Occultic;Nine – 03[She Cracked]

This week on Occultic;Nine…stuff happens I guess? In watching this i am getting reminders of Chaos;Head in a lot of ways. Now the Chaos;Head anime was a mess but the visual novel actually started really well with a lot of intrigue before D-swords were introduced and the whole narrative just became a giant nonsensical mess.  There are some common elements here as in Chaos;Head there was a murder influenced by a goth punk singers lyrics who was then claimed to be a prophetic. Here we have a murder influenced by a manga doujin where the mangaka claims to see in dreams. In Chaos;Head this whole prophetic singer thing just turned out to be a waste of time because it turned out the singer was batshit insane and the similarity to the murder was just pure coincidence. I feel this thing with the mangaka girl is going along the same vein. Basically  that she sees stuff in her dreams and pretty much has nothing to do with anything. I at least see the Occult part of the title is starting to appear with demon creatures and ghosts and whatnot, though I doubt we’ll be seeing even half the stuff in the opening.

I will be blunt and say I have little interest in what’s happening here. I can follow it though that certainly is a challenge but I find this show is trying to peak my interest by withholding its cards. So this episode we get a bunch of people acting suspiciously and a bunch of questions raised. Thing is I don’t care about these people and I am certain that any of the questions raised here will not have satisfactory answers. You may say I am speaking too soon and that I really could be surprised by what this show does with all this, and frankly you are right. However when looking at what is presented I see no possible way this is going to make any real sense. We already have the Occult involved so any mystery this series presents can pretty much be explained with “A wizard did it”. The idea of someone masterfully planning the suicide of over hundred people sounds like one hell of a feat in a story without the supernatural. However here Demons probably Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Booed them and they went and killed themselves. This series is trying to establish a massive conspiracy with connections everywhere in this mystery but the problem with that is that to make it all sound convincing and not contrived you need to be a damn good writer.

Ryukishi is one of the few who can build a massive intricate mystery without it feeling contrived and even he needs to cheat every now and then. It’s easy to build suspense and intrigue with questions but eventually you need to answer those questions. This is generally the point where everything falls apart. Here we have a murder where the victim had a key hidden as a tooth in his mouth which is connected to both a Doujin artist and a girl who set a curse on the victim using some sort of devil creature(Girl was also sent the victim’s scalp in the mailbox) along with a mass suicide, people who seem to be involved with secret organizations, a self proclaimed NEET who isn’t a NEET getting instructions from a toy doll that seems to know everything, the murder victim researching into Nikola Tesla and some Phantom plane, and a weird boy who abducted the friend of a popular fortune teller girl. Tell me honestly, do you think there is a way to tie all that together without resorting to something dumb? Because I certainly doubt it.