Score: 4/10, 1/5
Length: 12 Episodes
Genre: Action, Military, Political, Supernatural
Summary: While the War of Unification has ended and all of Eastald's various provinces have come under the banner of a Unified Zesskia, the trauma of that war has not yet passed. Anger, resentment, and rebellion still smolder in this era of assumed peace. None feel more slighted by the end of the war, though, than the fairy soldiers of each nation who were forcibly bonded to eldrich beings. Now outlawed by the nation, all fairy technology are either under government protection or destroyed, including those same soldiers that fought for freedom against Zesskia. Given the choice of death or subservience, many fairy soldiers have either gone into hiding--waiting for the right moment to stoke the flames of war again--or joined the government's fairy-hunting task force, Dorothea. Having nowhere else to go and desiring this illusion of peace over vengeance, the soldiers of this task force strive to ensure the tragedies they endured are never repeated.
Review: Political dramas, in my opinion, have always been the hardest kind of story to tell. For these kinds of stories to work at all, lots of distinct but intricately connected parts need to move in concert, distracting the viewer with minute details as the larger picture starts to come together. If any single part doesn't work as planned or distracts too much from the overall purpose of the machine, though, it all falls apart. For example, if the series in question focuses too much on the action of war, it becomes harder to notice the intricacy of the political machinery that made the fight in question possible. If the characters fail to grab the attention of the audience or establish their purpose, the story can lose any and all dramatic momentum. Knowing and believing this to be the fact of the matter, part of me feels like I should cut Fairy Gone a bit of a break. After all, it's not like this original anime even had some original material to fall back on if things happened to break along the way. Since that part of me is relatively small, though, and since Fairy Gone is, quite simply, the biggest mess of a series I've ever had the displeasure of watching, it will not be getting off lightly.
Same here, honestly; just replace "men" for "anime" in this case.
Now, to be perfectly clear, I will not be criticizing this show out of spite or because I want to soothe some wounded ego. I knew from the start that this show was going to be a mess. As many other reviewers and commentators have pointed out, the very concept of "fairy soldiers" battling "fairy terrorists" while competing with the "fairy mafia" over "fairy artifacts" is absolutely impossible to take seriously. So, with that in mind, I at least believed that this might be a fun mess--one of those "so bad it's good" titles. At best, I expected this to just be a comedically incompetent reimagining of the "evil" versus evil formula seen in Witch Hunter Robin. I assumed that we'd get a character drama rife with action and ideological hypocrisy as the government's "good" fairy soldiers battled the "evil" fairy freedom fighters, ultimately blurring the line between the two as the conflict dragged on. What we got, though, was just a mess of a political drama that was being dragged along by characters so dull and lifeless that I couldn't even be bothered to remember their names half the time.
Granted, with main characters with names as stupid as "Free Underbar," can you really blame me?
Put bluntly, the main issue with Fairy Gone is that none of the pieces of its grand political machine actually work. Normally, a political drama would use all of its parts in concert to tell its story, steadily adding more and more to the motion of the machine until everything is in place and ready to really set things off. In Fairy Gone's case, however, all the pieces are just kind of thrown in at random and end up conflicting with each other. There's no flow to this story or its tone. Rather, everything just stutters and stops as each segment plays off an entirely different tone and purpose than whatever preceded it. One minute, we'll have a comedic buddy cop segment that lets the cast joke and banter about the current social climate and their feelings on recent events. The next, we'll be hauled into a board room meeting where government officials throw out so many proper nouns that it's impossible to know what they're actually talking about. Then, once the show has bored you to sleep with that, it'll cut back to the buddy cop duo as they suddenly land themselves in a fight to the death with some supernatural heavy hitters. Finally, in the middle of that battle, the show will cut to one of the show's various antagonist factions making noises along the lines of "everything is going according to plan" and that'll be the entire episode. There's simply no flow, no logic to the way this show twists, turns, and bends itself backward to make sure every one of the show's four to eight subplots and factions gets some screen time. Within the span of show's first two episodes, I'd already gotten lost and couldn't recall who was from which faction and what country they represented in the empire.
Granted, that might have simply been because each of the provinces has at least three different names it can go by at any given moment.
