I Watch Rubbish Anime
I watched Weiss Kreuz, mostly just to cross it off the list. And in conclusion: it has the makings of something that could be a truly awesome guilty pleasure thing. It could've stood as an interesting precursor to Death Note. It could've been a mass-marketing franchise - well, I guess it was, in its time? But sadly, it's too overwhelmingly awful to get even close to that potential. I've read AU fanfic that writes Weiss Kreuz ten times better than Weiss Kreuz is written.
That said, I watched all of it in less than a week without having to force myself to, and hey, if you want to familiarise yourself with one of the staples of the late nineties anime, I might as well tell you what to expect so that you won't get your hopes up. But the thing is, I think I might've liked it better than I want to admit, because dear lord did this get long.
Weiss is the name of a boyband - I mean, a group of young, handsome assasins with distinct personalities, Sad Pasts, and nicknames based on exotic cat breeds who sing their own OP and ED. They spend their days working in a flower shop and their nights "punishing the dark beasts" on the orders of the mysterious "Persian". Each of the four members have their trademark as-unrealistic-as-it-is-cool weapon such as piano wire and clawed gloves that are presumably dipped in nerve poison as they can kill a man instantly by giving him scratches on the back.
Half the episodes go something like this:
1. One of the Weiss guys get to know a young woman or occasionally some other sympathetic character, such as a cute child
2. Someone Evil preys on the friend of the day
3. Weiss, still ignorant of the friend of the day being in trouble, is sent out to kill whoever is after her
4. They kill him, but the friend of the day or someone close to them dies in the struggle
5. Weiss watch as one of their members breaks down over having lost a precious person, and reflect over the loneliness of an assassin's life.
6. Come next episode, life goes on as if last week's shattering tragedy never happened
The rest of the time, the series is preoccupied with its overarching plot, and aside from the godawful animation and the insultingly bad writing that I'm not going to detail because you can just watch the first episode yourself, one of the problems with Weiss Kreuz is that that overarching plot is really dumb. It's cliché, it's predictable, it fails at conveying any of the emotional blows it wants to. The same adjectives apply to the villains, who moreover are also badly developed and probably twice as many as they needed be - I never figured out exactly what the relationship between Schreien and Schwarz really was.
To its credit, the story is a bit better at handling the pretty boys (they obviously knew the target audience), and although they never get close to being well-rounded characters, there's at least some interesting things eventually revealed about their previous lives. Unfortunately, the story still neglects to touch upon THE big question when we're dealing with teenage assasins: We're never told how these overwhelmingly well-adjusted young men became vigilantes. Sure, we know WHY some of them ended up where they were, but there's a big gap between being a promising athlete framed for cheating, and being an undercover hitman whose favoured method of execution is a pair of wolverine gloves. This goes for all of them, but it's really a glaring plot hole what Omi concerns. With Aya I've got no problem buying it, with Yoji I can see it, even with Ken I wouldn't be terribly surprised at whatever it was. But Omi? The sweetest and kindest boy in existence? "But he took me in and raised me" does not explain the cold-blooded killing part.
Some further points of annoyance:
- The fact that whoever was writing this shit had some serious issues with women. I don't know if I even can accuse them of fridging, what with how most of them are just one-epside wonders anyway.
- Sakura Tomoe. She was cute for the first five and the last two minutes of her collected on-screen appearances. For the rest of them, she's so obnoxious that I don't have words. I found her a bit more bearable after I heard someone point out that she's essentially just there to make the point that Aya wants to bone his own sister, because that's always hilarious.
- In fact, all the love stories are singularily terrible, though I'm not sure why I expected better. Obviously, I thought it was pretty fun with the guy who discovered he was dating his own sister (not Aya)
- The fact that their weapons are ridiculous and they never get to use guns
- The fact that NONE OF THEIR VICTIMS EVER BLEED. Jesus.
- Okay, so I kind of loved all the silly German thrown around here, but there's a limit to silly and they crossed it when they named the villains Eszet. I'm just going to assume that the Evil Swiss Trio on top were Umlaut, Ich-Laut and Ach-Laut.
