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I have a long-standing fascination with The Asterisk War. To most people, the series has been laid to rest these days, but I was new to anime and the anime community when it came out and was the spicy new topic to discuss. It was one of the first times I got to take a side on a hot-button topic of the day - and the *very* first time I got to take a side on a specific series. I liked The Asterisk War. I was team AssWar > Rakudai. I was all in. We got absolutely annihilated in that battle, mind you. Rakudai picked ... up a decisive victory in the war of public perception, but to this day I'm still that guy in whatever Discord server the topic manages to come up in, sitting in my rocking chair and ranting about how Rakudai wasn't all that and how much better The Asterisk War was. It's reached a point where people just a few years younger than me don’t know what I'm talking about anymore. I have become an old coot.

So, let's rewind. To talk about The Asterisk War in a way that means something, we have to put it in the context of 2015. The landscape was different back then - everything was in the process of changing to resemble the anime community we know today, but the new ways of the community were still in their formative stages and the old ways of the community were just beginning to die off. Conversations surrounding non-seasonal anime were declining but still prominent, and the platforms where most people discussed anime were less centralized compared to 2023. MAL, YouTube comments and r/anime were legitimately the most centralized platforms of the time. AniTwit wasn't even a term yet, and Discord hadn't taken off yet to become the behemoth that it'd become.

This setup lent itself very well towards one form of anime-centric fan content - reviews. Written and video-form reviews benefitted from the less centralized environment, where it was more common to have to seek out other people's opinions to engage with your hobby rather than be bombarded with those opinions on your Twitter feed whenever you weren't soliciting them or wanting to hear them. It was billboarding an opinion for other people to read and discuss. They still had to be sought out, but it made it much easier to find and seek out opinions on whatever series they were wanting to read or hear more about.

The largest platform with the widest possible audience for reviews was - and is - video-form reviews on YouTube. In the early to mid-'10s, we had content creators like Digibro, Mother's Basement and Gigguk that were making content that - for better or worse - had a visible impact on the discourse surrounding a series outside of the anitube bubble. Threads over the latest videos were getting pages and pages worth of discussion and argument on some nook and cranny subreddit, on anime threads on off-topic boards on My Little Pony fansites, and, most importantly to me, over on MAL's Anime Discussion board. I'm not lying when I said the most engaging and heated discussion you could find in this era was in follow-up threads about the latest Digibro video. This anitubing shit mattered back then. People talked about it, and they talked about it with passion.

With visible success creating video-form anime reviews came the flood of high school and uni kids who wanted to eschew having to grow up to work a shitty corporate nine-to-five in favor of chasing a dream of making a living by making videos talking about their favorite hobby. The prime garbage people were eating at the time was Sword Art Online videos. It was a worldwide phenomenon back then that came with a loud fanbase and a loud hatebase alike. This made it into a cash cow for creators wanting to rake in easy numbers.

However, the market on SAO content was cornered by 2015. Digibro and Mother's Basement talked about it enough by themselves to cover for thousands of up-and-coming anitubers. The SAO video review economy was being flooded by a very select few people, and the people doing so were the ones who already had all of the resources and visibility that came along with having an established platform. Nobody was making themselves off of making reviews on that series anymore outside of the people who had reached the top early.

Then the Fall 2015 season hits, and with it comes The Asterisk War. A new property with a lot of traits that made it seem like a marketing dream to some production committee at the time. It was part of the newest domestic LN trend of magic high schools, it had a largely international cast that foreign audiences might be able to relate to and enjoy, and it came with a similar-but-safer writing formula that a lot of people had identified about SAO. If the production committee pulling the strings was going to make the next LN global phenomenon in 2015, they saw AssWar as their ticket.

The production committee ran with it. It was made a split-cour before the term "split-cour" was even a term seeing common use. To folks at the time, it looked like it was an anime that came with a second season announced before the first one had even aired. It came with a gacha game before AL and FGO had made gacha games a massive thing. It had its own shitty PS Vita arena fighter, again, as part of the marketing package. The light novels were speedran for international release by the standards of the day, the valuable marketing tools of OPs and EDs were not skimped on in the slightest, and the production values behind the bulk of the anime were very strong for a 2015 LN harem anime - albeit they just took a much a less creative form of the Ufotable approach by relying heavily on filters and whatnot to make the visuals pop. It even got its own spinoff series about some girls who attended the doofy idol school that always comes in last place. It got shitcanned pretty fast, but I like to imagine that there's an alternate timeline where The Asterisk War Cinematic Universe became a thing.

Nobody seemed to consider how audiences would react to writing quality. Maybe they saw SAO selling like hotcakes in spite of the critical backlash, maybe they weren't even aware of the critical backlash since that was mainly a foreign thing, or maybe they just didn't think that quality was important for these kinds of series. I don't know. I just know that the Asterisk War and all of its marketing efforts were absolutely torpedoed by flopping with critics and audiences alike on this front. It just wasn't good. It didn't have the qualities it needed to make fans of this medium latch onto it and care about it. People didn't defend it, they didn't buy the LNs or play the gacha, and they didn't feel pressed to support it even if they did like it. The character writing and storytelling created a series where the standard reaction to it was the series itself being routinely mocked.

