Brave Witches Review - Nosedive
“Really, SnYves? This is what you decided to review this week? A magical girls show that almost nobody’s heard of released as a side story to another equally obscure magical girls show from almost a decade ago?”
Reader, I have a very good explanation for this in that I don’t have a good explanation for it. What can I say? I saw Brave Witches show up in my recommended list after watching a bit of Izetta from last fall, and my curiosity ended up getting the better of me. I put on one episode to tie me over in between episodes in the wonderful, glorious, couldn’t-have-arrived-early-enough spring season, and I was so mystified by what I saw on my screen that I just couldn’t help myself. It was like one of those in-browser flash games that you’d play in middle school whenever the teacher wasn’t coming your way.
Does that make it a good show? No, not especially. But considering I managed to get my way through almost the entire season over a couple of days, the best compliment I can give Brave Witches is that, even though it’s bad, at least it’s the kinda enjoyable bad. See, there are multiple ways an anime can be classified as “bad.” You have the visually engaging and striking but otherwise hollow and meaningless bad a la SAO or the third arc of Bleach. There’s the monotonous, boring flavor of bad that doesn’t try in any respect and fails simply on lack of effort (“Yes, SnYves, you’ve made perfectly clear how much you despise Casshern Sins. The horse is dead; go beat on something else.").
And then you have the bad anime that’s trying to do its best with its premise, absurd as it may be, but just can’t put together a passable production, and that’s the burning building Brave Witches jumped out of last summer. The series is littered with issues regarding pacing, writing, character development and just plain common sense, but I can’t really work up a good hard rage against this like I can with other shows. Because even though Brave Witches seems to embody the phrase “failed attempt,” it’s the “attempt” part that I can appreciate.
As for the remainder, well, it’s kinda my job to analyze what goes wrong in order to make bad anime bad, so let’s get cracking.
That poster has both Cyrillic and Latin letters on it, leading me to think it’s actually an im-poster.
The series Brave Witches is essentially making a fanfic of is called Strike Witches, brought to you in Summer 2008 by Gonzo (yeah, Fullmetal Panic Gantz Hellsing Gonzo, I’m just as baffled as you are). The story sounds like the ramblings of a history professor doing weed for the first time after reading a furry webcomic. The setting is World War II only without the Nazis or the Axis or the World War II’ing in general, so the anime could’ve saved itself a ton of nitpicking if it just said it was the 1940s, and renamed the countries just enough to be escapist without losing the actual “historical” feel. But, oh well. In this case, it still is technically a world war, only in a much different context. This time, Earth is under siege from an alien race whose name has so many vowels in it, no two people pronounce it the same way, and our only hope lies with the 501st Joint Fighter Wing, a division of young girls that can use their magical powers to grow animals ears and tails, strap airplanes to their legs, and fly out to fight the alien…
Bahahahahahahahaha!!! I’m sorry, I couldn’t type that sentence with a straight face.
Brave Witches follows the adventures of Hikari Karibuchi (Ai Kakuma), a young Witch who gets drafted into the similarly named 502nd Joint Fighter Wing a few years after the events of the parent series. The show sets her up to be a complete underdog (or, in her case, undercat) as a girl with minimal magical capabilities and close to zero talent in combat, flying or really anything expected from a normal military pilot, but hey, she has a lot of stamina from running lunches down to her dad’s work! No, really. That’s the explanation we’re given for it. I’d have much rather not heard it personally, because now I have to wonder why Mr. Karibuchi doesn’t bring his lunch in with him to work and has to get his daughter to excuse herself from school and run it down to him every single day.
To be fair to the writers, though, Hikari’s constant need to leave classes early would definitely be a good reason why she is arguably the worst pilot at her school, and arguably the worst pilot in her division, and just all around incompetent in general. Listen, I’m all for the main character in these sorts of shows not quite being of the same caliber as the rest of her unit, but Hikari is a special exception for me. The narrative goes well out of its way to tell the audience that Hikari is not Flying Witch material in any respect, and then whenever Hikari actually gets into the “action,” we totally see her live up to those expectations. Then whoever’s the stand-in for the audience at the time reiterates that she is indeed not fit for flying, but then off-handedly mentions she has “plenty of stamina,” (take a shot every time you hear that) and then I imagine the person in charge has a stroke off-screen. That would be the only viable explanation as to why they pick Hikari for their flying team anyways, as opposed to a more-qualified veteran, their pet rock, or an ostrich.
Although, the fact she’s able to fly straight while carrying two people as dead weight is impressive.
It sounds like I’m being unnecessarily mean here, but the entire point of an underdog main character is that they have growth potential. Shoyo Hinata is not an amazing volleyball player by himself, but in the very first episode of Haikyu!! we see that he knows how to run and spike stuff. My Hero Academia’s Izuku Midoriya is Quirkless, but his superior knowledge, courage and dedication are admirable and we want to see him do well as an audience. The entire deal here is that we know the characters are capable of doing good things, and we want to see them develop and harness those skills. And when Hikari Karibuchi goes flying and we see her struggle to meet expectations time and time again, with very little evidence that she’s improving, you eventually lose interest and hope in seeing her grow her skills.
