Guilty Crown Mid-series Impressions28

Guilty Crown attempts to encapsulate several genres at once and in doing so never manages to be particularly good at any of them. Overall it is the slice of life scenes which play out the most convincingly. Whilst that genre in itself is usually generic and predicable, the series manages to bring enough flair and good humour to make for an enjoyable viewing experience. However in the end all of the high school scenes should have been the stepping stone for Shu as he becomes part of Funeral Parlour, not filler for whenever a new character must be thrown in or the writers need an excuse for a beach episode.

As a romance, Guilty Crown achieves little to nothing in this regard. Shu is an insecure teenager with self-esteem issues who never hesitates to wallow in self pity. Inori meanwhile has no actual personality to speak of. Thus when the writers try and build a relationship between these two characters it always comes down to progression through circumstance. That is to say that Inori is always in trouble and Shu inevitably rescues her and sadly there is nothing deeper than that.

Other romances, for example Toradora, tend to work because they have well defined likable, but flawed characters to begin with. But also because whilst large events such as a ski trip advance the relationship significantly, there are a dozen of little moments that have lead up to this. This gives the culminating scene the weight it needs to actually mean something. Therefore so when something big happens in the story and one saves the other, we as an audience understand why these characters like each other and why they need each other. Most importantly we are supporting them because we’ve seen their relationship grow and mature as they themselves have done so as characters.

Guilty Crown apparently fails to do this and instead gives us Shu who is simply infatuated with Inori and Inori who is actually quite emotionally immature to the degree that this seems like her first crush. Shu likes Inori because she’s pretty and soft spoken and has a nice voice. Inori likes Shu not for any particular reason it seems other than the fact Shu keeps saving her. Thus you have something that is in no way love but simply a boy infatuated with a girl who he feels needs protecting. And a girl who simply likes the fact the boy wants to protect her.

As a science fiction action series the show fairs a little better. Stunning visuals are accompanied by expertly choreographed fighting and action, which whilst not always making any sense never fail to impress. Yet Guilty Crown makes the irredeemable mistake of making all the antagonists except from Major Segai utterly incompetent. When the bad guys aren’t credible, the threat is negligible to any team lead by Gai who will think up 145 back up plans and memorise them with ease. When the threat is negligible the stakes are never high, there is no tension to any of the scenes. There is no suspense because you know that even if it makes no sense, Guilty Crown will always have Funeral Parlour walking away victorious, with little to none casualties of their own.

Guilty Crown tries to establish a paradigm of the little guys versus the big guys. GHQ has more men and equipment and it is all top of the line stuff. Funeral Parlour meanwhile has a dwindling pool of manpower and equipment and are forced to use outdated equipment such as Ayase’s endlave. This should work because clearly the stakes are high and yet due to the unfailing stupidity of GHQ and inconceivable luck of Funeral Parlour the winner is always obvious before it begins.

The most glaring example of this perhaps is a scene in episode 6 where Inori (who whilst being an expert marksman likes to hold her guns sideways) shoots a soldier in the head. The other two soldiers you might expect to immediately use suppressive fire to move into cover. From there they might then force Inori back due to their entrenched position and the fact they have automatic weapons. However in Guilty Crown it appears soldiers receive no actual training; these soldiers shout angrily at Inori and run towards her. The scene is beyond dumbfounding but is just one of many similar scenes where artistic license is allowed to supersede any common sense.

Unfortunately the plot doesn’t fare much better, by episode 11 it’s riddled with enough plot holes, clichés and inconsistencies that you wonder how it hasn’t collapsed in on itself. Everything that occurs in the show seems to be done out of convenience whether explained or not. Shu’s void power only works on 17 year olds or under and every void he plucks out is always perfectly tailored to fix the exact problem he’s currently facing. The invisibility cloaks that appear in episodes 1 and 2 randomly disappear never to be seen again except for one random appearance in episode 8 as simply the prop for a humour scene. Considering that Funeral Parlour is supposed to be the one who at the very most occasionally manages to steal hardware off GHQ, it begs the question of why GHQ has no invisibility cloaks of its own.

It is a strange thing to note that in 11 episodes the only character with any decent characterisation is Gai. That is to say grown from their experiences and become a more interesting as a character as a result. Shu meanwhile only seems to have gotten worse as the series progressed. He begins as a depressed insecure high school student and ends with Post-traumatic stress disorder and a huge inferiority complex. Granted his character development was at least consistent, but one can only wish it hadn’t been a consistently downward spiral. It comes to a point – several times in fact where you think Shu has nowhere to go but up. Yet the one episode where he seems to have actually grown as a character is simply negated in the next episode where he suffers from such severe PTSD that you wonder how many years of therapy it’ll take for him to recover. Of course Shu is fine in the next episode, which would have come as a surprise if Gai hadn’t survived an orbital laser strike to the face several episodes prior.

You cannot fault Guilty Crown on its visuals, the colour is vibrant and the art style excellent. The fight scenes are dazzling with impressive choreography and direction. The stunning visuals are backed by a brilliant soundtrack and solid voice acting. It is simply a shame that all these lavish production values are wasted on such a generic, illogical and ultimately shallow script. Whilst many including myself found Guilty Crown would be the jewel of the fall season, it seems as though on closer inspection, looking beyond its beautiful exterior exposes a hollow core.