Gleipnir – Not Quite Suited For Anime

 

Does anyone remember the TV series Heroes? People around the world were finding themselves developing super powers and despite that this was given a genetic explanation, I remember there were super powers like being able to absorb other peoples’ powers, or manipulate time, and I think one person could even turn themselves into a video game character, because the ability was somehow in their DNA.

Heroes had a pretty decent first season, then had to cut their second season short and stumbled through their third season and got an alright fourth season, then came back for a several years later season and quietly faded away. It was a superhero project that missed the train by arriving too early for the popularity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It also was trying hard to be Lost by having a large cast of characters and giving screen time to everyone. Meanwhile, shows like Doom Patrol succeed because the focus is on a few heroes instead of a growing roster that have to be regularly killed off in order to make the numbers at least somewhat manageable.

When it comes to super powers, there have been some… shall we say interesting ones over the years. The hero who can enter virtual spaces mentioned above feels like it was designed to be deliberately unique in a genre where you can still get away with creating a character who is super strong or can fly as long as they’re interesting enough to tell great stories with. Sadly, at least half of the heroes in Heroes were not interesting at all, and we rarely found reasons to care for them. The only one I felt much of a connection to was Japanese hero Hiro, the one who could manipulate time. They gave him an origin story that I actually cared about and he was one of the few characters who didn’t want to flee from their powers. Whereas the rest of the main cast seemed like “I have powers now, woe is me”, Hiro embraced the idea of a heroic quest and even treated it like a real life version of Chrono Trigger, right down to falling in love with someone and declaring she was Marle and he was Crono.

Unfortunately, the series suffered for its success and the writers constantly felt the need to depower everyone in order to keep the drama flowing rather than creating stories that would challenge the characters and coming up with plausible weaknesses that would prevent the more overpowered characters from using their powers except when strictly necessary. For example, if they could’ve made it so that time travel had a detrimental effect on Hiro’s own lifespan or a detrimental effect to the universe itself (like maybe the force of gravity very gradually – and retroactively – weakens every time someone travels through time), it would mean you wouldn’t be able to travel through time on a whim. Imagine hearing from a scientist that the acceleration of gravity on Earth is 9.81 meters per second, squared, and thinking to yourself, “Before I started using my powers, it was 9.82.” It doesn’t have to make complete scientific sense as long as it offers a notion that every use of the character’s power comes at a potential cost. No one but you would realize or even remember that gravity is being weakened, and you wouldn’t be able to consult with anyone regarding how many times you could theoretically travel through time before you doom the existence of the planet you’re trying to save. Will this trip through time be the one that weakens gravity enough that it permanently alters the history of the Milky Way Galaxy and keeps Earth from even forming? It would also create consequences that you couldn’t just erase with another trip through time.

Heroes also sometimes introduced characters who weren’t miserable just so they could help the main cast briefly and then get killed off, only for the writers to find that they needed another character who could do the same thing a couple seasons later. There were two separate characters who could paint the future and who were killed as soon as they delivered their tiny contribution to the plot.

I suppose everyone likes superhero stories and would love to write in the genre, but it’s hard to write a compelling super hero without giving them some reason why they’re not the ultimate solution to every problem. I like Squirrel Girl because she’s physically strong, but her thing is pretty much squirrels so no one takes her seriously. She also often finds herself in situations that are well out of her power class, but she still finds some way to succeed. You need clever writing in order to write a good Squirrel Girl story.

Just when I think that there are no new superpowers, along comes Gleipnir, an anime about a boy whose power is to turn into a fursuit so that a girl can climb into his body and use him like Iron Man to fight their enemies. For years, I’ve been looking for a premise even more bizarre than Akikan! without resorting to hentai, and I think I’ve finally succeeded.

That said, Gleipnir certainly skirts the line, stopping just short of it several times in the first few episodes alone. If Killing Bites was outright sexual at times, Gleipnir is probably the horniest anime I’ve seen that doesn’t quite cross that line. The main character is Shuichi, a boy who can turn into a dog-like suit, and who one day saves a girl named Clair. She discovers Shuichi’s secret and blackmails him into letting him be worn by her in order to defeat their enemies in combat, since his body grants her the strength to fight. Together, they are nearly unstoppable.

Anyone who has worn a fursuit in public knows that they can get pretty hot, and Clair seems well aware of that, so she strips down to her undergarments every time she climbs inside Shuichi. For some reason, the inside of Shuichi’s fursuit form looks a bit more fleshy than I was expecting, and despite that she’s the one wearing him, it always looks like his insides are more sweaty than she is. Still, it’s nice to know that someone was doing their research into furries when they made this.

