TRIGGER comfortably proved themselves with their inaugural TV series, Kill la Kill, easing concerns that they may not be able to live up to the legacy they were taking from GAINAX as well as setting up a lot of anticipation for any of their future work. And didn’t we feel surprised – and a little blessed – when it was announced they had another show in the works for the end of 2014! It seemed so soon, although in retrospect expecting a greater than year-long gap between shows was kind of silly from a business perspective, but we were all grateful regardless.
Even more so when you consider that their follow up to Kill la Kill is an adaptation of Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-Kei no Nake de (When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace) a high school romantic… comedy… light novel.
Hrrmm.
Going from an incredibly distinctive and original action/nonsense epic to adapting a light novel – one of the most trashy, banal and derivative aspects of otaku fiction – sure is… bold, I guess?
I’m not going to lie, I pretty much had no intention of even picking Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-Kei no Nake de up, but some reasonably positive early reactions combined with TRIGGER led me to biting the bullet. And here we are.
In its defence, Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-Kei no Nake de at least tries to do something interesting within the swamp of shite that are light novels: parody the shit out of chuuni-as-fuck action fantasy light novels. You know the types: dark and brooding teenage leads, magical action with pseudo-germanic/latin phrases, a complete disregard for anything but the surface elements of European occult, mysticism and fantasy, etc. etc. etc. Teenage escapist power fantasies that assert, hey, being an outsider actually means you are the coolest. The kind of entertainment that causes/is caused by/feeds on ‘chuunibyou’, the so-called 8th grader syndrome wherein young teenagers… look, I’m going to assume if you’re reading this blog you’re familiar with Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai!, which is literally the only reason anyone in the English speaking fandom acts like they know what chuunibyou even is.
Anyway, Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-Kei no Nake de parodies this by having a chuuni main character (Jurai Andou) who wishes he would receive superpowers actually receive superpowers along with his fellow all-female literature club members, followed by the complete lack of anything that happens as a result, because who the fuck are they going to fight with them? Also, Andou’s power is literally useless.
For the early episodes at least it’s actually really quite funny. The chuuni character continuing to act chuuni with the validation of actually having powers, when contrasted with the fact that suddenly having powers doesn’t mean anything else is going to change, does a really effective job of demonstrating just how dumb the whole notion is. When characters are using their powers of healing anything to mend broken mugs, or stopping time to just get a bit more studying in, or the ability to create portals between any two areas for the sake of getting home from school without having to go out in the rain, some fun, low-key and relatively subtle satire gets invoked.
Andou makes for an excellent butt-monkey, thanks in no small part to his complete lack of self-awareness when it comes to his chuunibyou. Tomoyo and Sayumi rip into him all the time (the former as a means of projection, the latter because it’s fun), using his own chuunibyou and extravagant claims coupled with his incredibly low power level to turn him into a fool, while Hatoko and Chifuyu don’t ‘get’ his chuunibyou so take most of what he says either at face value or letting it go over their heads, undermining his delusions of dark grandeur by forcing him back to earth at every turn. Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-Kei no Nake de demonstrates some remarkably good comedic chops early on, bolstered by TRIGGER’s fun and cartoony animation and direction, and managed to get a lot more laughs out of than I ever would have anticipated.
Naturally, unfortunately, Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-Kei no Nake de falls victim to the usual complaints of romcom light novels by virtue of being one. Before too long it ends up with the medium’s generic purgatorial pseudo-harem narrative, wherein every woman is inexplicably in love with our impossibly dull main character and no romantic progression is ever made. This ensures that no character’s fans are left feeling alienated or betrayed, leaving them more willing to invest more money into the franchise and future entries just in case Best Girl wins. It’s all one massive, perfectly calculated and utterly trite tease.
Making it worse is that Andou gets pretty grating. Sure, when he’s being chuuni he’s a lovable, goofy moron, but then the show tries to make him some sort of serious, insightful and casually ‘deep’ character too. Oftentimes if one of the girls is having a problem of some kind, he always manages to say the right, perfect and allegedly ‘meaningful’ thing that makes them have a revelation about themselves and also how amazing he is, and it’s so utterly natural and never a big deal or forced at all nosiree. It’s a really tedious and transparent strategy to a) justify why all these women are attracted to him and b) elevate him (and don’t forget, he’s the audience surrogate in all this) to some sort of superiority. Remember – he’s also being this utterly ridiculous chuuni kid before and after he says these things. These two elements of his characterization just don’t work together, they conflict too much, and as a result he ends up getting on my nerves. Andou has this forced likability about him, where in-universe he’s something amazing but it falls hilariously flat on the audience. In its own way, this too is chuunibyou – it’s a reflection of the audience’s own desire to have power, just realised immaturely through unrealistic words and emotion instead of magic.
Alarmingly, Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-Kei no Nake de devolves into a straight up chuuni action-fantasy light novel. It literally becomes the thing it’s trying to parody, and does so with a remarkable lack of self-awareness.
After a while, a magical, indirect war between fairies is introduced as a means to explain why they have magical powers. A completely ridiculous adult who never stopped his chuunibyou was introduced earlier, and it turns out he’s involved in it. This sounds like it would be a great opportunity for further parody by having a thoroughly irreverent attitude towards an otherwise typical chuuni plot, especially considering that the main cast are completely oblivious to all this, but aside from some of the characters being pretty silly that never really happens. This fairy war is, as far as I could tell, taken completely seriously, and when we see the rest of the participants there’s never even a hint of irony or satire about it. In that light, the main cast’s obliviousness makes them special within the plot because everyone else knows why they have powers but not even the fairies know who gave them theirs! In effect, Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-Kei no Nake de’s dominating and driving narrative in their chuunibyou parody is a straight, unironic chuunibyou action fantasy.
Maybe it was intended to be parodic, but if that’s the case it never has the opportunity to demonstrate that. The background and details of this fairy war are never expounded upon in any way, giving us no real context to the fighting and powers involved. It just sort of happens, failing to develop into anything or go anywhere. And it doesn’t even have a huge amount of relevance – the main cast only interacts with it two or three times, but every time they do it’s done incredibly seriously. But it’s still framed as something important. So how am I meant to interpret it as anything other than the author being serious? The few silly elements in it come across as less parodic and more artefacts of where the series started, a painful reminder of what this series should have remained.
Suffice to say, the triple whammy of Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-Kei no Nake de beginning to take itself seriously, indulging heavily in generic light novel rom-com crap and introducing an actual magical fantasy battle plot when it started out parodying that did not do the show any favours as it progressed. Where it started out as a pretty good comedy with a few light novel trappings rendering it a touch hit-and-miss, it ended up being, well, a bit of a mess propped up by the occasional moment of actual fun. It did manage to eke out a few excellent scenes (Hatoko’s breakdown being one of my favourite things to come out of the year), but all they serve to do is highlight the inconsistent quality. It’s a shame that this is what TRIGGER did next, because it – unsurprisingly – feels like a waste of their time. And while their animation and direction certainly made it more entertaining visually, even they couldn’t save this series from being, at best, mediocre.
I’m glad I’m not the only one out there who found Andou’s words or wisdom grating and infuriating.
I get the impression the show wouldn’t lose much at all if you compressed it into a single OVA episode with Hayamin’s rant in the middle.
Or just let her show off in a better series next time?
She definitely deserved better than this, for sure.