I'm not aware of what's to come for the guy moving forward, though this episode does give me reason to suspect that maybe I'm supposed to be creeped out by him and that I'm not expected to just laugh it off. It's Marie's birthday, so Gauche is taking advantage of the Black Bulls' recent payday to purchase as many gifts for his sister as he can carry. The cold open before the theme song gives us a hint of how powerful and sadistic he actually is, and the episode follows that up by framing Gauche as unkempt, unwanted, and—wait a second, that's what "gauche" already means. Dammit! The show's way ahead of me! The tough old nun who looks after Marie during the day also doesn't seem to like him, so I'm going to defer to her judgement.

The conflict this week starts with the fact that Marie, like every girl in this series, has developed a crush on Asta while Gauche wasn't looking. It's a simple innocent little kid thing where she claims she's going to marry him and Asta's just playing around with her like a big brother, but Gauche takes it personally and vows revenge on Asta, going so far as to sneak into his room at night and try to kill him with his mirror magic. Gauche definitely feels like the villain of this episode at times, but I can't tell if this is meant to be a dark subversion of a joke character, or if this is a temporary turn before everything settles back into the status quo. This mini-fight between Asta and Gauche leads us into a larger conflict where an outside force is hypnotizing and luring the kids in town while the adults sleep, so it looks like the two of them will have a common enemy to team up against soon enough.

Rebecca from the mixer episode is sticking around, as she and Asta have been really hitting it off. She's got her own younger siblings that Asta gets along with equally well, and they're starting to egg her on to make a move on our hero. Oddly, the will-they-won't-they stuff manages to be a breath of fresh air in this episode, which is otherwise pretty bland when it isn't giving me Gauche-related whiplash. We're beginning a new storyline, but the cliffhanger about the missing kids screams two-parter rather than a new major arc. I'm not very invested yet.

The idea to spin Gauche as an evil villain who's been waiting in the wings this whole time gave me a twinge of excitement, but I can't imagine that's where this is actually going. Siscons are a thing now, and the way they've snuggled themselves into media so easily does manage to be kind of fascinating. I'm not nearly as judgmental of run-of-the-mill pervert characters, even though there are plenty of gripes to be had about the message we send when we treat their antics like inconsequential jokes just because we're used to it. I don't think characters like this inspire copycats or anything, but I do expect the traditional pervert to be the kind of archetype that will gradually fade away or mutate into something else. This siscon archetype may just be a new mutation of deviancy we've added to popular culture.

Source

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjw_yZ--NI8

Black Clover - Episodes 28 & 29 [Review]

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Black Clover - Episodes 28 & 29 [Review]

After taking a week off, I assumed that I'd have two episodes of Black Clover to digest, which I was honestly looking forward to, but to my dismay the second episode in this batch is yet another clip show. So functionally, I've only got one episode to review! Guess I can't complain about my timing.

Episode 28 has the makings of a filler episode (it's not), by virtue of not moving the plot forward and instead focusing on throwing the characters into a wacky sitcom scenario. Finral, the ladies' man of the Black Bulls, has organized a mixer with some local women, dragging Asta and Luck along with him since they seemed like they'd be the least intense company and therefore least likely to scare the girls away. In practice, this proves to be true by only the tiniest margin.

As a comedy episode, this one is kind of great. Asta and Luck being obviously unfit for their environment allows for plenty of great jokes, and they're bouncing right off the girls who churn out lots of deadpan humor as a result. Shonen tends to be more fun when its most colorful cast members are forced to contrast with the more normal world around them. This trio of girls does their best to keep the conversation going, and there are brief glimmers of hope that the guys' better qualities will start to shine, but it's all inevitably upended by some joke about how violent and socially clueless they are. My favorite joke is when the girls are almost impressed by Asta's story about fighting at the Royal Capital, but then he shows off his battle wounds and they're so gross that the show has to digitally blur them out. The pacing and energy is generally good, ensuring that humor can come from around any corner.

Eventually, everyone else at the mixer starts to hit it off, leaving Asta alone with the redhead Rebecca, who goes from being the coldest in the group to really opening up once the two of them are chatting about what it's like to have younger siblings. As the episode transitions from funny to sweet, it's all blushing girls and talk over what a great guy Asta is. There's kind of no way that this series can sell Asta as a potential love interest to at least three girls, but if you can swallow Black Clover's unrelenting approach to romance, I think it comes off well this week. There's also Noelle spying on the whole thing and acting jealous, just in case you weren't sure this show was going to triple down on that element.

It's a real bummer that episode 29 is a recap, because that's the kind of thing that forces you to acknowledge these shows as products designed to fill time slots first and foremost. Black Clover now has a higher episode count than most anime these days, and yet so little has actually happened. There's some new content in the framing devices for the clips, but beyond learning about Gordon's alarmingly creepy diary about Asta, there's not much worth checking out.

We're beginning a new cour, which likely means a new arc is on the horizon. For now, I think it's worth mentioning that the new opening, 'Black Rover' by Vickeblanca, might be the series' best one yet. The song's cool, but the visuals are shockingly beautiful, full of movement and neat ideas that I think would have me coming back to this show if I was a teenager watching this. It's not like I don't enjoy most of this show's cast and world-building, so there's always going to be chances to keep me invested moving forward even if the story is moving slow. I don't know enough about what's coming to say that I'm entirely excited to find out what's next, but as usual the show can offer some harmless fun while we wait to find out.

Source

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwr9wX1aIW4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPm7JE0qS2g