Satsuriku no Tenshi – 02[Your grave is not here]

This is a very strange show. I may regret choosing to blog this but with the second episode I still find it quite fascinating and I really want to see just where this leads. I will however say that it isn’t because of excellence that this show has caught my attention for at the moment it’s very much on a level of half working. Now the first episode very much portrays this to be a horror anime with a focus on a surreal environment but this episode flips that on it’s head as we are rather suddenly met with the introduction of comedy. Zack has gone from being a hammy villain to as goofball ally and I rather like this change. Before he was a villain that just felt like the author was trying too hard to make intimidating but with this episode fleshes him out a bit by revealing that Zack literally was trying too hard. Zack is like some edgy teenager chuunibyou who wants to be seen as the next Jack the Ripper but thanks to Rachel losing the will to live and actually being able to interact with Zack we can see that he’s not actually insane and has at least some degrees of humanity to him. Of course he is still an actual serial killer who has killed quite a number of people from the looks of it but it remains rather amusing to see him try to play up the insane serial killer angle only for it to fall apart due to his own stupidity.

Rachel has also made a radical shift from the first episode, one which may not be as positive as Zacks for in the first episode she was more like an ordinary girl but since losing the will to live has now become completely deadpan. On one hand this does make her an excellent foil to Zack as he doesn’t want to kill someone who actually wants it so it makes the interactions between the two quite amusing as Zack tries to pull some humanity out of her so that he can enjoy killing her while Rachel tries to find some way to convince Zack to kill her. However this change does make her character rather one note as her responses are either deadpan snarking or monotone statements. So in order for Rachel to die she needs to regain the will to live, but if she regains the will to live then she will no longer want to die. It’s the immovable object vs the unstoppable force paradox which pushes these two to work together to get out of this strange dimension and I adore the dynamic. But it isn’t this aspect which makes this anime so strange but rather the world these characters are in for the anime has chosen to keep the game aspects of this RPG maker game which shows our characters solving puzzles to progress through the world. In this aspect it just makes the surrounding ethereal and otherworldly for this place runs on its own logic. Nothing is realistic and the characters themselves don’t question it but rather just accept it as normal. Almost like a dream where you just don’t think about what is happening around you but rather just follow the flow, in retrospect the way which this series cuts around our protagonists traveling to other areas is just as disjointed as dreams themselves.

Do take heed that this is still very much early thoughts on this series and that I may just be letting preconceptions cloud and bias my thoughts. This series has problems and can very easily slip up and become something bad. Yet I find it’s kooky weirdness endearing and I feel it has massive potential. For when I start a series I often as least have another anime series which I can use as a point of reference to get across a general “feel” of the series. As an example if I was to say this show was like Evangelion they you can at least make a connection of “Okay, so this series has mecha battles with psychological elements topped off with heavy handed symbolism and dark themes.” I admit that is very much a weak method of conveying what a show feels like but for those familiar with the series I reference it makes for convenient shorthand. When it comes to Satsuriku no Tenshi, I have no comparisons for quite frankly I cannot think of a single anime which this show is like. It is it’s own beast and in that regard could very well birth an entirely new genre of anime. But again that’s very much reaching as it assumes this show will reach a level of excellence that would make it noteworthy to imitate which is very much an unlikely possibility.