Either that or they just wanted an excuse to show Clair in her bra and panties a lot. Like I said, this is a very horny anime.

I do admit that it’s a little disappointing to find out that everything that’s happening is the result of an extra-terrestrial, but let’s be honest: how often does anime dip from that well? Shows like The Twilight Zone have used the alien trope over and over like it’s a well worn pair of shoes, like the episode “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?”, where the twist ending is that there are actually two invasions happening, not just one, and the second invasion has neutralized the first. Anime, meanwhile, doesn’t make use of extra-terrestrials as often as you’d think. I suppose you could consider all isekai stories to be full of aliens, but it’s not like those other worlds exist in the same plane of reality as we do. They’re quite literally a different reality, and most of the tropes present in such anime are more in line with fantasy than science fiction. Magic is more likely to exist in such worlds, and the level of technology is well behind our own, usually. Even when the main character can still access our world in a limited manner, like in In Another World With My Smartphone or Campfire Cooking in Another World With My Absurd Skill, it’s clear that this is an exception in a world that’s several hundred years behind our own in development.

I can think of only a handful of anime I’ve watched where aliens played any kind of role in it. There’s a list of anime featuring aliens on Wikipedia, but the list of isekai anime is much longer. I’ve actually seen a fair amount of science fiction anime, but most of the time, the characters all originate from, or are descended from, Earth. One of my favourites, Carole and Tuesday, takes place on Mars, but it should be noted that this is a colony that originated from Earth. So while it’s disappointing to know that aliens are involved in Gleipnir, keep in mind that this is because aliens are used incredibly often in Western media. This is actually a refreshing topic for an anime to take on. Heck, it doesn’t even factor into the story all that much, the alien is such a minor character in the grand scheme of things, something which I should’ve seen as a bad omen for the story, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

With the reveal in episode four that everything is being caused by an alien and his magical coins, the rest of the anime actually stops feeling as strange as it did in the beginning. During the first three or so episodes, my thought was “What in the world am I even watching?” but once it was all explained to me by the alien, I nodded along with the explanation. “Ah, okay. Let’s see where this goes.” And where it went was a bit more pedestrian. It turns out the story is your standard collect-a-thon style adventure with rival gatherers and other miscellaneous characters who use their powers for truly evil purposes. I’m reminded of how Akikan! needed to pad out its length with standard anime trophes in the middle as well, including such staples as a beach episode and the sexual harassment of authority figures, before everything ramped up again.

That said, pedestrian isn’t necessarily bad. I was bracing myself for the anime to go one of several ways. The Destroyal tournament arc in Killing Bites takes up most of the only season the show got, just like how most of Darwin’s Game takes place on one night, but there’s just something about Killing Bites that doesn’t sit right with me. There’s a lot of missed opportunities with the anime, since it ultimately feels like a prologue that didn’t get to continue, like all of those unaired pilot episodes that sometimes show up on-line and which never get ordered to a full series. Killing Bites also makes the supposed main character sit on the sidelines 90% of the time, which only contributes to the prologue feel, since the story’s setting up his eventual transformation into one of the genetically enhanced animal characters. The protagonist of Darwin’s Game is involved right from the start, which makes for a much more satisfying anime.

In Gleipnir, Shuichi and Clair fight as one. Shuichi might be a passive observer in his own body whenever Clair wears him, but he’s very much in the thick of things, and until he transforms, he’s got the exact same amount of agency as Clair does. Yuuya, the main character from Killing Bites, rarely has the same amount of agency that Shuichi does. Yuuya is introduced in the first episode of Killing Bites as an unwilling participant in a plot to gang rape random girls off the street and during the Destroyal, he’s instructed by Hitomi to pretend to be the one in charge. He couldn’t have less agency if he tried, and then when he’s murdered at the end of the series, I was actually not all that surprised and saw it coming. He gets better, and would’ve been more active in the story if a second season had been made, but we’ll never know outside of fan translated manga.

I’m much more satisfied with Shuichi’s participation in the story of Gleipnir because he’s right there in the thick of things and has agency right from the start. Even though he gets blackmailed by Clair into helping her by being her fursuit, he still took the initiative in the relationship by saving her life in the first episode. She had been trying to kill herself in a fire and he messed up his anonymous rescue attempt by leaving his phone behind. Since then, she sees an opportunity to use him to gain some strength of her own and he becomes her reluctant partner. Don’t get me wrong, Shuichi is not a perfect main character and sometimes other characters take his agency away for a bit, but when you’re a suit that someone else wears, it comes with the territory.