These elements combined to create a very visible low-hanging fruit, and every young anituber and reviewer looking for their big break 8 years ago made shitty content on this series where they tried way too hard to make this their Sword Art Online. It was open season, too. This was people's chance to break out. This was the next bad LN series getting a big marketing push for its anime adaptation. Standards of quality seemed to collapse, and anything and everything that could be mocked was being grasped at. I'm still haunted by the audio of some kid laughing for about 20 seconds straight because a character in the series is named "MacPhail," since that kind of sounds like "McFail." I don’t know how to follow that up. It happened, it’s out there, and it can never be undone.

Yet, the greatest failure of The Asterisk War is that the series made nobody. The series never became the next LN phenomenon, so the production committee wasted a bunch of resources in marketing a failed product. Yuu Miyazaki wasn't made into the next Reki Kawahara, let alone made into somebody with more meaning than that. I don't know of any content creator who made it - let alone sustained any success - by breaking through with their AssWar content. Unlike SAO, it didn't generate enough devotion from its few fans to at least elevate it to "divisive" status, meaning the loud hatred it received tended to be met with echoes, causing even the hatred to fall off fast due to a lack of interest. It managed to be lost in the void in a way that's not much different than the way some dinky OVAs get lost in the void. It inspired a tsunami of hatred that tapered off after a single wave.

To the people who even remember it, this series' legacy is defined either by an already-established content creator making a 13 video series called "The Asterisk War Sucks," or by making Rakudai Kishi no Calvary seem much better than it was when they both came out. Sword Art Online was a divisive success that just fell off with time. The Asterisk War was never anything more than a resounding failure. It's gifted kid burnout: the anime. When it was forming up, it looked like it had all of the marketing tools needed to be a massive success, only to fall apart fast and fall apart hard when it went out on its own.

Yet, here I am. I'm still here, 8 years later. I'm sitting in a room by myself with what's now the dead body of a series. Everyone else has left it to rot to the passing of time, whether they hated it or loved it. I was the one who stayed and watched it die. It’s not an exceptional death to have witnessed - the LN series wound up living as a corpse for several years following a sharp decline in sales after the anime adaptation was panned by pretty much everyone, and it got put out of its misery before reaching the intended conclusion because of said low sales. I entered this room in 2015 and I've never left, though. Eulogizing it to an audience of nobody through a review might be my way of stepping out of the room after all this time.

Let's get something straight - the storytelling of the Asterisk War is hard to talk about because of how little happens. It begins with a couple of small arcs centered around Ayato building his harem by being Mr. helpful nice guy person, followed by a series of tourney arcs, which start later on in the first season of the anime and run all the way through, until the very end of the LNs. The anime ends on the conclusion of the Phoenix Festa tourney arc, but pretty much everything that happens after the anime ends is different tourney arcs. There's all of the politics and intrigue surrounding the tourney arcs that every tourney arc in the history of tourney arcs has ever had in their tourney arcs, but at the end of the day they're all fairly routine tourney arcs. I hope I've said tourney arcs enough to drill in the point that this whole fucking series is a bunch of different tourney arcs, storywise. I'm not being hyperbolic with that.

They at least have decisive winners, but that decisive winner is always the protagonists, so whatever. It's not interesting, and it gets very repetitive the longer the series goes on. What you see in the anime is pretty much AssWar's peak in terms of storytelling quality, and it has the added bonus of featuring the very few and far between non-tourney-based storylines at the start.

And in a series defined by being nothing except tourney arcs, the fights are very weak. They're not ugly and they don't skimp on special effects - instead, they're just too clean. It's the same logic about why the lightsaber duels in the Star Wars prequels fell short of the ones from the original trilogy. In what's supposed to be an emotional fight, it's so much more human when a character just starts wailing on someone. You don't scream in rage or overcome some obstacle and just go into some beautiful exhibition-style swordplay. There's emotion in a fight. A fight is its own story inside of a story. At their best, they're bloody and raw, not a fucking well done dance routine. The pristine way that AssWar handles its fights furthers a sense of detachment from the characters on the screen, and the main cast's characterization already had been doing enough of that by itself to not need the extra help.

Which, yes, there's a lot more to be said about the characters, albeit that's because they tend to have paper-thin personalities and motivations. They are so bad that without proper context being given they could be misinterpreted as a parody of shitty writing. Julis wants to save an orphanage. She starts off as a tsun, is tsundere for like, a teensy bit, then becomes dere noble mchero mcgoodguy and not a totally McFail mcbadguy. She is disgusting in how pure of heart she is. She is like that dorky '80s teen movie trope of wanting to save the rec center from the evil big money boss and his douchey son who want to bulldoze it to build...something, except even dumber because instead of a rec center, it's a fucking orphanage. Orphans are sad and they are being abused, and Julis wants to save the orphans because she is good. Please like Julis.

