*During this review I will use spoilers because of two reasons. The first is that to illustrate the dishonesty and disrespect I need to use them, the second is because I don’t see any purpose of watching this. *
To start to understand why this anime fits all the description above, I will explain a little the premise of it. The anime starts in a seemingly similar form to other stories that have been done in the past, with a loser guy that gets transferred to the past after being broken by the news about her ex-girlfriend. This character was strangely incapable of believing her eyes, which is normal, I wouldn’t either. And then, after a series of events, he had an epiphany, to change the past to save his most loved ones with the help of a friend, which leads him to learn more about the background of gangs and the characters involved in them.
This seemingly straightforward and easy to manage formula to propel drama and action in a delinquent setting started to evolve episode after episode into a pathetic excuse of disjointed highlights and impactful moments that could make an impression in the viewer, not setting anything else as a substance that could redeem the lacking execution, creativeness, and power of them. The set of shallow cardboard characters that started to interact with our MC that have been integrated sequentially through the plot and the convenience of our hero are nothing but an excuse to create more of these apex of excitement, to generate a twitter clip with a cap saying “RT if you cried to this”, or to show the stylistically pleasing characters in a badass moment that would serve well as the profile picture of a rebellious teenager after being scolded by her mother because of his falling grades in math. Arc after arc the fellow manga readers hyped what would happen next, and my dumbass trusting them got underwhelmed every time.
The anime and story itself don’t serve any other purpose but virality through a mix between straightforward stupid and over the top drama, low quality action and scenes that could grant the ever-growing society of solitude screenshots of the most intense moment to post in a page. And honestly, just honestly with the deep of my heart, I have no problem with that. I have watched plenty of anime that are meant to be nothing more than a product that can sell correctly, I have even given good scores to some of them because they are self-aware of it, which is then the problem with this? The problem of this is that everything around it is as pestilent as a garbage dump, as pointless as an anime review, as worthless as the Venezuelan currency.
To explain the motivations about the claims above I would divide the review in four points that construct such argument. The first point that I would attack is the coherency and consistency of the characters, or, in this case, how many times the decisions of the characters have no other reason but pushing forward the hype, trending topic moments instead of giving us texture of their psychological statement and decision-making, instead of telling us who they are.
In this case I would gladly say something positive, Takemitchy should be awarded with something, Takemitchy should be recognized by everyone for a single feat, and it is being the dumbest and most useless time traveler in the history of media. While watching this a colossal annoying amount of question marks starts to pop. How, a person that is fighting continuously against a strange force, could have the same proactivity as the western governments during the pandemic. How, a person that is 12 years older than his own body, could act with the same level of reasoning as some full of hormones teenagers that have no foreshadowing about the consequences of their actions. How, a person that is 12 years older than his own body, didn’t learn a single thing through those years and can’t even manipulate a teenager into doing something. How, a person that is 12 years older than his own body, can’t come up with a plan to get above kids that are also pretty much the bottom barrel of human intellect by default, and probably into mental disorders because of the amount of head trauma that they have suffered. How, a person that have a literal detective working with him, can’t do anything but the most straightforward in the box planning that could one ever imagine, a plan that not even a pre-teen would think that could work correctly based on all the antecedents that the own anime presents us.
All these questions could only lead to one answer, the only reason that could justify the set of incoherent decisions that our beloved MC and his buddy Naoto take. The truth is that Takemitchy and Naoto are pretending to care about Hina, but they secretly want to write a biography about Takemitchy that could be a best seller in Japan, so they need to act dumb to provide more action and insight about the youth gangs. This line of thinking is motivated by the fact that there is no way that an adult wouldn’t involve the cops or any third party in this conflict, there is no way that an adult can’t convince a group of people about his judgements by having knowledge of things that would happen next, there is no way that an alternative plan that doesn’t involve fights can’t be done by their perspective, even using money to do such.
Can’t they see the future events? Why do you need to risk everything to the last second? Why would you plan something that have a potentially deadly outcome, while also knowing that you are a useless piece of crap that doesn’t do anything but cry the moment you hit the conflict and narrate what is going on to the spectator? Are you just forcing yourself to create a believable and interesting character development instead of solving the conflict? This incoherency could be overlooked, fine, but it is just a telling about how disrespectful this anime is towards the people who watch it. The behavior is then just justifiable if you don’t trust and respect the capability of the viewer to be able to fill realistic alternatives and understand basic human behavior. Anyways, continue, this alone doesn’t deserve a 1.
The second issue is that not only the characters actions are incoherent and have no resemble of basic human behavior, but the worldbuilding and the apparent rules that are subject to each of them are also as incoherent. To exemplify this, lets remember that certain character for some reason survived several hits to the head that could pretty much kill you or leave you unconscious in any kind of semi-realistic setting, like the one presented, let’s remember that this happened two episodes AFTER another character died because of one hit that didn’t even have the same level of momentum. Is it then to believe that some characters are not subject to the constraints of human body? Is strength linked to the hardness of our skull? I guess that we can’t really tell with the things that have been shown as of now, but I highly doubt so, I don’t just highly doubt so but, like the incoherency of the characters decisions, incoherency about the rules of the universe of the anime are just there because of disrespect, laziness, and the search for hype, virality, drama, misery, and thrill, and they are the norm of this anime.