So clearly, bringing Hikari onto the 502 was a very bad decision, but then again, after seeing the chicanery the rest of the division’s members get up to, I’m led to believe terrible decisions are the norm around the place. Just about everything our cast does is contrived, monotonous, or more frequently just skull-numbingly stupid. During an episode where Hikari gets caught in the middle of a blizzard, her squadmates take her to an improvised snow-hut shelter, then remove all their clothes, including Hikari’s, so they can “more directly share body heat."
As an Eagle Scout who’s been through this situation before, I can tell you with 100% confidence that this is the last thing you do when you’re trying to keep someone warm.
Like, seriously. Everyone in this picture thinks this is how you treat hypothermia.
The side characters are almost all one-note and close to forgettable, and it got to the point where I just started referring to them by their gimmick. There’s the cook, there’s the shy one, there’s the creeper, there’s the angsty one, there’s the stern and mostly quiet leader, and those are just the ones I remember. The show has plenty of opportunities to develop these characters a bit and actually give them some depth, but instead it focuses almost solely on Hikari working to get better as part of the wing, and we’ve already established how much of a lost cause that effort is.
And since she has a ton of work to do and only twelve episodes to actually show any degree of competence, the writers decided the best way to demonstrate her growth is to constantly toss her into fights with the aliens. Consequently, the show’s pacing feels rushed to the point of awkwardness. What few character arcs there are are hastily resolved by the end of the episode when they should have been allotted at least two, and the writers go to such great lengths to create plot hooks that they frequently undermine their own characters in the process, making them look forgetful, rash, arrogant, brazen, or any other negative trait that you probably don’t want your heroines to be associated with.
Another unfortunate side effect of the show’s runaway pacing is the sheer lack in discipline among any of the 502’s members. Characters routinely disobey direct orders, frequently putting themselves and their teammates in danger while doing so. But it’s all okay, because they learn a valuable lesson in teamwork and believing in each other, all without fear of being charged with insubordination or going rogue! Worst case, they’re forced to kneel on the hangar floor for a couple hours.
How grueling.
Are we just not questioning the fact their school uniforms don’t have pants?
By the way, I totally understand that I’m seriously dissecting a show with an incredibly un-serious premise and some people just want to see girls with cat ears (which they have in addition to their normal human ears, strangely enough) fly around and shoot stuff. That’s fine and all, but you can tell Brave Witches really wants to try telling a story and developing characters on the side, and it just doesn’t do that well. I don’t care how good a restaurant’s cheeseburger is; if the fries are subpar and taste like they’re plotting to overthrow the Idaho farmer overlords, it’s going to hurt my overall impression of the main course.
As far as the actual action is concerned, it’s serviceable. There are multiple different types of alien for the 502 to fight, and every episode tries to vary up Hikari’s teammates as well. Let it never be said Brave Witches doesn’t have variety in its setups, as if the plane-legged doggirls and catgirls weren’t evidence enough. Things start to fall apart when every fight seems to devolve into just another flurry of bullets and characters yelling things at each other, with no semblance of how the actual fight is progressing. Occasionally, a random unintelligible thing happens to a pilot, and suddenly they are in peril, because a thing happened.
Pilots' skills vary on the whims of the writers, where they can have a bad case of Stormtrooper Syndrome one moment and then literally turn into McCree from Overwatch minutes later. The last part I’m alright with, since the show does explain that every witch has a unique ability to set them apart from their comrades, but then that means the “standard” magic that they use whenever they aren’t using their specials, that is to say the genre of magic everyone seems to have uniform access to, is just a repulsive field. The magic fuels shields and maybe breaks a fall every once in a while in combat, but I kinda expected to see some more bombastic and varied magic being used regularly by the cast. As is, the magic is really more of a sidenote that tries to distinguish the characters more, but ultimately plays such a situational role (in a magical girls show no less) that it feels like a letdown.
“Which is something we definitely should’ve discussed before putting all of our gear on."
In the end, Brave Witches gets an A for effort, but that’s all I’m really willing to give it. Substantially, there’s nothing really to recommend about it, as almost every facet of the show is severely lacking in some respect. Our cast makes more dumb decisions than a standard session of Congress, the characters are flatter than the two-year-old bottle of Sprite in my fridge, and while its setup certainly helps it stand out (putting it mildly), the show doesn’t do anything beyond that, making the actual events taking place unmemorable at best.
And yet, somehow, out of all the bad shows that I’ve seen, Brave Witches was probably the most fun for me to nitpick. I’m not saying that to spite the show more than I already have; even though Brave Witches has nothing to offer on an analytical level, it still managed to keep my attention, and that’s admirable in a way. I enjoyed watching this in the same way film connoisseurs enjoy watching something like The Room or Mortal Kombat. The production itself is not amazing, but it’s still amusing to watch and poke fun at. And if that happens to be your thing, then feel free to give this a go.
I’ll go ahead and get the ball rolling for you as well: roughly 80% of the main characters in the show don’t wear pants.
THE VERDICT: D
Next time: The movie on everyone’s minds.