Anime Spotlight #5: Indiana Columbus Strangelove (and Juliet)

Hark! What Spotlight through yonder screen doth break?

'Tis this post, and #AniMonday has gone.

Alas, poor Weebotaks, I am late and shall finish this anon for release on the morrow.

That means Tuesday.

At midnight.

Apologies for the delay in posting, and the weird title. But the latter does figure in to this week's edition of Anime Spotlight, which shines on a mouthful of a title: Our Last Crusade OR The Rise Of A New World. Draw the connections between titles of this post and the featured anime series, and groan at your leisure.

That is, assuming you have any leisure to do anything at while capitalism and democracy burn before your eyes for the first time in a generation (9/11/2001), racial tensions explode for the first time in almost thirty years (4/29/1992), our nation's capitol is under siege for the first time in over two centuries (8/24/1814), and the world is still in the grips of the most voluminous pandemic in all of human history because the proverbial slipped-through cracks are ever-widening in the name of "respect for human life," greatly reducing the power of natural selection to work as our respective deities intended, and giving near-unchecked voice to the screeching masses and their syphilitic brand of "logic" and "fact."

But I'm not here today to retread old, horrific ground with the rest of the critical marketplace. I'm not an expert in such things; I just know from instinct what rubs me the wrong way and why it does so. All I can do is shake my head, speak my disgust, and help you escape with some good, old-fashioned, semi-new anime.

And what better way to escape from an insane, apocalyptic reality full of prejudice, war, fear, and anger than to cover an anime about an apocalyptic world where the main catalysts for its ongoing war are prejudice, fear, and anger?

That's right, it's Our Last Crusade OR The Rise Of A New World! In this anime with a light-novel-length title that doesn't tell you the plot, the ages-old dichotomy of science and religion vs. magic (am I going to need to bring back the hyphen drinking game for this?) is represented by two kingdoms at war. The science/religion kingdom fears the power of the magic kingdom (and no, it's not Disney), even though the magic people used to be "normal" people before an unprecedented energy thing happened, marking them with early-2000s pretentious tribal tattoos and giving them control of the elements. So, the science/religion kingdom labeled them witches, killed them, exiled them, and...well, war. Many years later, a top-ranked knight for the kingdom's church takes pity on a young witch an helps her escape his kingdom's prison, thereby making a traitor of himself and being imprisoned in her place. Some time later, his kingdom offers him pardon if he can capture the magic kingdom's princess, Alice, dubbed the "Ice Calamity Witch" because fear-based codenames and she can freeze stuff--a lot. During a mission with his old team to capture Alice, she and Isaka (the former knight) come to an unexpected realization about one another's world views, and the usual anime romantic-comedy beats of repressed feelings and chance encounters ensue on an episodic basis from there, mixing a light-hearted take on Romeo and Juliet with questionably motivated espionage and some spectacular action sequences. The series isn't over yet, so I can't speak to its quality as a whole. But the story is captivating from week to week, the characters are mostly enjoyable and charismatic (especially the villains on the charisma front), and...I just like it. Hopefully, it doesn't disappoint by the end. Fingers and stars crossed.

I kept that relatively short because I'm a day late for posting and I wanted to get something out this week. Two more series wrapped their dub releases in the past few days, so next week, it's a double feature of comedy and blandness with Kakushigoto and By the Grace Of the Gods (plus a special comparison selection to commemorate the impending return of one of my favorite isekai series).

As always, like and comment, and if you want to check out Our Last Crusade OR The Rise Of A New World 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 the best source for Last Crusade, so get a subscription from the link above or feast your eyes any way you can.

Animeister AND Hoping For A Better World,

out.