The same could be said about the time travelling mechanic, which is nothing but a device to propel drama and misery to the main character through retroactively reminding how worthless he is. Nothing more than a device to kick the story and create moments that would just create tears in highly gullible people. My reasoning about time-traveling being anything a cheap device to create drama and conflict come from two facts. The first is that the main character can’t take advantage of the mechanic because he is as dumb as a bag of rocks, the second is that the time travelling itself is just nonsense in terms of consequences related to the actions of the main character in the past and completely incoherent to the present. And why do I say that there is no way that the mechanic is coherent? In the first episode our dear main character said that his life completely changed after being humiliated by Kiyomizu, he supposedly left the town because of such event after graduating, which is kind of sad, right? Life altering circumstance, I would have killed myself. Shake hands with the next worst detective of Japan, came back, Naoto next to him, his life should be as miserable because the affair wasn’t resolved yet, we can trust such thing happening honestly. Then, we get to him solving the affair, he didn’t have to deal with the consequences of Kiyomizu being above him, he shouldn’t have left the city after graduating because there is no reason for that, his relationships dynamics changed completely because he is now involved with some shady guys, and he came back. To the same exact point. Ok. Naoto remembers the apparent changed past too. Ok. No problem, we can deal with this with some mental gymnastics, like two different timelines collapsing to Naoto conscience and Takemitchy travelling between those timelines. Remember that in both cases he was unconscious during the time travel in his current timeline, so there is an apparent real time present change. Then, his life change even more, now he is buddy big buddy of Mickey, he came back to the present, and the point of respawn changed to his workplace, his life was completely the same as before, but Naoto wasn’t there, same work, same life, but he wasn’t unconscious. Same life as before as he solved the affair with Kiyomizu, same life as before he was friends with Mickey, same exact life as before he saved Draken. I hope that you can follow what I meant to say by this. The three time-travel events can’t coexist in the same universe. You can always generate a line between two points, but if the other point is in the other side of the plane you must completely bend the function.
And this is the case here, one event contradicts the other by default, should we accept such with a happy face? That is what people told me, but I’m clearly not happy with that. All this inconsequential storytelling, these contradictions that build bigger and bigger episode after episode could just go through your own capability of being ashamed if you don’t trust and respect the capability of the viewer of watching critically what is going through the screen. Anyways, continue, this is not enough to give this anime a 1. Intellectually offensive, but can something else be going on, right?
The third point that makes this highly chaotical, barely correlated anime a piece of garbage is how every event that happens is presented, the abhorrent execution. As we can tell, Takemitchy is a bitch, a coward, a good for nothing, a weakling, a chicken, a yellow-belly crybaby. He doesn’t do anything; he is a worthless piece of crap that doesn’t deserve our pity, he even tried to cheat on her girlfriend and kissed a minor. The plot doesn’t even respect or build its own rules and it is heavily disconnected from human behavior. Ok. That could still provide something decent, right? We could have moments where everything flows together, intense sequence of events that link each other to don’t let our eyes get out from the screen.
No, it isn’t the case, it isn’t the case because every single plot point, every single event is complemented with some mental asylum level of expositions or over the top predictability. That exposition could came from Takemitchy narrating what is literally happening on our screen every single fight scene, that exposition could be that dumbass Kazutora reminding us that the writer doesn’t even pretend to make a psychologically broken and delusional character and instead made a Pokemon-like dialogue so people who didn’t receive enough oxygen in their birth could understand that his head is twisted and make dumb memes about it, that exposition could be Naoto explaining what literally happened in the past to the MC because he can’t even deduce how to change his pants after getting them dirty with pre-ejaculate fluid from kissing a minor with his 26 years old virgin brain.
All these events are nothing but disrespect to the capability of the viewer to get the plot, nothing but the intent to appeal to the lower common denominator and creating something as wide as possible while highly decorating these flaws through bombastic trash to watch fights, incoherent shouting, and hype badassery with guys without shirts, dyed hairs and tattoos. And it sucks to watch, it sucks to watch because it converts a lot of time into white noise that could have been easily prevented, it sucks to watch because it is made for people who are scrolling through their friends instragram stories while watching this, it sucks to watch because it just reminds me of those cheap soap operas that you watch while cooking some high-level spaghettis with ketchup. Fights and points that could pretty much be summed up in 5 minutes are prolonged to 20 minutes just because they don’t trust and respect the capability of the viewer to understand the shallow mess of the plot that have been presented.
