Anime Spotlight #4: Midnight Occult Civil Servants

 Hello, my fellow weebotaks!

Just as the year 2020 became 2021, Sunday has once more become #AniMonday, and that means it's time for another edition of the Anime Spotlight. I hinted at the end of my last Just the Ticket that everything would "come together" following my review of Appare Ranman! because, at the time, I was experiencing a manic fit of identity crisis, and was going to abandon my individual series' for a more unified posting...thing with only one title and a "back to the beginning" numbering scheme that would show just how long I had been doing the Blogger thing (and the MySpace thing, and the Yahoo! Groups thing...); yeah, this thing I enjoy doing has had a lot of "things" to it over the years. Well, when I was done being an impulsive crybaby about my life and using this medium as a proxy for realigning myself, I realized how stupid that sounded, and here we are with another Anime Spotlight issue instead of whatever I was going to call my new thing that isn't going to happen anymore.

So, getting back to what makes one day or year turn into another, I'm here to talk to you about midnight. I remember that, back when I was a kid, I decided I would try to stay awake until midnight one night. I had always just followed a pattern of "go to bed when it gets dark, wake up when it's not dark anymore," not really thinking about the moment in between that made one day into another.

I tried three days in a row to hit my goal, laying in bed each time, music blaring through my headphones, staring at the seconds and minutes that ticked by on those first two nights, only to nervously hypnotize myself to sleep and wake up the next morning, feeling disappointed that I had foiled my own efforts yet again.

So, on the third night, I got smart, and...I cheated. Rather than keep trying to brute force my way to midnight, I went to sleep as I normally would have, but I set an alarm to wake me up at something like 11:55pm, and when it went off, I stared at my wristwatch (which showed the day and date as well as the time), letting the local hard rock station carry me through the next five minutes.

I don't really know what I expected to happen when the time came; whether something was supposed to click somewhere in the universe, or I was supposed to feel some unique quality of this new ends-with-day that identified it as being different from the ends-with-day that came before it, I didn't know. But when midnight came, 11:59:59pm simply became 12:00:00am for a second, the digitized day shorthand changed to the next abbreviation in line. and the date incremented by one. By the time I registered all of these changes, true midnight was already seconds gone, and time just kept doing what time does, irrespective of my search for an indefinable, unattainable something that might not have actually been a something at all.

Time, when you do nothing with it but watch it pass, is no different from moment to moment beyond the ever-changing numbers we use to mark it. What we do when we're not staring at our timepieces? That's the important thing.

So, yeah. In the real world, midnight is nothing special.

In anime, though, midnight can be anything the author wants it to be. And in today's selection, midnight becomes the source for one of my favorite genre combos: supernatural crime-solving. I've talked in the past about series like BEM, Cop Craft, In/Spectre, Meiji Tokyo Renka, and Durarara!, and how much I enjoyed each of them for their atmospheric weirdness, unique, well-written plots, and entertaining character dynamics. And Midnight Occult Civil Servants is no different. I mean, it is different, or I wouldn't be telling you about it. But it belongs in the Anime Spotlight of supernatural crime series alongside those other titles.

Midnight Occult Civil Servants follows a specialized police unit that the other divisions know exists, but they only know that this special unit is called in for "unusual" cases. What makes these cases unusual? That they are either caused by or perpetrated against "Anothers" (basically Japanese folklore creatures like yokai, youma, kappas, oni/ogres, and the occasional transplanted pagan deity like Huehuecoyotl or Pandora). But in addition to most people not being able to see Anothers--the special cops can see them, though--it's even more rare to find anyone who can understand what they are saying, and so the Civil Servants have to go on sign and body language. That is, until Arata Miyako joins the group, learning in a moment of stress that he is the rare human who has "ears of sand," and the Anothers believe that he is the reincarnation and descendant of Abe no Seimei (who, SPOILERS and irony, was the main villain in Twin Star Exorcists). Using his ability, Arata helps the special police solve Another-related crimes, mysteries, and disputes, with hopes of breaking down prejudicial barriers and lessening the chances of future incidents. The cases were interesting (the Romeo & Juliet plot between an angel and a tengu, the teleporting elevator mystery, and the death of the trans vampire--yes, they made a transexual Transylvania pun on purpose, and the story still works as a tragedy--were the most memorable for me, but the series is solid as a whole), the characters were quirky and memorable, and the only criticism I can level at Midnight Occult Civil Servants is that, like most twelve-episode series of quality (and the ones that suck, too), it was only meant to serve as a promotional gateway to its print source, and therefore was ended too soon with too much left to explore. It may not be a shonen juggernaut worthy of its own personal bank vault (both to house its printed volumes and its Good Girls-meets-Breaking Bad pallets of cash), but Midnight Occult Civil Servants is of a quality that merits another season. Give it a watch and see if you end up speaking my language.

So much has been released between the 2020 production freeze and the regular slate of 2021 anime that I'm kind of leaving myself in the dust here. I'd like to do an Anime-BAW on three Crunchyroll Original series that came out last year, an Anime Spotlight on the Isekai Quartet series' (which doesn't make any sense because there are five of them now) that incorporates the BAW ranking system, the Girls In A Dungeon franchise, and single-title Spotlight issues on Akudama Drive, DECA-DENCE, Jujutsu Kaisen, Black Clover, I'm Standing on a Million Lives, By the Grace Of the Gods, The Day I Became A God, Yashahime: Half-Demon Princess, Wandering Witch: The Journey Of Elaina, Kakushigoto, Gleipnir, and Fire Force.

But next week, I thought I'd continue the supernatural Romeo & Juliet stream of consciousness with a look at Our Last Crusade OR the Rise Of A New World.

As always, like and comment, and if you want to check out Midnight Occult Civil Servants or look up any of the anime I have mentioned above, affordable streaming subscriptions can be found through VRV (Crunchyroll, HiDIVE, and Rooster Teeth), Funimation, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. 👀

Funimation is your best bet for watching Civil Servants, but the best value and variety for anime is VRV. For around ten bucks, you get Crunchy, HiDIVE, Rooster Teeth, VRV original programming, and a few rotating services that provide classic cartoons, horror movies, and some old Super Sentai (Japanese source for Power Rangers) seasons in their entirety. Hopefully, we will get Funimation back on VRV when the buyout becomes official, but until then, feast your eyes and ride out the chaos any way you can.

Animeister Strangelove,

out.