Any good story manipulates your emotions to some extent to make you feel something genuine for the fictional characters involved, but proper manipulation isn't hamfisted. This might sound crazy, but saving the orphanage as a motivation to get you to root for a character might just be a little too hamfisted.

Now, Ayato is different. It's easy to miss if you don't think about it because the series itself treats all of this like it's normal, but Ayato is a fucking weirdo. He meets Julis, they have a misunderstanding, then a fight, and then he listens to her sob story about wanting to save the orphanage. Following this incredible reveal, he decides to devote pretty much his entire life and being to supporting this girl he barely knows. Do not try this in actual dating. It is less effective than unsolicited dick pics.

It works here in fantasyland, though, and in the end it winds up undermining the closest thing we have to a driving motivation in Julis wanting to save the orphanage. During the last tourney arc in the LNs, we get the epic final showdown of Ayato versus Julis. Ayato throws the fight he was winning to her to prove how much he cares or some shit. It doesn't say he intentionally loses to her because he wants to go spelunking in the cavern between her legs, but you know he's desperate enough based on his character motivations that this has to be his reason. In the biggest tragedy of the entire series, Ayato still does not get laid after losing the fight for a million billion dollars on purpose to impress the girl he's not actually dating.

Dude really based his whole life around a girl he barely knew, for fuck's sake. Just go watch porn or some shit if you just need to get it out of your system. Have some self-respect. He *does* have like, this quest to find his sister who went missing in Rikka or some shit, but it goes on the back burner for most of the series in favor of orphan-saving, and it winds up resolving itself like, oh hey we found her she was trapped by big evil master racist bad man but she's fine now and we have her. Boom. Problem solved.

Listen, harems are a sex fantasy at the end of the day, even if they're not often outright pornographic. Fantasization is normal and healthy. I also don't think the guy in the harem tends to matter a whole lot, because I'm way more worried about the girls. I don't care if he's weak or lame. I don't care if he's massively overpowered. I will get annoyed if his story overtakes that of the girls, but that's usually the extent of a response a harem MC can elicit from me. Different genres have different sources of appeal to draw an audience in, and the main draw of harem series is in the genre's one word, five letter name. However, the best possible interpretations people could make of Ayato's character were the ones during the flood of dull review content from 2015 where they complained about how bland and nothing his character was. If you think about him for too long, though, Ayato just becomes depressing to look at.

In a bold stylistic decision to completely misunderstand romance and relationships, Ayato comes across like he's some sort of dude who has no confidence with women, and thinks that he can win them over them by making them his everything when in reality their relationship is only at a stage of talking and maybe flirting a bit. This somehow works out for him, sort of. I don't really think depression and sex fantasies make a good cocktail, and the way Ayato handles his relationship is very representative of a lot of awkward and unfortunate guys out there who totally jump the gun and think they have to act this way to prove themselves to someone. I kind of just want him to get better, but not in a way that has me rooting for him as much as pitying him.

Kirin is the closest thing we have to a main character with a functioning ongoing story rather than just being a tagalong at best or having a lame-ass motivation at worst. Kirin's story is a bit about breaking out of a controlling/abusive power dynamic. I'm glad the abuser is framed as an actual abuser and not as a well-intentioned dickhead like I feel I've seen far too often with dickhead parental figures in anime, but the fact that this is my highest praise for her character story isn't a good thing. "Hey portraying a serious problem normally and without being offensive" isn't a strong statement - it’s the bare minimum. Following her little coming-out-of-her-shell arc, she becomes something closer to a small, cute animal rather than a human in behavior and mannerisms, so it was all for nothing because she goes right into the rubbish bin long term. I also find her gross to look at. Don't like the loli-big boobs combo. Never have.

The villains are all like, setting-based Nazis or some shit. Racial supremacists, but the race are the people with the super powers. It's not interesting. There's one dude you see in the anime, Dirk, who doesn't have any powers but is still a powers-based racial supremacist. He's also ugly but in a way that seems intentional to make you dislike him on a shallow level as well as because he's such a rat bastard, but I find him more physically attractive than Kirin. I'm not into men and I say that with absolute certainty.

Other than that, my favorite characters are ones I tend to enjoy for very strong reasons in an ecchi anime, i.e. I usually like them for their tits. However, do not be fooled - AssWar is not an ecchi. It's tagged as an ecchi here on MAL, but in implementation it just has a fanservice bit every few episodes during the first season, and by the second season the fanservice gets phased out almost entirely. You cannot watch AssWar as an ecchi. It will disappoint.

I want to end the character talk on a good note, though. I think Saya Sasamiya is the high point of characterization in the series, and not just relative to a weak cast, either. She's not the hottest character ever - too loli for my taste - but I'd place her on the strong side of kuudere characters in anime as a whole. The archetype isn't my cup of tea, but Saya is the comic relief of the cast in a way that comes off per the character's intent rather than as a byproduct of her dull tone and demeanor.