The fourth and last point is also maybe the one that offends me the most because it talks volume about the people who watch the medium and the respect to the creators, the main offender for how it has been defended by the ones who love this anime because of their low standards and nonsensical overly positive thinking, and this is the animation and art. I will tell you no false truths, the animation sucks. The animation is subpar, below the average that have been the norm in anime of even low budget studios, and it also doesn’t try to innovate in anything. Hell, we don’t ever have to go that far in the past to get a point of comparison, Super Cub is an anime made from a small studio that was pleasing to watch just because they did what they could, the story is meh, the direction, fantastic. Kageki Shoujo is an anime that is pleasant to watch because the motions are correctly executed when it is needed, the design is not KyoAni levels, the fluidity is not of the level of Shaft or MAPPA, but it is beautiful to watch because they poured their hearts on it. This is not the case here, not at all.
The animation of this anime is horrendous to watch and a complete disservice to the overall experience too, and rabid manga readers accept such too, which should tell volumes about the amount of copium that some people must take to defend this. Static backgrounds of people in fights, character motions that are extremely choppy if they are not the same one-dimension directional motion that they do all the time, deformed facial structures and body figures, use and abuse of the same face angles, lifeless color palette, use and abuse of slideshow like montages, use and abuse of translational camera movements. We could excuse some of them in the lack of resources and time, but then, why would you create a storyboard that can show all this flaws? They do because they don’t trust and respect the capability of the viewer of discerning those flaws. Because they can get away with this because of the morbid mentality that equals criticism with attacks. Critical thinking is what moves everything forward, you are doing no favor if you don’t give feedback.
Now, those four points are enough for me to call this a 1. I didn’t learn anything from this anime, the anime didn’t provide anything new that I haven’t watched before, the anime didn’t have any positive message that haven’t been told to the infinity and beyond in other anime, the anime didn’t try to go deep into anything, the anime didn’t explore anything of substance, the anime didn’t provoke anything human on me.
The anime is just a collection of moments, a set of scenes that could be packed into a set of TikToks every Saturday to get thousands of likes, the anime is just delusion, a violence glamorizing fantasy. The anime could pretty much be a parody of its own genre, and then maybe it could work. Takemitchy could pretty much be a parody of the most pathetic MCs that are present in the medium, and then maybe it could work. The time traveling nonsense could pretty much be some next level irony about how most of the time there are big holes when they implement such mechanic, and then maybe it could work. The problem is that the anime is always serious about his own self, it is not an anime that works in disrespect to itself that could portray a critique to the medium. It is an anime that works in disrespect to the viewer, to our capability to think and critique, that explores the possibilities of mediocrity and how much it can get away with while being successful. And maybe they did their experiment right because this was highly successful with all its downfalls. And maybe they did their experiment right because people who defend this anime tells those who critique to not think, do they deserve respect then?
The question would be, why should I care then? Why would I waste my time explaining the lame point of view of someone who didn’t turn his brain off while watching this, who for some reason believed the always wrong source readers and expected to see something that deserves my attention? I think that the issue with this mediocrity is that it leaves space to more mediocrity.
I think that the issue to not entice thinking is that it promotes less thinking. I think that the issue with shallowness is that it promotes a vapid culture. And I think that what we should strive for is to get away from that, to get pieces that could stand the time because their inherent value is there and deserve so, that could serve even without the social trending, without the viral phenomenon, that could exist and prolong themselves in the future and when the next generation of people watch these shows they won’t think “Damn, those fuckers had such bad taste”. Tokyo Revengers hype will decay, people will forget about it, but the overall mentality will perdure, and that is what I meant to portray here. What I meant to do by giving this a 1 and writing this review is just to call out this behavior, to tell them that fun things are not meant to be also dumb and incoherent, that there is always an underlying message, intention, emotion behind the frames that are given to us through the media player, because they have been done by a human, by one of us, and to capture what they wanted to do is the most beautiful aspect of consuming what the others do.
That incoherence and disrespect to the audience should then have no place to stand, because it is dishonest, and to my belief dishonesty is one of the ugliest concepts that one could face, one of the ugliest because it emerges from the sense of getting away of consequences, from the sense of mutual understanding and respect, from love to the ones that are out there, from community. And you shouldn’t get confused, when I meant that it is dishonest, I don’t mean that anyone involved is completely at fault of every sense of dishonesty here. The animators and the ones that do the production are not at fault at anything but the fact that they were given conditions that couldn’t suffice a good production, the writer is not at fault at anything but his own incapability to make something better, I can’t attribute malice to anyone individually because it would be dumb to do so, I don’t know any of them, but I can do it as a whole, as the entity called Tokyo Revengers, because when they saw this and they said “Hmm, it is alright, keep doing it” an act of dishonesty was conceived, because I can’t really think that people who dedicate their own lives to the medium would think that this is correct.
Human emotions transcend through honesty and attachment to reality while the exposure of time kills the essence of virality
Peace, Gween