One thing that I find interesting about the anime is that there’s subtext in the relationship between Shuichi and Clair, where Clair stepping inside him is the equivalent of a sexual encounter, so when another girl uses him as a suit, the subtext is that he’s cheating on Clair, even if the characters don’t outright say so. It’s a kind of subversion in that Shuichi is the one whose body gets penetrated by his partner and yet he’s still the one who has subtextually cheated on his partner. It’s one of those anime tropes that don’t seem to go away no matter how progressive a series it is, and is one of the main reasons why I stopped reading Love Hina and never bothered to watch the anime. There’s nothing like a “comedy” where the main male character gets blamed for things outside of his control and punished for them, never allowed to move beyond the “You’re a pervert, eat this physical attack!” part of the friendship, and with friends like those, who needs enemies? The only saving grace is that Clair doesn’t feel the need to get revenge on Shuichi and the story just moves on.

The ultimate goal of the characters is to gather a hundred of the coins together, something which has the potential to end the world, should the gatherer wish it. Otherwise, one who collects a hundred coins could be granted any power they choose, but their transformations already grant them interesting powers. There’s a boy whose head turns into a surveillance camera and this allows him to record video, but he also uses his cell phone for that sort of thing so I’m not sure why he needs to become a camera himself. There’s a character who can enchant her hair to decapitate anyone who betrays a secret. My favourite is a girl who grows fox ears and can understand animals as a result of this.

It’s too bad the diverse cast of characters ends up being largely superfluous and inconsequential to the overall plot. Even the alien, as I’ve mentioned above, doesn’t get a lot of screen time and despite his contributions to the plot, is basically another bit player. Perhaps it’s because the manga was still ongoing when the anime was being made, but the anime introduces many characters and powers which don’t end up doing much of anything in the overall story. The biggest tragedy is that I was expecting more from the fox-eared girl, Chihiro, but in the end, her and the entire group of gatherers that Shuichi and Clair meet and befriend exit the plot without doing anything other than almost being wiped out like the first guild Kirito tries to join in Sword Art Online. The only thing that saves them is the quick thinking of Clair.

Something which I wonder is, did the studio who made Gleipnir intend to make a second season but were told at the last minute that they shouldn’t bother? Is that why the anime ends like it does? Is that why even as late as the penultimate episode, they introduce more characters intended to be obstacles in the way of Shuichi and Clair’s quest to end the game, only for those characters to never enter the plot in any meaningful manner other than in flashbacks?

One of the aspects of the show that I wish had been touched upon more regards the exact nature of all of Shuichi’s powers. We see that he can turn into a suit for someone else to wear, but when he and Chihiro are almost killed, they meld into one being and then once the fight’s over, they separate again and are both none the worse for wear. Shuichi never merges with Clair, and as I mentioned above, this somehow ends up not being a problem for their relationship in the long term.

I would probably have to read the manga to know for sure whether this is the case, but having only watched the anime, I think this is another example of why one shouldn’t adapt from source material that doesn’t yet have an ending. It happens all the time, where the anime runs out of material and then has to come up with something original to either fill time or complete the episode order. I’m not even talking about filler arcs in shows like Bleach. I’m talking about the ending of the original Fruits Basket anime, which had to be made up completely because the manga was still on-going at the time and which assumed the gender of a key character and got it wrong. I’m talking about shows I mentioned above, like Killing Bites or Darwin’s Game, both of which could’ve easily continued past their final episodes, even though neither of them are likely to get a second season. I’m even talking about Western shows like Game of Thrones, which had to come up with original content because the last two novels hadn’t been finished when the series began and still hadn’t been finished by the time they ran out of material to adapt; the last two novels are still not finished, by the way.

I wonder if shows like this get adapted while the manga is still being published as a way to capitalize on whatever popularity the manga might have. It might make more sense to adapt a small portion of the manga in order to make as much money off of that one season as possible, than to wait for the manga to run its course and adapt the entire story, which runs the risk of no one sticking around to watch because everyone’s already moved on to reading other manga. I should think a show like Death Note proves this wrong, though. In the seventeen years since the Death Note manga ended, there continue to be adaptations and movies made, and The Simpsons even adapted it into their latest Treehouse of Horror episode.

Unfortunately, Death Note and other shows like the second Fruits Basket series (as well as the upcoming new Spice & Wolf series) seem to be the exceptions, as most manga that does get adapted is still ongoing. Even my beloved Campfire Cooking in Another World With My Absurd Skill is adapted from a light novel series and manga, both of which have yet to end. I think it’s proven popular enough that it should get a second season, especially since isekai anime are big right now. Gleipnir, however, has been out for a few years and although new seasons can come at any time, the likelihood of it happening to this series is small. That said, I would watch it because for all its faults, there’s enough here that makes me want to keep watching, if a second season were to happen.