Well I’m finally getting around to looking at Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress after it’s been recommended to me enough. I’ll also take this time to mention I have a separate account that all videos on politics will go to from now on (intell-opinions), sorry for the Charlottesville one.
And now as always I’ll go over premise, characters and story to give you the conclusion and ensure you don’t waste your money.
PREMISE
The premise of the story is human beings living in iron fortress like cities afraid of being infected by mutant zombies, said mutant zombies are fought by the paranoid law enforcers with specialized weapons and half zombie half human hybrids, our main character is one. Is this starting to sound a bit like Attack on Titan?
No this isn’t Attack on Titan, the main character isn’t related to his hyper competent female sidekick this time, there’s a difference!
But Eren and Mikasa aren’t related eithe-
Moving along!
CHARACTERS
Ikoma is the main protagonist of the story that despite the setting is massively naive and self sacrificing. Really you’d think someone that grows up in a post apocalyptic setting would have a bit more cynicism and self awareness, now that would be an interesting character to write about, how despite their viewpoint they fight anyway because it is right, but we get stuck with Ikoma instead.
If you find that annoying I already can’t recommend this anime to you.
The hyper competent female sidekick, or it could be said that Ikoma is her sidekick for most of the story since she steals the show in almost every scene she’s in and she definitely has the most experience killing Kabane (what the show calls zombies).
Yet despite being the kickass girl for most of the show she is later forced to make way for Ikoma to be the hero once the villain gets his hands on her.
He is the villain of the series, no its not the Kabane, he’s the main villain. He has a strong, the strong should devour the weak philosophy. And he’s willing to perform all kinds of experiments to prove it.
Most of his experiments tend to involve killing civilians that can’t easily take care of themselves putting him in direct conflict with the main characters.
STORY
Actually experiencing the main story of the show wasn’t that bad. Now already you might’ve noticed I didn’t go into that much depth with the main characters and that would be well there really isn’t much to talk about. The characters are the way they are and they are placed where the story needs them to be for a fight with Kabane to ensue as this is mostly an action show. The action I saw I enjoyed, it was well thought out and animated. Yet after watching around three episodes I started to get worried about the story, worried in that I didn’t get the sense it was going anywhere.
Usually after three episodes of any anime you have a good sense of what the main conflict is and where the story is going to go in order to resolve that conflict. By episode three of this anime the characters are all dicking around doing their own thing. They haven’t even been fleshed out all that well as characters. And I was starting to get worried about the direction the show was going to go.
When you have a mostly action based story that doesn’t really have a clear goal you see there’s really only two ways you can go with it. You can A: make the action the focal point of the show and just make it bigger and better all the time till you have to make up some final boss like character and defeat him/her/it to end things before the show jumps the shark. Obviously this is difficult to pull off well, but it’s more natural than the second option. Option B: shove a villain into the story at some point and give him a small arc to make him feel more like a character and less like some guy that was made up just to give the hero someone to fight so the story has an excuse to wrap up. Easier to pull off than option A but still very difficult to do well.
Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress attempts some of option A and all option B. By introducing Biba the main villain, he has some depth to him, he is reasonably powerful as a villain to Ikoma and wants a similar goal. He has all the attributes of a good antagonist, but it’s far too obvious that he only exists so Ikoma has a bad guy to kill.
Now at this point you're probably wondering, why is that a problem? Isn’t that why all villains exist? Well yes they do but there’s a natural antagonist and a forced one. As an example of the former lets look at Darth Vader from Star Wars Episode IV.
He is there so that Luke has someone to challenge him when he blows up the death star but even if Luke Skywalker wasn’t in the story, even if the protagonist was someone else Darth Vader still naturally fits into the story. As the villains in Star Wars belong to an empire that’s willing to blow up an entire planet to get compliance it’s obviously an empire that rules through fear and not through good publicity so someone like Darth Vader makes sense in the context of the story, it’s expected that an evil tyrannical empire would keep someone like him around: a powerful man that evokes fear in most everyone. So even if Darth Vader didn’t pull the whole “I am your father” routine in the next episode he doesn’t have to justify his existence as only being there so that Luke Skywalker can kill him he fits into the story regardless of who the hero is. Biba...just doesn’t. Unless he’s fighting Ikoma whose own values are radically different from his own he feels like less of a villain. Not that designed an antagonist for one specific protagonist is always a bad thing, The Dark Knight proves that it can be done well; this show however just doesn’t.
CONCLUSION
Now does this mean I hate Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress? No far from it. I enjoyed what I got. Some people complain the show got stupid as it went along, but to that I say: Watch the show again and tell me if it was ever intelligent. The characters are stupid, they wouldn’t survive two minutes without 50 tons of plot armor and they never learn from any of their mistakes and that’s because the characters were never the focal point of the story the action was henceforth the characters are as stupid and naive as the writers need them to be to get them to the next action scene that has to be bigger and flashier than the last.
Sure the show wasn’t as great as I expected from a show clearly inspired by Attack on Titan but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I feared it was going to get.