The best joke in the series is when this arrogant idol-school chick is talking herself up prior to a duel with Saya, and Saya just blasts her away before she finishes her speech. The second best joke is when Ayato walks in all of them changing, and everyone is flustered, as per the norm. 'Cept Saya, who just takes the most casual, "yo waddup ayato how's it going" reaction to the situation, seeming to be aware of how this should be an embarrassing situation for everyone involved but instead just treating it like it's as normal as bumping into your friend in the hallway. It manages to both defuse the situation and set it apart from other uses of the scenario to have the joke come across as fresh, without coming across like it's trying to be self-aware. I can buy into the idea that it's just Saya being Saya, and that's why she's is the bright spot in this cast.

It's not a type/role match that's unique to her, but it's the best I've seen it handled in the details. Kuudere humor tends to be either laughing at them for their awkwardness and finding it cute, or them making sarcastic remarks about the absurd situations the rest of the cast is in, but in the glory of monotone. Saya is just a silly, fun person who happens to speak in monotone. She's animated, she's emotive (for her archetype), her style of humor is hers, and her being a kuudere is just pretty much the way she speaks and the fact she has a thing for Ayato to make her -dere. Her archetype is additive to her comedy as a character and gives her flavor, but it doesn't dominate her entire existence. This culminates in making her feel less like the butt of the jokes or like she cannot stand being around these people, but more like she's the life of the group and a great enhancement to what's otherwise a pretty weak cast dynamic. Sometimes, even writers who cannot write for shit manage to do stuff right. Good job, Yuu Miyazaki.

As a whole, though, AssWar doesn't understand that heroes need something to make an audience want to cheer for them. The heroes are so strictly good that they feel intangible. I do believe you can get away with bland heroes whenever they go against memorable and interesting villains for an audience to enjoy hating, but AssWar's villains are as hardtack as its heroes. The only people I felt any form of investment in were Saya - because Saya is just cool as shit - and any girl with nice tits not named Kirin. I don't care about anything else with these characters.

Now, this should all seem weird. I'm ripping on AssWar quite a bit. I opened up talking about how much I like this series and now I'm mocking the writing. I do like this series, though. I promise. It's not an ironic enjoyment, either - I love it.

I do think the character writing and storytelling are awful, and because of this it's easy to see why it was such a flop. People want great characters and strong stories in this medium. It's why they're here, and if a story and its characters fail to deliver there is nothing wrong with expressing your dislike for having wasted your time with it. Asterisk War tries to tell a story that it places front and center so you can't really argue that the intent isn't as much.

I am an ecchi fan, though. If my existence as a fan was defined by basing my views on any given series by having a rigid need to weigh those two aspects of a series above everything else, I couldn't be an ecchi fan. I'm very open to disregarding them entirely if there's stuff I like a lot more, and AssWar redeems itself to me through the one strength it has - the setting concept.

Follow along with me here. If you played videogames when you were younger, did you ever do dumb shit like try to walk around like your character was just one of the people who lived in the setting? I remember when I was a kid and playing Wild Arms on the first Playstation, I'd stop and do that in the starting village all the time. I'd stop at bales of hay and act like my character was gathering them and then I'd take them over to the area with the horses, like I was giving the horses their hay for the day. Then I'd walk around, talk to people who said the same lines, then head up to the bedroom where it let me save. The sleep song would play, and I'd get my character out of bed and repeat my task of feeding the village horses the next day. When I revisited Wild Arms as an adult I found that it isn't an exceptional game, but when you're a little kid everything seems so magical about this fantasy and fiction stuff that you just want to get lost in it all.

As people get older, that sense of mysticism and excitement in everything begins to wear off. We get bags under our eyes, we experience a lot more of the negative parts of the world and life, and we deal with bullshit we'd rather not have to but are forced to just to be able to function on a day-to-day basis. Those feelings fade into this memory that we call nostalgia. It's a powerful thing when it gets combined with the stresses of life as an adult. This sense of longing for things to feel that way again, for everything to be exciting and to capture your imagination like it used to.

I feel like it's very rare, but as adults, I believe we can still interact with media that manages to recreate that sense of wonder and excitement that we felt when we were kids. Media that captures our imagination to the point where we're getting caught up in minutiae, not just wondering what'll happen next in the story. To date, the only media I've experienced as an adult that has managed to capture my imagination to this extent was The Asterisk War and its worldbuilding.

So, a long ass time ago in-setting but well into the future for us real-life lads, Earth was struck with some magical meteor shower or some shit, and these magical meteors caused the next generation to begin experiencing births of super people who could do magic and shit. Blah blah blah, the city of Rikka was built in one of the meteor impact craters to house them and hold super-powered magic techno-fighting tournaments that the rest of the world could watch as a sport.

Now, Rikka has six schools that run from middle school through university, and these schools have different ethos attached to them that they expect their students to uphold, kind of like the D&D alignment system or the fucking weird ass Harry Potter Hat with a face - the student's personal values being reflected by which school they attend.

To give a runthrough of each one, there's Seidoukan, which is more or less the protagonist syndrome school for the neutral good characters. This is where the heroes of the main story all attend. There's Le Wolfe, which believes in Social Darwinism, and it's as edgy as you'd expect upon hearing that as their ethos. No teamwork, advance at all costs, prove you’re the strongest because survival of the fittest, yadda yadda. This is the school for all of the Shadow the Hedgehog and Sephiroth fans out there.