Anyway: it's really shit, but I did find the Weiss crew likeable enough to hang on just to see them do their thing, except for Aya who is the character type that I've got the least patience with. Just don't go into this expecting character development - the best you'll get is to hear Aya tell someone his real name. Their pasts are explored to a degree, but as mentioned above - just not enough to explain what drove them into the arms of Weiss. Their justification for making a living of carrying out vigilante justice are likewise glossed over - and this is where the Death Note connection comes in, because noises are being made about a government that is corrupt and incapable of or unwilling to pursue the most ruthless of criminals. In Death Note, the well-intended vigilante BECOMES the corrupt regime and although the philosophical aspects of the story are far shallower than so many of its fen praise it for being, the very setup of Death Note at least poses the question of how violence corrupts. Was Light always evil, or was he destroyed when he was given the power to kill indiscriminately? Weiss Kreuz does not seem to want to face the consequences of what committing murder does to a normal person. It's actually really weird that way: the violence commited by the protagonists is the very heart of this story, yet the story simultaneously denies it: don't show any blood, don't let the good guys use conventional weapons that would make their killing look realistic and plausible, don't let our heroes carry the mental burdens of a profession that arguably goes against human nature.
I think another comparison to Death Note might serve to explain why it was that I put up with the awfulness of this for a full twenty-four episodes and then I went straight to the OVA afterwards. I obviously wasn't a big fan of Death Note, mainly because of two gigantic flaws in the writing: it spent way more text than a comic is ever allowed to put on page just to wank about Light's genius by way of detailing his ridiculously convoluted plotting. Second, the protagonists are singularly unsympathetic and the background cast was just a faceless mass, with the exception of Misa and Matsuda. Death Note is clever, but when the narrative is wonky and the cast isn't even unlikeable, it's flat-out forgettable, then I am not enjoying the story. Weiss Kreuz is anything but clever, but for all the clumsiness in the way they were portrayed, I did like the protagonists, I did feel for them in their doomed romances (well, a couple of them at least). I've never denied that Death Note is technically good, even though I found it thoroughly difficult to enjoy; and I'll never deny that Weiss Kreuz is a mess, but some part of it touched me enough to make me happy that they survived for the sequel.
So there's the godawful 1998 anime, there's an OVA that's better but still firmly in the "mediocre" category, and then there's the 2002 sequel Weiss Kreuz Glühen. And to be honest? Well, to be honest I think Weiss Kreuz has long since just been the kind of classical title that you should be familiar with because of the impact it had, not because it deserved its fame. But Glühen might actually be worth a watch. Now, I can't actually be a fair judge as to whether or not it is good, because so much of the experience of watching it was tied up to my familiarity with the original series. But what is for certain is that it is TONS BETTER than the original. The animation is fine, the writing is way ahead of the original, the nasty questions about how professional killing messes with people's heads are finally being asked, guys, there's character development happening! The plot is... well, still pretty ridiculous and fairly obviously just a vehicle for having cool fighting scenes and pretty-boy angst, but unlike the first series, there's at least a coherency between the episodes here.
So the story is thus: There's this really elite school where Nefarious Things are going on. Luckily for the peace of the land, Persian has sent Weiss to find out what's going on and presumably to stylishly kill some bad guys while they uncover a conspiracy that could end the world.
Aaaaaand... yeah, this is the part where things get weird-ish. Point the first, there was some copyright argument going on, so the lads got some pretty extreme makeover between two series, to the point of at least one of them being unrecognisable in everything but name and trademark weapon.
Point the second: the storytelling shamelessly builds on the audience's familiarity with the cast, for even though all four Weiss boys appear in the OP and the ED, the entire first half of Weiss Kreuz Glühen is about Aya investigating the Evil School together with two new Weiss members. No hint, none whatsoever, is given about what the other three are up to. This is of course a highly effective way to keep a faithful audience watching - they came here to see what became of the Weiss boys, and what better way to keep them hanging than to keep those boys away from them? THAT is the reason why I cannot in good faith tell someone that "this is good, you should at least give it a try". I assume that for anyone who doesn't have any relationship to the funky guys appearing alongside Aya in the OP and looking all angsty in the ED, Weiss Kreuz Glühen is just a very run-of-the-mill thing. It's average and moreover, a lot of the abovementioned character development is tied up to backstory from the first series that is so briefly referred to here that it's probably just confusing.
If viewed in connection with the first series, then Weiss Kreiz Glühen becomes something akin to good - or at the very least, I found that I was intenesely pulled in by it. It takes interesting bits from the first series and expand upon them in exactly the way the original so frustratingly refused to; it gives depth to a couple of characters that were notoriously denied to suffer for more than an episode from some of the life-changing things they went through back when this was just cute. If the original series had been produced with the same quality as the sequel, then I really do think it would have stood the tests of time as something more than a joke. But it wasn't, and the honest result is that the second series suffers for that, too. It isn't terribly good, and so many of it actual strong points rely on its connection to a work that I can't get myself to ask anyone to watch for anything else than ridicule.
