11.08
I need a wise man to judge my hat.
The first season of Valvrave was one of the bombastic, reprehensible, and bizarre shows to air this year. Despite the story having more holes than a spider’s nest, the show’s drive to be serious in light of rampant fanservice and bizarre character interactions made it quite memorable. As if someone looked G Gundam and believed that was too subtle, we were given a hodgepodge of anime tropes molded into something claiming to be a show. But that’s not to say the show didn’t put effort in being mindless. Nobody could unintentionally come up with such a mess. Only a passionate writer could create a show this idiotic. Sunrise whipped up a comedy of errors with shameless disregard for subtlety.
But then season two happened, and the series has stopped being as moronic. On the surface, this sounds like an improvement for a show. Yet I do not enjoy this show as much as I used to. The bouts of insanity have been swept under the rug, with any mishaps being too few to truly appreciate. By removing some issues with the first season, Sunrise took some of the charm from the as well. Imagine if someone had made a sequel to Plan 9 from Outer Space that proved to be a decent, but unmemorable movie. While the movie could be objectively better than its predecessor, it would express apathy rather than mindless aspiration. Rather than being a laughably insane space opera, Valvrave has become a mediocre space opera. I’m expected to care about Haruto’s plight instead of see his character as a punch line to a accidentally labyrinthine joke.
I know some people see differently. They wanted a mecha series with genuine plot instead of fumbles that snowball into lunacy. But when the show introduces vampire wizards from space, any sort of low-key storytelling gets thrown out. This second season fears being bombastic, in favor of portraying scenes where Haruto and L-Elf goes in espionage to attack Dorssian bases. Valvrave’s become a clown trying to do understated humor. This could have worked if the show had done this from the start, but a season’s worth of nonsense weights that ambition down. The show ignores established rules, expecting the viewer to have forgotten the odd parts of the first season in order to stand out as a legitimate show instead of unintentional parody.
And that could have worked too if the second season’s writing was pristine enough to redeem the previous psychosis. While this is entirely subjective, the writers don’t have that ability to manipulate the show like that. They can’t make their own Catch-22 by making the audience laugh one minute and cry the next. These are people who forgo being excellent comedians by becoming lackluster dramatists as an alternative. Their hearts are genuine, but are put in the wrong place. Perhaps the show will prove me wrong by having Saki turned out to be the new Jesus or something, but I have resigned in seeing this slapstick become a half-hearted tragedy.