Then there’s St. Galahadsworth, which is the lawful good school where the students are forbidden from dueling and are expected to uphold a strict code of chivalry. Arlequint - my personal favorite - is the mad scientist, always playing-with-syringes school where the students are expected to always foster innovation and stand at the forefront of weapons development, complete with a student section comprising of human guinea pigs to test out the experiments on and do the actual fighting for the nerds in the lab coats. Jie Long, which is somewhat similar to Galahadsworth but without the focus on Western-style chivalry and instead a greater focus on things like self-improvement and martial arts, kind of like the Bruce Lee school or some shit. Jie Long is not as demanding to be lawful good, either, it’s chaotic and all over the spectrum. Last and least there's Queensvail, which is an all-girls school focused on producing idols and entertainers above all else, so if you’re a pretty girl who wants to sing or something I guess you can go there and get last in every event.

In these schools, they have different disciplines of magic unique to them that students can learn like Jie Long's Taoist style magic, and various weapons called Orga Luxes that have mystical properties that can interact with the user that the weapon itself will choose, for better or for worse depending on what weapon it is. It can grant the user new abilities they previously didn't have access to, it can damage the users psychological state, so on and so forth - each being different and giving different boons or maluses depending on the weapon’s temperament.

It is game world worldbuilding, and that's not super distinct in of itself in the world of light novels. What sets it apart is in the details - it's not JRPG videogame worldbuilding. It's a magic sci-fi city, complete with its own values systems stemming from the strange society that's been built up through the lore of the land the series actually takes place in and treats as real, with its own list of things like legendary weapons that's left open-ended enough for the viewers to get creative with on their own, rather than having a set of in-game rules that the worldbuilding itself is forced to abide by. Underlying the trite story the series tells is a setting with the potential for a lot to be done, ranging from ideological and ethical conflicts, to treasure seeking, to magical fantasy shit, to sci-fi techno shit. The worldbuilding made a point of incorporating things like personal values and beliefs in tandem with all of this rather than just being another demon king story or something just fucking fascist like Mahouka, too. I felt invited to make my own characters with their own values and come up with special weapons that had unique properties for them to use.

The series itself - anime and LNs - does a good job at showcasing its worldbuilding. It doesn’t drop into textbook exposition too often and will take time and care to show certain facets of the worldbuilding through actions. A good example is when we see McFail try to use the Orga Luxe that winds up going to piss boy MC. It’s such a simple sequence - characters are going into the vault to try out Seidoukan’s collection of legendary weapons. Señor McFail walks up and try to use one, but the weapon itself rejects him. Later it becomes piss boy MC’s legendary weapon, but this small sequence showcases the idea that the main weapons all the top folks in this system use accept or reject those who try to wield them. We also get droplets of it through the main storyline, such as when they were trying to deduce which school sent in a spy to infiltrate them. They break it down in ways like “No, it’s not likely that St. Galahadsworth would result to these kinds of tactics, they have a certain image to maintain” to give a rudimentary idea of which schools of magic lie where on the values and ethics spectrum.

It’s not some impressive feat of writing as much as it is just good execution, but it does a good job of drip-feeding this kind of info to the viewer without relying *too* much on exposition - it’s not perfect, but relative to the norm in anime it’s a cut above. This is what caused me to get so wrapped up in this series. I wanted to have my own character in this world, and when I watched it for the first time when I was 18, I made one. He was going to be a student at the Renaissance Europe-styled school of St. Galahadsworth whose characterization was going to be inspired by Galileo Galilei's conflicts with the church over his contributions to astronomy conflicting with religious doctrine, E pur si muove style. He was going to be so fucking cool and rebellious inside of a heavily controlled and legalistic environment, and he was going to get to bang Shenhua and be a bit of a villain who strays from the path of the super good guy school, and it was going to be awesome. I was so engrossed with thoughts like this that I kept watching the series so I could learn more and more so I could incorporate it into my own little story I was coming up with that'd use the setting. I'm not going to pretend like I think it would've been good with the power of hindsight, but give me a break. I was having a lot of fun coming up with this shit.

Dorky. Cringey. Fucking awesome. I love how much the Asterisk War was able to engage me on this level. This is one of the best ways to get wrapped up in something to me, where you're imagining your own characters and stories and getting to thinking about dumbass little details about what weapons they'd use, how they'd look, what their room and social life would be like, so on and so forth. That feeling of imagination and wonderment is a powerful connection to make with a series, and I kept paying attention to little details that were just so inviting to that sense of wonder that I found myself falling into this weird rabbit hole of AssWar lore. I even own physical copies of the volumes of the LNs that’ve been released. I bought them for fucking research at first. I didn't sit down and read the LNs until half a decade later. When I was so into this series, I used them for the comprehensive glossary of terms and concepts about the setting the first volume came with, or I skimmed through them to pick up lore tidbits, or just to look at the map of Rikka they came with where it described the schools and their various facets and guiding principles. To me, that’s appreciating something on a level that not many things can succeed in evoking. The Asterisk War, somehow, was the series that did for me.