Find a drinking game and watch Weiss Kreuz drunk, and then you can watch Glühen sober? I don't know. In the end, I didn't regret watching it. Hell, I might even watch it again some day if I seriously haven't got anything better to do. I don't doubt that the fandom might've been awesome.
That said, I watched all of it in less than a week without having to force myself to, and hey, if you want to familiarise yourself with one of the staples of the late nineties anime, I might as well tell you what to expect so that you won't get your hopes up. But the thing is, I think I might've liked it better than I want to admit, because dear lord did this get long.
Weiss is the name of a boyband - I mean, a group of young, handsome assasins with distinct personalities, Sad Pasts, and nicknames based on exotic cat breeds who sing their own OP and ED. They spend their days working in a flower shop and their nights "punishing the dark beasts" on the orders of the mysterious "Persian". Each of the four members have their trademark as-unrealistic-as-it-is-cool weapon such as piano wire and clawed gloves that are presumably dipped in nerve poison as they can kill a man instantly by giving him scratches on the back.
Click to viewHalf the episodes go something like this:
1. One of the Weiss guys get to know a young woman or occasionally some other sympathetic character, such as a cute child
2. Someone Evil preys on the friend of the day
3. Weiss, still ignorant of the friend of the day being in trouble, is sent out to kill whoever is after her
4. They kill him, but the friend of the day or someone close to them dies in the struggle
5. Weiss watch as one of their members breaks down over having lost a precious person, and reflect over the loneliness of an assassin's life.
6. Come next episode, life goes on as if last week's shattering tragedy never happened
The rest of the time, the series is preoccupied with its overarching plot, and aside from the godawful animation and the insultingly bad writing that I'm not going to detail because you can just watch the first episode yourself, one of the problems with Weiss Kreuz is that that overarching plot is really dumb. It's cliché, it's predictable, it fails at conveying any of the emotional blows it wants to. The same adjectives apply to the villains, who moreover are also badly developed and probably twice as many as they needed be - I never figured out exactly what the relationship between Schreien and Schwarz really was.
To its credit, the story is a bit better at handling the pretty boys (they obviously knew the target audience), and although they never get close to being well-rounded characters, there's at least some interesting things eventually revealed about their previous lives. Unfortunately, the story still neglects to touch upon THE big question when we're dealing with teenage assasins: We're never told how these overwhelmingly well-adjusted young men became vigilantes. Sure, we know WHY some of them ended up where they were, but there's a big gap between being a promising athlete framed for cheating, and being an undercover hitman whose favoured method of execution is a pair of wolverine gloves. This goes for all of them, but it's really a glaring plot hole what Omi concerns. With Aya I've got no problem buying it, with Yoji I can see it, even with Ken I wouldn't be terribly surprised at whatever it was. But Omi? The sweetest and kindest boy in existence? "But he took me in and raised me" does not explain the cold-blooded killing part.
Some further points of annoyance:
- The fact that whoever was writing this shit had some serious issues with women. I don't know if I even can accuse them of fridging, what with how most of them are just one-epside wonders anyway.
- Sakura Tomoe. She was cute for the first five and the last two minutes of her collected on-screen appearances. For the rest of them, she's so obnoxious that I don't have words. I found her a bit more bearable after I heard someone point out that she's essentially just there to make the point that Aya wants to bone his own sister, because that's always hilarious.
- In fact, all the love stories are singularily terrible, though I'm not sure why I expected better. Obviously, I thought it was pretty fun with the guy who discovered he was dating his own sister (not Aya)
- The fact that their weapons are ridiculous and they never get to use guns
- The fact that NONE OF THEIR VICTIMS EVER BLEED. Jesus.
- Okay, so I kind of loved all the silly German thrown around here, but there's a limit to silly and they crossed it when they named the villains Eszet. I'm just going to assume that the Evil Swiss Trio on top were Umlaut, Ich-Laut and Ach-Laut.
Anyway: it's really shit, but I did find the Weiss crew likeable enough to hang on just to see them do their thing, except for Aya who is the character type that I've got the least patience with. Just don't go into this expecting character development - the best you'll get is to hear Aya tell someone his real name. Their pasts are explored to a degree, but as mentioned above - just not enough to explain what drove them into the arms of Weiss. Their justification for making a living of carrying out vigilante justice are likewise glossed over - and this is where the Death Note connection comes in, because noises are being made about a government that is corrupt and incapable of or unwilling to pursue the most ruthless of criminals. In Death Note, the well-intended vigilante BECOMES the corrupt regime and although the philosophical aspects of the story are far shallower than so many of its fen praise it for being, the very setup of Death Note at least poses the question of how violence corrupts. Was Light always evil, or was he destroyed when he was given the power to kill indiscriminately? Weiss Kreuz does not seem to want to face the consequences of what committing murder does to a normal person. It's actually really weird that way: the violence commited by the protagonists is the very heart of this story, yet the story simultaneously denies it: don't show any blood, don't let the good guys use conventional weapons that would make their killing look realistic and plausible, don't let our heroes carry the mental burdens of a profession that arguably goes against human nature.
