It’s been about a week since I finished Spice and Wolf Season 2, and this is a review that I’ve come to after a good deal of retroflection on the show. I first saw S1 as part of my then-college’s anime club about a year ago, and really loved the unique themes and characterizations that the show dealt with. Most of all, however, I fell deeper in love with the outstanding opening, a song that I’ve been listening to for many years now.
Now I return to S2 with fairly high expectations and a better understanding of what makes this show unique. I’ll spoil the end of this review by saying this, but I can pretty confidently say that while I enjoyed S2, it didn’t hit quite as well as S1 did, and I feel that there were some distinct areas that the first season did better. That being said, I can preemptively recommend both seasons to most readers of this review, and this is probably the first show I’ve ever seen where I’d love to have a third season rather than being completely satisfied with only two or completely happy that it’s over.
I alluded to it earlier, so I’ll look first at the music of Spice and Wolf S2. Unfortunately, the OP is good but really isn’t anywhere near the level of S1. The first OP evoked a sense of longing and journey, both of which were themes that the show focused on heavily. The second OP sounds merely like existence in a world, which is appropriate for some shows but I feel kind of misses the point of this one. The ending, however, I feel is far superior to the S1 ED, which I felt clashed with the show’s ambience throughout. Moving beyond OP and ED, I actually feel that the rest of the BGM was slightly better in S2 than in S1. I’ve said it before but I feel that an overwhelming BGM isn’t necessarily the best for dialog-based shows, which Spice and Wolf absolutely is, and S2’s backing track manages to add to the feel and focus of the show without distracting. Hard to describe, but good.
Next onto the art. It’s definetely good as well. I love this show’s color pallet – the greys, browns and greens really help to illustrate the agrarian society that our protagonists find themselves in. I’d say the art is superior to that of S1, as is the animation in general, and manages to be quite consistent, which I normally count as a win by default. I also appreciated how the artists leant heavily on shadow and darkness to illustrate critical moments without using words. Sure, light and dark is a pretty self-explanatory and overused theme in anime in general and media as a whole, but it’s suitably subtle in Spice and Wolf, and it wasn’t jarring enough for me to be distracted by it.
On next to my favorite part of any review – the characters. Unlike in my S1 review, I’d actually like to give a better look at some of the side characters here. Spice and Wolf is perhaps the first and only show I’ve seen that routinely cuts out characters and actually does it in a meaningful way. I’ve seen too many shows where side-characters are an infuriating tease. The writers will dangle a thread of character development in front of your face, perhaps for only one episode or maybe a few, suggesting that they can or will have a meaningful impact on the future of the plot as a whole. Next thing you know, they’re gone as soon as their usefulness to the leads has been exhausted. They disappear seemingly into the blue. Side characters in Spice and Wolf, however, disappear simply because the narrative focus moves elsewhere. Lawrence and Holo mount the cart and travel to a new town. Their disappearance helps to draw onward the show’s key thematic journey, in which separation is literally part of life.
I’ll use two characters as examples here – Mark and Eau. The are actually a fairly major part of the plot in the first arc, and I’d argue that Lawrence spends almost as much time talking to them as he does to Holo. But unlike minor characters in other shows, their existence isn’t contingent upon Lawrence’s. Mark’s shop lives on whether or not Lawrence comes to sell or buy, a theme that is explicitly referenced in their discussion regarding traveling merchants. In the end, they disappear for the second arc not because they’ve expended their use, but merely because our protagonists decided to move to a new place. The writers don’t tease us with their development because the focus is, rightly, elsewhere. I found this amazingly refreshing.
I’m worried I’m going to break my own promise and run overboard on length here, so let’s cut to who I’ve been looking forward to talking about ever sense. Reiterating what I said in my S1 review, I don’t dislike Holo but I feel that Lawrence himself is an incredibly underrated character. I suggested maturity in a previous review and I feel that this is even more prevent in the second season. Lawrence is a medieval man dealing with medieval problems, and maybe I watch too many slice-of-life shows but this is a welcome break from learning about teenage daily lives and relationships. Unlike so many other male protagonists, Lawrence starts S2 (and S1, let’s be honest) with a pre-existing modicum of maturity that simply makes him do reasonable things, regardless of how much he gets berated. Lawrence develops significantly as a character but these changes follow a shift in outlook rather than in person. He actually learns from his mistakes – my absolute favorite example of this is him admitting to Mark that as a traveling merchant, he doesn’t understand what it means to have duty to a town. I won’t spoil the ending, for sure, but I also feel that his goals follow this shift in outlook while still retaining his identity.
To avoid going off about Lawrence for too long, I will look briefly at Holo, and I’m somewhat frustrated to say that I feel that she regresses a bit this season as compared with the first. I appreciate that she acts considerably less vain than before, but she also seems to have lost some of the sharp wit that honestly left me scratching my head in the first season. She communicates better with Lawrence than before, I’d say, but still misses considerably in other aspects. I honestly feel that the romantic tension in this season benefits Lawrence more than Holo and leaves her more of a confused onlooker rather than a wise sage. Sure, not going berserk at every turn is nice, and I’ll give her credit for opening up a bit more to her traveling companion.
What’s left is the plot, and in the interest of remaining spoiler-free, I’d say that the first arc of this season is comparable to both of the first season in terms of quality, despite being a bit different in terms of writing. In my opinion, however, the second arc and ending of S2 is significantly weaker than that of S1. This may largely be due to how predictable I found the ending, and while predictability isn’t something S1 eschews, it at least manages to involve some truly confounding turns by the end of the season. Consequently, I’d say that S2 actually declines in the plot department as it wears on, leaving me a bit disappointed by the end. Was I completely engaged, the whole way through? Absolutely. This show does that for me. But was I satisfied (not happy…two different things) with how it drew to a close? No.
I’m calling this review here. I’ll reiterate that I can pretty easily recommend both seasons, and while I did find the first slightly better than the second, I think that fans of the former will still enjoy the latter. Again, this is probably the first show I’ve seen where I honestly want a third season, because I’m not satisfied with where it left us. Unfortunately, the curse of 2 seems to have hit Spice and Wolf as hard as any other series, and I’m not holding my breath.