When I did sit down to actually read the LNs cover to cover, I was a proper adult with 5 years of experience in the workforce. This is when it all clicked together. I came to understand that this husk of a series wasn't a failed franchise, but someone’s dead dream. The anime was very corporate in its presentation and marketing, sure, and the LNs became a total lazy mess later on in their run before receiving what I can only describe as a mercy-killing cancellation, but what’s stuck with me more than anything about this series is the author’s note in the very first volume of the light novels.

In it, Yuu Miyazaki doesn't talk about how much he loves animation and storytelling and what anime and manga he was a fan of that inspired him to make AssWar. Instead, he expresses his love of tabletop RPGs. When he was younger and didn't have a friend group to play them with yet, he'd have his parents buy him RPG manuals he could read. He used to love reading Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer game manuals for the setting details in them, to get lost in their worlds and lore and history, to let his imagination take over and see where things guided him. In this note, Miyazaki claims a wide variety of these game manuals as his inspirations, and states that his goal with Asterisk War was to create a series that people could create their own characters for and become its own tabletop RPG someday.

The Asterisk War was never meant to be a light novel. It was meant to be a setting for an RPG people could make their own stories with and go on adventures with their friends in. This is a stated intent dating from before the anime’s release. Yet, somehow - and I don't know how - it wound up as a light novel series instead, and a light novel series and its fans demand some sort of a story to get engrossed in rather than one they make themselves. In this case, the story they received was a story written by someone who didn't care about and wasn't interested writing a story to begin with. Even if effort is expended, if the intent and desire isn't there, it'll fail to connect with the audience. This was its undoing, and yet aspects about the setting that Yuu Miyazaki had created made it appear to some suits on a production committee like the next big thing they could market to create the next Sword Art Online.

This opened its shortcomings up to widespread attention, and those shortcomings caused the series to be met with intense mockery. People online would rip this series apart tooth and nail. They themselves were out for blood in trying to create their own next SAO. I remember back when people still talked about AssWar, I'd watch randos in threads stoop to petty things like berating the author's appearance and ascribing personal faults to him as a human being for having the audacity to write an inoffensive, if dull, story as a vessel for his setting to be published. Years later, I remember thinking about how much Miyazaki was attacked as a person for writing AssWar when I was following the Ruroni Kenshin drama. People were far more accepting of an actual pedophile in Ruroni Kenshin's mangaka than they were of some dude who just wrote a bad story that it seems like he didn't even want to write, and that's just...heartbreaking, really.

As the LNs continued beyond the anime, they became less and less energetic. Even if the writing before wasn't great, I think it at least tried to highlight the setting as best it could before even that fell away as the series went on deeper into its neverending tourney arcs, and there was even some good character writing at points like I saw with Saya. Hell, even Kirin's story with her Uncle tried to do something with familial abuse and pushing children too hard, and even if it wasn't much, it at least handled it far more tactfully than I'd have expected. It was bad, but it wasn't lazy.

With time, the starry-eyed excitement of that first author's note that was hoping it'd become the tabletop RPG it was always meant to be was depleted, with the author’s notes becoming more and more brief with each passing volume before they stopped all together at a certain point. The story and art inside of the LNs derailed, better exemplifying a lack of motivation in creativity than anything that was adapted into the anime could. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t trying to achieve anything anymore. It was going through the motions as much as that could entail.

The Asterisk War died quietly, to no fanfare or mourning, just a little under a year ago as of this review. It was a bad story with bad characters, but it was this way because this wasn't what it was supposed to be in the first place. It was in the wrong medium. I don't know how it got here and how things wound up this way, but I'm convinced the AssWar would be better if it was never LN or an anime to begin with. Maybe there's a timeline out there where it managed to spread its wings and be the tabletop RPG it was always meant to be, and there’s groups of friends going on adventures with their characters in their little anime magic school game. In our universe, though, it all failed with a short drop and a sudden stop. I can't escape the feeling I'm the last person leaving the room where we watched someone's dream die in real time, and that's a bitter taste to have to swallow.

With that, I leave this room and close the door behind me. For better or worse, I had fun. Shine on, you crazy diamond. I mean it when I say that I wish that it had all gone differently for you.

I find it very easy to hate DxD. The content isn't why, though. Anybody can see a floppy anime tit and dismiss it as being too base for them. That's not worth a discussion, let alone a review. It won't make any statement greater than getting people who hate fanservice to smash that upvote button. So fuck it.

Instead, I want to present my contempt for DxD from the perspective of somebody who loves this type of shit. Because yes, I love ecchi. I love how ecchi is about jack-knifing sexualization and more traditional types of content and characterization. At the same time, I love that ... it still veers more towards the stupid and pornographic than it does the thematic and substantial. I also love what it represents on a grander scale, beyond what's put before the audience.

Remember that last one. It's important.

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So, before we dig deeper into the series itself, let me lay some groundwork. I'm under the impression that in order to understand why DxD sucks so much, we need to understand what makes it work for so many people. Plenty of people do like this series, and it's not like I'm sitting here with a stupid look on my face trying to understand why. It's not hard to figure out if you think about it long enough.