Regardless of how weird the names used throughout the series are or how interchangeable some of them might be during the political back and forth, the series isn't helped at all by the fact that it's impossible to really latch onto any one element. The buddy cop aspect to the series, for example, is so flat and lifeless that it might as well not exist. Never mind that the "buddy cops" in question should be fascinating characters to work with in their own right. Never mind that they are pretty much just fairy-based Stand users with pasts that should give them a lot to talk about and argue over when it comes to the way the government is using and abusing them. Never mind, even, that they're being forced to go out, hunt down, and potentially kill their former comrades who are just as resentful of the nation as they should be. By all rights, this show and its characters should have been a home run but they're just not. Free Underbar, for all his macho pride, spends most of the series moaning about how powerless he is even though he can summon a 10-foot werewolf that can destroy stone walls with its howl at will. Similarly, Marlya Noel, despite being one of only a few survivors of a destroyed village and the only fairy soldier who didn't get a fairy through the standard surgery, just mopes about how unfortunate she is. Throughout the series, we're led to understand that she's a master marksman yet we never see her actually attack anyone. Rather, she simply spends all the time curing herself for being a "cursed child" whose mere presence kills everyone around her. Both of these characters are so lost in their angst-ridden pasts that they just don't work together. There's no "buddy" to this cop duo. They're just a pair of loners who couldn't be bothered to act like actual characters even if they wanted to.
Behold, this is what our "main characters" look like 90% of the time.
As if the failed "buddy cop" dynamic between these two weren't bad enough, though, the series also seems to play them off as a potential romantic couple. This is, of course, absolutely laughable since there is absolutely zero chemistry between them whatsoever. Rather, it feels like the show is actually pushing each of them toward their same-sex, edgelord "friends." That's right, both of them have that special someone who has turned to the dark side and refuses to be swayed no matter how much the main characters beg. Marlya, for her part, spends a good half of the first season fruitlessly chasing after the other survivor of their hometown, Veronica Thorne, who has gone from beautiful town idol to revenge-obsessed assassin. How these two are friends in anyone's guess, though, since neither seemed to interact in either of their flashbacks apart from one scene in which Veronica just leaves Marlya to die in the snow. Yet, despite the nonsense of their connection, Veronica seems to have an uncharacteristic soft spot for Marlya in that she refuses to kill her or let her be killed. Following much the same vein, Free spends a good portion of the show hunting down and pining for his soldier buddy, Wolfran Row, who just kinda left the army one day to become a more neutral-leaning terrorist. So, in the end, it just feels like this show has no real clue what it wants to do with its characters or even where their stories are ultimately supposed to lead.
Really? Then why does she keep showing up to save Marlya whenever she gets in trouble?
With more or less this same kind of lame heavy-handedness, Fairy Gone pushes the show's story and drama ever onward even though we're never given the time to know or care about the show's cast. Episode after episode, things just kind of end up happening to the cast for little to no reason. For example, during one of the show's most pointless moments, Free and Marlya get attacked by a pair of psychopath assassins because that's what the plot demands. Over the course of this conflict, Free and Mayla each fight another fairy-user, even though there are only supposed to be a couple dozen out in the world, and end up losing nothing in the process. Even though these assassins were supposed to steal the McGuffin Free and Marlya were toting around, they end up just leaving it behind when the most unforgivably evil of the two gets killed by Veronica. Nothing was gained and nothing was lost, ultimately meaning that the whole ordeal was pointless. And that's just kind of the nature of every conflict this series has to offer. Things might happen and characters might die but we're never actually given a solid understanding of what's at stake. In some instances, the cast fights over some enigmatic tome of fairy science that, eventually, is forgotten altogether. In others, they're fighting to protect the government from a fairy soldier coup that simply ends after the villains just walk away. No matter what happens to be happening in any given episode, there's simply no rhyme or reason to it all beyond the show doing whatever bullet point happens to be next in the script.
I want to throttle whoever came up with the scene in which one of the show's villains
just walks nonchalantly up to a line of gunfire without getting
shot just because "he's really scary."
Honestly, I could spend hours ranting about every little thing that Fairy Gone does wrong but I just don't feel like it's even worth it. This show is just an absolute, irredeemable mess and isn't worth anyone's time. Regardless of how pretty the art might be or how fun K(Now) Name's music might be, they just aren't good enough to justify watching this train wreck. Just go watch B: The Beginning or go download the OST to this series. Then, at least, you'll be engaging with something worthwhile.