I think another comparison to Death Note might serve to explain why it was that I put up with the awfulness of this for a full twenty-four episodes and then I went straight to the OVA afterwards. I obviously wasn't a big fan of Death Note, mainly because of two gigantic flaws in the writing: it spent way more text than a comic is ever allowed to put on page just to wank about Light's genius by way of detailing his ridiculously convoluted plotting. Second, the protagonists are singularly unsympathetic and the background cast was just a faceless mass, with the exception of Misa and Matsuda. Death Note is clever, but when the narrative is wonky and the cast isn't even unlikeable, it's flat-out forgettable, then I am not enjoying the story. Weiss Kreuz is anything but clever, but for all the clumsiness in the way they were portrayed, I did like the protagonists, I did feel for them in their doomed romances (well, a couple of them at least). I've never denied that Death Note is technically good, even though I found it thoroughly difficult to enjoy; and I'll never deny that Weiss Kreuz is a mess, but some part of it touched me enough to make me happy that they survived for the sequel.
So there's the godawful 1998 anime, there's an OVA that's better but still firmly in the "mediocre" category, and then there's the 2002 sequel Weiss Kreuz Glühen. And to be honest? Well, to be honest I think Weiss Kreuz has long since just been the kind of classical title that you should be familiar with because of the impact it had, not because it deserved its fame. But Glühen might actually be worth a watch. Now, I can't actually be a fair judge as to whether or not it is good, because so much of the experience of watching it was tied up to my familiarity with the original series. But what is for certain is that it is TONS BETTER than the original. The animation is fine, the writing is way ahead of the original, the nasty questions about how professional killing messes with people's heads are finally being asked, guys, there's character development happening! The plot is... well, still pretty ridiculous and fairly obviously just a vehicle for having cool fighting scenes and pretty-boy angst, but unlike the first series, there's at least a coherency between the episodes here.
So the story is thus: There's this really elite school where Nefarious Things are going on. Luckily for the peace of the land, Persian has sent Weiss to find out what's going on and presumably to stylishly kill some bad guys while they uncover a conspiracy that could end the world.
Aaaaaand... yeah, this is the part where things get weird-ish. Point the first, there was some copyright argument going on, so the lads got some pretty extreme makeover between two series, to the point of at least one of them being unrecognisable in everything but name and trademark weapon.
Point the second: the storytelling shamelessly builds on the audience's familiarity with the cast, for even though all four Weiss boys appear in the OP and the ED, the entire first half of Weiss Kreuz Glühen is about Aya investigating the Evil School together with two new Weiss members. No hint, none whatsoever, is given about what the other three are up to. This is of course a highly effective way to keep a faithful audience watching - they came here to see what became of the Weiss boys, and what better way to keep them hanging than to keep those boys away from them? THAT is the reason why I cannot in good faith tell someone that "this is good, you should at least give it a try". I assume that for anyone who doesn't have any relationship to the funky guys appearing alongside Aya in the OP and looking all angsty in the ED, Weiss Kreuz Glühen is just a very run-of-the-mill thing. It's average and moreover, a lot of the abovementioned character development is tied up to backstory from the first series that is so briefly referred to here that it's probably just confusing.
If viewed in connection with the first series, then Weiss Kreiz Glühen becomes something akin to good - or at the very least, I found that I was intenesely pulled in by it. It takes interesting bits from the first series and expand upon them in exactly the way the original so frustratingly refused to; it gives depth to a couple of characters that were notoriously denied to suffer for more than an episode from some of the life-changing things they went through back when this was just cute. If the original series had been produced with the same quality as the sequel, then I really do think it would have stood the tests of time as something more than a joke. But it wasn't, and the honest result is that the second series suffers for that, too. It isn't terribly good, and so many of it actual strong points rely on its connection to a work that I can't get myself to ask anyone to watch for anything else than ridicule.
Find a drinking game and watch Weiss Kreuz drunk, and then you can watch Glühen sober? I don't know. In the end, I didn't regret watching it. Hell, I might even watch it again some day if I seriously haven't got anything better to do. I don't doubt that the fandom might've been awesome.