HAIGAKURA – Episode 1

Content Warning; brief fan service

What’s it about? In a world where the gods have hidden themselves in other worlds, musical shamans called Kashi can make seek out and make contracts with these spirits through song and dance. Ichiyo has been searching for mythic figures known as “the four perils” since he was a child; unfortunately, he’s also infamous for his rock-bottom skills as a Kashi.

I desperately do not want to think very hard about HAIGAKURA, because it has magically transported me back in time. I am now a teenager watching Tactics and Saiyuki and Descendants of Darkness in crunchy, crunchy three-part 480p chunks on YouTube. Amazon Prime even threw me a solid and had the English subtitles stop working for the last five minutes of the episode, forcing me to do my best with Spanish—a language of which I possess, generously, a grade-school comprehension.

It’s hard to say that this is playing on nostalgia when the manga did, in fact, start running in 2008 (and hasn’t stopped since, barring a few dropped months when Zero Sum Comics WARD stopped circulating and it had to switch to online publication). It’s just itself, plucked out of an entirely different generation of tropes: Ichiyo is laconic and crabby but secretly big-hearted; his ditzy subordinate Tenko is secretly earth-shatteringly powerful; they’re broke all the time on account of the wacky shenanigans. And obviously the show is baitin’ Ichiyo and Tenko hard—like, it needs hairy palms to-day, “we’re introducing them with a mouth-to-mouth fakeout” hard. In my mind’s eye I can see the clip shows made with Windows Movie Maker and titled with a lot of asterisks and tildes. To be clear, I will grow a third nipple out of my eye socket before these two men lock lips onscreen. It is stupid. It’s obvious. They’ve got somebody from HYPMIC helping out on scripts. I’m extremely endeared to it.

But I don’t get paid to be nostalgic, thank God. So I have to take a moment to put on my Feminist Killjoy™ hat and start rending the meat off this show that I’m definitely going to watch more of.

HAIGAKURA requires you not to think very hard about it. The rules of the contract system are somewhat vague—it seems to require consent between god and Kashi, but it also seems to be easy to abuse once the bargain is struck. It’s not precisely an enslavement situation but it’s also not not that, at least theoretically. The central conflict is written in the spirit of a particular subtype of Pokémon episode: the ones where the villains monologue about how Pokémon are tools and Ash has a big speech about how his are his friends and partners, actually. There’s slightly more finesse, but that’s about what it boils down to, but with an extra level of sentience further muddying the waters.

The episode’s only female character, meanwhile, spends most of her screentime as a power-conserving feral toddler. She’s clearly there for Tenko and Ichiyo to have dad moments with, and that’s fine enough except for when a Comedy Pedophile side character oozes briefly into view so that she can be disgusted by him. It’s slightly less fine when she grows to full size in order to rampage, dons a Morrigan Darkstalker-esque outfit complete with panty shot, and… still talks like a feral toddler. The crushing discomfort of that decision is only barely salvaged by the ensuing (pretty good) punchline about what exactly makes Ichiyo the “worst” as a Kashi.

From a production angle, it’s not especially reassuring to see the production house that wreaked havoc on the apparently very solid source material for both Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke’s Mansion and Dahlia in Bloom. But unlike those series, it doesn’t have a licensed translation of the manga you can look up—or even, near as I can tell, a complete fan translation. It’s kind of a bummer, and de facto means the anime is all curious English-language audiences have to go on. I don’t think I can enthusiastically encourage anyone else to cozy down with me on this trash pile but, y’know. Seat’s open.

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