DxD has two contrasting elements that end up developing synergy in their execution - a traditional action narrative and a lot of fanservice scenes. They're not connected in any meaningful way. It doesn't make any kind of thematic statement on sexuality, either. No narrative relevance. None of that shit that outsiders like to fawn over so much in their piss poor forum posts or Twitter hot takes.

Rather, the synergy between narrative and fanservice in DxD stems from the relative simplicity of both. The traditional action narrative I spoke of isn't anything groundbreaking by itself. The MC, Issei, has a special power. He gets his ass kicked sometimes. He powers up and comes through with the power of friendship or tits or something. Rinse and repeat, the only differences being aesthetic and the growing sense of scale that each new arc brings to the table.

A lot of people have pointed to the emphasis DxD places on narrative as a primary point of defense to me when I've criticized this series in the past, but let's be real - if we removed all fanservice from DxD, nobody would fucking talk about this shit. Nobody talks about DxD power scaling, that'd be stupid. Nobody talks about how epic any of the fights are, either, or how dope the pseudo-religious backdrop is. None of that matters by itself, because none of it is interesting by itself. It's about as bog-standard as you can get with an action narrative.

This series is still distinguished *because* of its fanservice, which it does have in spades. We're not going to have to sit there and debate on whether it's an ecchi anime or a mere anime with fanservice. This isn't Fire Force or Shokugeki. It's a fucking ecchi.

Yet, I'm under the impression that DxD's fanservice is just too basic to be a selling point by itself. Nothing about how it implements fanservice makes it exceptional relative to its field. It relies on the most basic exposure shots *to an extremity* and it repeats those shots over and over again, redrawn, but not different. Is seeing a bare nipple enough to give you some Looney Toons-esque, heart-beating-out-of-your-chest reaction? It's not for me. I stopped being 14 a decade ago. A tit is a fucking tit.

We compare shit to other shit we've watched. Almost everyone does. If you rate one series an 8 and another a 7, you've compared them to one another and said the 7 was worse. If we don't factor in DxD's emphasis on a traditional action narrative, DxD's ecchi is like, a 2 compared to other ecchi. If what you want is an ecchi, there are hundreds of much better options for that. They go further with how explicit they're willing to be. They have better characters with more meat to latch onto. They're centered on this element of their identity and wear it on their sleeves. There's a lot of dope ecchi content out there, and you're missing out on it if you think DxD is at the apex of what the genre has to offer in that regard. Ecchi isn't any more of a strong suit for it than narrative is.

This is where DxD's synergy between narrative and ecchi kicks in.

The narrative kind of sucks, right? It's nothing great, but it's familiar territory. That's what's important - it's barren ground that other series have treaded time and time again. It'll take somebody who is unfamiliar with ecchi, yet familiar with more mainstream types of anime, and put them in friendly territory. It's something they know. It's something they can digest and understand. It's not going to weird them out or come on too strong with the Harem&Ecchi elements, because it's kind of like that one battle shounen they like, but with tits.

And the ecchi kind of sucks, right? Well, maybe if you're iffy about fanservice in anime, it's not. It's so safe and conservative that it's hard for it to offend anyone. It's got quantity, but it lacks any desire to push the envelope with its sexual content. It rests on its laurels, making everything always trace back to being a sequence of basic exposure shots.

But if you take shitty, conservative ecchi and mix it with a narrative that's derivative and safe, you get synergy for a specific type of audience member - the type of people who watch anime but don't watch ecchi. It has a good shot at removing the weird element of watching a straight up-ecchi anime for someone who wouldn't.

That's where it succeeds. It's so safe for the genre's standards that people who may be uncomfortable watching an ecchi can watch something like DxD and feel more at ease with themselves.

It's not great because of its narrative, and it's not great because of its ecchi. It's because the simplicity of both of those elements come together to create a safe environment for people who might otherwise feel insecure in watching something like this.

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You *might* have the wrong idea of where I'm going with this now, so let me clarify something. DxD is a kickass gateway for getting people into ecchi anime, and I think that's awesome. I am all for getting more people into the ecchi fandom. I don't like or promote trying to get people into anime itself for the sake of "introducing your friends to your hobbies" or whatever, but if people want to try out ecchi on their own terms and end up liking it, I think that's great. DxD being the way it is *does* make it a great point of entry for people who are unsure whether they'd like Harem&Ecchi anime.

DxD doesn't suck because it's a gateway anime. No. DxD sucks because it's too conservative. Lemme try to illustrate this.

In the first OVA, they go to some museum-type thing, fight some Egyptian-type thing, and after they're done, a tentacle monster swoops in and begins grabbing up the girls. Tentacles are fucking weird, yo. That's not what you'd expect to see out of a conservative ecchi anime, so I was hype. It was being different. I'm not even big on scenes like tentacle scenes, yet I'm all for this shit. After being subjected to clothes dissolution -> basic exposure shot like, seven times an episode throughout the first season, it was going out there and getting ready to push the envelope and be explicit and lewd.

