barfkutsuou
amei, wredwrat, a number of people and also me have started watching Gankutsuou, which I do every year having encouraged everyone many times over Twitter, and the prospect of which makes my heart develop many boners.
Today I realized I wanted to write a serious post about this show. The post is long and the show is pretty ridiculous so no one will read the post, but I am happy to have said so many things.
SO FAR
_
Basically it all depends on how you feel about Albert. Gankutsuou is sometimes a surprisingly mature show, and one of its most literary risks is the polarizing nature of its POV character. His mahoushoujo levels of openness and naivete are his greatest asset in this kind of story, where everyone but Albert is inexorably driven and doomed by their one greatest lie, where the villain preys on secrets and is only bested when he tries to cheat an honest man. And it's not even that Albert's honesty is a symptom of his ignorance -- with his back to the wall he is quite the critical thinker, and honest still -- he's just the odd romantic out of a cast otherwise entirely populated with dispirited cynics. It's clear to me that the reason he and Edmond Dantes look so much alike has nothing to do with the hilarious/topically creeporama possibility that they are father and son, as is the hinted case in some other TCoMC adaptations, but rather serves to demonstrate exactly why Albert's mere presence causes the Count to buckle over and over. And Albert is better equipped than young Edmond to take knocks; his relationships with Franz and Eugenie play out in exact reverse of Edmond's with Fernand and Mercedes, plus he's been raised by social wolves.
But it's very important to note that Gankutsuou is uniquely and fundamentally a coming-of-age story, where Albert's naive romanticism is censured at least as much as it is celebrated, because it is also his greatest flaw. The greatest of a whole, explicitly underscored bunch. You wouldn't really want to "be" Albert, at least not for most of his character arc. Not that Albert isn't relatable; actually he's probably too much of the opposite; it's just that he is not a character one would frankly enjoy relating to when we meet him. He is self-righteous, immature, self-involved, spoiled to the point of eccentricity, and tends to lash out whenever others question the importance of his initially insignificant yet subjectively profound problems. There's something a touch discomfiting about watching a fifteen-year-old anime protagonist act very much his age, particularly in a way that feels distinctly Western, from a perspective that is pretty starkly adult and therefore unforgiving. Mahoushoujo naivete is all beautiful and good in theory, but in application, in this show, I can hardly name a character that does not wonder aloud re: what the fuck Albert is even thinking. You could argue -- and the series commendably asks you to consider the validity of arguing -- that much of the crap that rains down on Paris is logically Albert's fault, and how much of the ending is his due punishment. Road to hell, good intentions, etc. etc. But then the epilogue lets him off the hook, I would say necessarily, because a show like Gankutsuou wouldn't stoop to certain kinds of cruelty. It has a moely good heart, too.
So I'll go out on a limb and posit that Albert is not the one we're supposed to relate to. (And here I'm obvi talking about Gankutsuou exclusively; I don't think there's any confusion about whom to throw in with in the original TCoMC story.) You do root for Albert in the end, of course, and for Edmond Dantes, and for Haydee, and for the shirtless dudes. But for the entire run, even when rooting like (☆∀☆) for Maximilian, even after it doesn't matter, you root for Franz. Everyone likes Franz, lol, and actually the show will fall apart far quicker and more surely for anyone who doesn't care about him first. Franz is right both in foresight and hindsight, he literally composes the moral of the story, and even if you find him ultimately too gay-martyr (a valid camp, though I personally am ok with that whole arc based solely on its sheer orgy of emotional pornography) you are nevertheless likely to stamp a big IAWTC onto everything he attempts to make Albert understand.
Kind of a tricky narrative choice, because in young adult works we like to form an instant bond with our POV character. But if it works for you, it works wonderfully. Like, if you trust Franz to the point of buying into his feelings, you begin to trust that Albert is worth this protective, totally unconditional love. For a while Franz's grounds seem objectively baffling, since, you know, all of the above, but little by little you kind of start to get it. I think I initially kind of got it in the scene where Albert and Eugenie ride out to the city limits, where Eugenie confesses just how badly she wants to run away from home, to which Albert is instantly and in full seriousness all, "Ok let's go right now!" Because Albert doesn't want her to be so unhappy all the time. It's basically the charmingest and heartbreakingest sentiment ever, as is Eugenie's reaction. Looking at Albert through this sort of filter, you eventually get over his flaws and start to love him the way Franz loves him, the way everyone ends up loving him, for more or less the same reasons. It's a subtle, potentially magical move. That's the thing that I like best about Gankutsuou, its capacity for subtlety and detail between the requisite bouts of deafening melodrama. Which the show basically has to lay into like nuts in order to work at all; no other format would be as effective! This is not like a super deep story, but it's a story that knows exactly what to do, and how to economize the motions of what it is doing. At 24 eps, it's actually pretty packed. I've seen the whole series about five or six times now, lol ;ᴗ; and ok I am not the most attentive viewer in the world, but be that as it may after five or six times I still catch all sorts of stuff I've never even noticed before.
Like ok take this segment:
Click to viewThe basic plot-progressing level here is, Albert is worried about Haydee, who has gotten ill at the Opera, and Franz coldly calls her a ho to dissuade Albert from the opinion that the Count is this really cool individual. But the actual point of the scene is so great, it's all about like. How Albert, having recently been apprised of all the thrill and passion that's missing in his super lame life, wishes he could figure out a way to fall in love, because it's one of the thrilling passionate things he has heard about and sort of half-believes and wants to try out for himself. Because Albert is 15 and sticking his penis into anything sounds like basically the best plan ever. For Albert, the Count represents all this freedom and semi-sexual possibility that Albert's lame parents and boring friends have never let him experience. Except Albert has no fucking idea what to even do when confronted with a semi-sexual possibility, I mean he can't even articulate it, he just sort of guesses that when you're with a girl you're supposed to sort of crawl all over her and feel her boobs while she is all, Ooooh. (Honestly to this day I still dk what are the legit sexual politics between Albert and the Count, like at any point in this series, because Albert is pretty obviously straight... except?? :3c ....)
Anyway meanwhile Franz makes his listening-to-Albert-try-to-articulate-semi-sexual-possibility face and tries super hard not to be like BEING GAY FOR YOU IS THE WORST THING EVER BUT I WOULD BE PROPOSING TO U RN IF I COULD etc.
Meanwhile we see a couple about to go get nasty in the bathroom or whatever to underscore all the symbolism.