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Going back to before Akame ga Kill premiered, where I was looking at the synopsis and trailer, my thoughts were: fun, crazy fights, action, ultra violence bordering on grindhouse and a wide, diverse cast in a simple and timeless story to bridge everything together. It was the classic band of rebels against an evil empire scenario, which despite being so played out, offers so many possibilities.

Having just finished Akame ga Kill, I'm in a rare mood to review it because of how I felt after watching all 24 episodes. This is not a good thing, by the way, as my feelings of emptiness and apathy ... regarding the series were replaced by annoyance when I saw how totally hollow and unmoving the finale ended up being. Maybe it was wishful thinking, but I was hoping they'd go out with a bang and salvage something for a climax. After all, most mindless action shows usually hit their peak by taking us on a fun roller-coaster of destruction, while spawning mayhem and violence in these sort of anime to paper over the cracks. Unfortunately, this anime went out with a whimper.

What went wrong? How could a show that looked so appealing in the lead-up leave me that flat?

It can be argued from so many points, but everything always tracks back to one thing: death had no gravitas. I'm trying my best to avoid spoilers but it is a key problem. Normally I praise fictional pieces that employ a 'nobody is safe' rule because it can add unpredictability and, when executed right, it establishes the stakes and the 'war is hell' feeling. This show gave us death by the bucketloads, but there was no consequence because, in the end, the death was made to feel inconsequential. After brief references, they just devoted so much time to the dumb humour, goofy moments and fanservice that we never really processed the feels the deaths should've caused. Characters dying should leave you feeling like you've just been punched in the gut and not laughing wondering 'who's next?'. Death became a sideshow to the series, showing just how bad the writers failed with giving us characters we can invest in.

So how can I sum up the characters in one way? Akame ga Kill didn't make characters at all. They made caricatures with as much depth as a cardboard cutout. This is just an endless cycle until the end. We'll get a moment where a character has to feel and take something away from it, but it's like the writer’s room put down a rule and said "No character progression" to keep them as stagnant as possible. This is made painfully worse by a prominent antagonist called Seryuu. Seryuu cries for justice so much that you'll be having night terrors listening to her talk about it as she talks about it nonstop every scene she's in, even when there's no point in it. The other characters are thankfully nowhere near as cringingly bad, but I believe I am being very generous if I describe them as window dressing.

The biggest problem with the main protagonists is two-fold. Firstly, despite being the title character, Akame constantly felt like a side character in her own series. Focus is almost never on her and she's just around. This leads us to the shows’s main character: Tatsumi. First of all, the character design just irks me and I'm convinced Tatsumi stole his clothes from Carlton Banks, except he has none of the swag to pull off that sweater. Tatsumi just never clicks as he's always a naive, small town, wide eyed kid who never learns anything throughout the series. He remains dumb as a doornail as he was from the start and never takes anything from his mistakes. For a character that was supposed to be our entry point into the world of Night Raid, the rebel group that's fighting the empire, I think by the end of it we'll have learned more about everything that Tatsumi never did. He is that dumb and not in a good way. Most shounen series seem to have this moment where a protagonist has an epiphany where everything clicks for them and they fulfil some sort of potential, but to Tatsumi those moments are contained in his hands as if they're water and they slip by him so easily, which is a shame and the series as a whole suffers greatly for it.

Now that my gripes with the characters are out of the way, where did these horrible characterisations leave the story? Quite frankly, it was a mess. Every episode was a detour saddled with the excessive abovementioned dumb humour, goofy moments, and fanservice. However once again, if you're not invested with the story's main players, it's hard to accept it as banter by comrades to divert from the horrors of war. Not even the excessive gore and violence gave the story a semblance of gravitas. It felt more gratuitous and shoved down our throats without a context rather than to add weight or darkness to the story setting.

That in turn went hand in hand with how the story unfolded. Halfway in, as the exposition and world building was done, it became so frantic that it felt like the writers were just throwing idea's at the wall, seeing what they could get to stick. It became a mess with too many moving pieces and not enough attention on these pieces leading to some terrible jarring story shifts that lead me to feel, at the time, that I'd missed half an episode or so. The twists seemed to be there just to add even more shock value at every chance. Eventually it creates the same sense of fatigue and apathy that the death caused for me. I just didn't care and the way everything progressed slowly eroded the quality that much more, as it went from an underperforming show with a decent concept to a show that was constantly missing the mark by a large margin week in and week out.

Overall, how does one sum up Akame ga Kill? The animation and action were good, the designs were fairly generic but serviceable (save for Tatsumi's horrible sweater), and the fanservice seemed like it was catered to 15yr old boys who obsess over boobs more than Beavis and Butthead used to, we were reminded of it every possible moment. There was a story, but the writers clearly had no intention of sticking to it and chose the prior mentioned fanservice, T&A and pervy humor over actually progressing the story and characters in a logical way. Oh wait, they did try balancing both light and funny and serious, it just didn't work and gave the illusion that they neglected it because their concept of storytelling was so bad.

In retrospect, I guess it could've been good, but now we'll never know. Going through the entire series and dissecting it to this extent shows how bad it truly was and it could be a thesis in its own regard, but I'm sure there's enough hard working, dedicated bloggers that will save me the stress of watching it again.

While it may seem excessively harsh, 4 is a fair score to me. It was a lot worse, but I can't fault the animation team despite the uninspired designs. The backdrops and settings used were also top notch, which actually bumped my score up (sometimes you can just pause and take in and appreciate the effort and detail they put in building this world). What a waste of animation talent it was, being focused on 24 episodes of this anime.

Just finished reading Life and I acknowledge it's an amazing story that gets extremely dark. The no holds barred take on bullying in school...didn't pull back any punches at all, was very uncompromising and actually left me very unsettled by the end.

I thought this era of ultraviolence, tension and psychological thrillers had desensitized me to so much but kudos to Keiko Suenobu for helping me remember exactly how damaging bullying can be and the many facets it can take. Took me way back around 10 years of being caught up in that cycle at times...despite being in another country with a totally different culture the ... similarities were eerie. Personal relationships, cliques, petty triggers, senseless violence. This is life, the school life most of us remain oblivious to despite either seeing it or actually having been part of it. The ugly side that we use 'out of sight out of mind' logic for. The author nailed this.

As well written as Life was though, after the halfway point I felt Minami (the main antagonist) because a bit too cartoonish with her scheming and being able to sidestep every obstacle, all she was missing was a monocle from being a stereotypical villain. The emotional impact was still there but it's the inverse of having a hero who's perfect. In retrospect I guess the escalation of the bullying in the story went further than it needed to despite already having established enough pieces to work with. I feel most series have a moment in the middle where things drag out somewhat and this is where Life took that hit.

Art is good, clean, simple yet easy to make out with good layouts. Nothing groundbreaking but solid stuff.

To conclude, if you're looking for a grounded story that doesn't shy away from topic of bullying and doesn't sugarcoat anything give this a shot.