The tentacle monsters grab the girls. They scream and squirm and cry for help, all of that rape-y shit.

Then the tentacle monster secretes a toxic substance or something. Then their clothes dissolve.

Then it does a basic exposure shot.

It looms over one girl's chest for a few seconds. Then the next. Then the next.

Then it's done and they beat up the tentacle monster.

It started doing something different. Something out there. Whether that's my scene or not, it built up the expectation it was going to do *something* that wasn't a basic exposure shot. Then it turned that into a series of basic exposure shots. Just like that, I went from intrigued to seeing the series bombard me with the same dull shots I'd seen a million times during the previous season. It teased pushing the boundaries, then it defaulted back to being as conservative and safe with ecchi as it could get.

Fuck off.

I watched DxD at around the same time I did To LOVE-Ru, too. I switched back to TLR after that episode.

One of the main scenes of the TLR episode that I watched afterward had a bit where one of Lala's inventions malfunctions, which is pretty much the most typical TLR ecchi scenario setup in that series. This invention is a telephone that's supposed to do...something else, I don't even remember what, but the unintended result is that it makes the person on the receiving end of the call begin to orgasm.

When Rito makes a call to Yui, we get this awesome prolonged masturbation scene that was borderline - if not outright - pornographic. Not some fucking basic exposure shot. Not something that's on the screen for a few seconds before switching off. It was an entire scene constructed around sexualizing a woman masturbating due to this weird pheromone phone. And I loved it. This is what ecchi could be! It can be an ecchi! It can show lewd shit! It can fire up your fantasies and stoke your imagination! You can masturbate to a series like To LOVE-Ru and I wouldn't find it weird, yet if you said the same about a series like DxD, I'd be side-eyeing you.

The reason it'd be so weird for one and not the other is because of this difference in execution. TLR goes places. It prolongs scenes and doesn't shy away from being what it is - an ecchi. Doing the same for a series like DxD would be fapping to a bunch of brief basic exposure shots interspersed with mediocre action scenes. That'd be...strange.

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At the end of the day, ecchi is rebellious. Refusing to conform to what people want and demand of you rests at its foundation. The series I compared DxD to earlier, To LOVE-Ru, was the subject of intense government scrutiny under Tokyo's Healthy Youth Development Initiative and how unrepentant it was in being explicit. It risked getting banned from being sold in Tokyo, which would have killed its publication.

The mangaka for To LOVE-Ru responded that government pressure by pushing TLR even farther and harder than he had before. He began doing shit like slipping subliminal pussy shots into his manga to sneak that in there, *as* the government was coming down on his work. That's fucking awesome.

The Japanese government doesn't like ecchi. Most ecchi-centric manga mags got fucking axed by them and the HYDI, and creators had to disperse to having their content put at the backend of more "acceptable" magazines.

Networks don't like it much. They'll stop airing this as soon as it steps out of line. See Interspecies Reviewers, another ecchi that made it a point to go as far as it could while still being comedic and having fun characters.

You don't make a lot of money making ecchi content, contrary to popular perception, so that's out the window. Any anecdote from a creator of ecchi content will make as much crystal clear. Even the author for Redo of Healer admitted that in a recent interview he did on YouTube when he talked about making lewd shit, and that guy was transparent about being in it for the cash.

We're never on top sales charts. We're always at the back of manga mags. The floor and the ceiling are both lower whenever you take the established myth that "sex sells" and look at the experiences of creators and actual numbers.

It sure as fuck doesn't have much legitimacy in the eyes of non-ecchi anime fans, either. It wasn't even that long ago where I was having an otherwise decent conversation about anime with somebody who knew I was an ecchi fan, and when we talked about anime he felt the need to assert that he "liked real anime, y'know?" - in comparison to me, the degenerate, irresponsible ecchi fan.

Do we need another forum thread or review complaining about the presence of fanservice in anime to make it clear that no shortage of outsider fans view what we like as illegitimate and less valuable than what they think anime should be? Considering that's more common than shitty isekai LN adaptations, I don't think we do.

We're here though, man. We're too weird to be normal anime fans, and we're too story and character-centric to be hentai. Nobody outside of us seems to like the middle ground we occupy, and yet the genre we gather around persists. It's not dying anytime soon, at least as far as I can tell. We still stand as an antithesis to people's idea of how media should be categorized, and that's despite copious amounts of opposition.

Yet, by being so conservative, everything that DxD's existence represents is antithetical to that entire ethos surrounding ecchi. It's an anime that is only shameless in how willing it is to kowtow to what others can consider "normal," and it accomplishes that through being safe, conservative, and boring. DxD represents subservience. It represents refusing to push the envelope with sexual content. It represents making something surrounded by an ethos of refusing to corrode into conformity and making that as safe and approved by the masses as it possibly can be. If To LOVE-Ru represents being willing to die on your feet, DxD represents living on your knees.

It's not what ecchi is, and it sure as fuck isn't what it should be. There's a lot of great ecchi out there. If this is your first stop with ecchi, I hope you manage to find the great stuff that lies beyond the gate. I really do.