Anime Spotlight #29: Black Clover

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Animeister

Beware the Ides Of March, Ticketholders!

They signify misfortune and doom, like when you have to come into work unexpectedly because two of your co-workers called in sick and your boss' uncle died, screwing up your content creation and scheduling plans for the morning so that you snap awake in the dead of night thinking, "Oh, shit! I have to write a review of Black Clover for Monday!" But also you have to write up the content calendar for the week first because it's Friday and that has to be up by Saturday morning.

Or, you know, important stuff like the assassination of Julius Caesar and the fall of an entire empire because Jesus and King Arthur didn't exist yet to give him any points of reference that his closest ally might betray him. Which makes Sun Tzu an asshole because if Caesar hadn't allowed Brutus to get so close to him, he wouldn't have had Brutus as an enemy, and he might have lived a bit longer. Keep everyone at Friend Distance, people!

And please keep me at Friend Distance by remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

The ironic thing is that after the Ides Of March, we get Saint Patrick's Day, which honors the death of the namesake metaphorical Pied Piper of Ireland, who introduced the lucky pagan Irish to Christianity. Which makes March the second month of three in a row to honor the life and death of a Christian religious figure (last month it was Valentine's Day, and next month will have Easter for Jesus), but be commercially represented by pagan symbolism (shamrocks, four-leaf clovers, and leprechauns in this case). Also, let's honor a dead guy by getting drunk!

St. Patrick's Day was yesterday, so like I hinted at above, I'm reviewing Black Clover today because clovers.

Black Clover is a popular, ongoing shonen manga-turned-not-ongoing-anime originally written by Yūki Tabata and animated by Studio Pierrot.

Honestly, I almost didn't even bother watching past the first episode because of how generic, annoying, and ass-pull-reliant it was. At its barest, Black Clover is a My Hero-alike: in a world based around one power system (magic in this case), the one guy without powers from that power system exercises a lot and gets a system-breaking power (Devil-powered anti-magic) that lets him fight as good or better than everyone else (and also fly and ride his sword like a surfboard). But in Black Clover, the protagonist (Asta, voiced by Angels Of Death co-lead Dallas Reid) is loud and obnoxious and has no idea how nuns work even though he and his childhood rival (Yuno, voiced by Toma Kamijo himself, Micah Solusod) grew up in an orphanage. So when Yuno gets the Four Leaf Grimoire of light and wind, and is automatically accepted into the best knight squad in the Clover Kingdom (because magic and playing card suits and this world is classist and medieval as shit) and Asta gets publicly humiliated because he has no magic and can't summon a grimoire at all, some aristocrats bully him so he screams really loud and a five leaf clover Black Grimoire (ladies and gentlemen, we have a title!) appears, giving him access to a Cloud Strife-sized anime sword that lets him nullify magic. Oh, and if Black Clover is going to be a generic shonen anime, there has to be a nebulous title or McGuffin that the underdog hero wants really, really badly, so prepare to hear Asta constantly scream about how he wants to be the Wizard King. Whatever that is....

We eventually do find out what that is because there is already a character at the head of the Clover Kingdom with that title. But in the early episodes, it just sounds like a lite beer version of King Of the Pirates.

The best and worst part of Black Clover beyond the first episode is that the existence of the aforementioned knight squads allows it to be an underdog story for more characters than just Asta. While Yuno faces classism problems as the only commoner to get membership to the aristocratic Golden Dawn squad, Asta is defaulted to the Black Bulls, a squad of misfits (including a lightning-powered psychopath, an alcoholic witch with destiny powers and a pet cat made out of fate thread, a psychotically slothful and gluttonous girl who can heal anyone with food cooked by indestructible size-shifting magic sheep, and an ex-aristocrat with mirror powers who escaped from siscon prison, literally named Gauche because if you couldn't tell by Asta's entire personality, subtlety does not exist in the Black Clover universe) led by Yami Sukehiro (Chris Sabat, because he's almost legally obligated to voice at least one character in every Crunchy/Funi-dubbed anime since they took over Dragon Ball), a cigarette-smoking samurai from medieval magic world anime Japan (a.k.a. "the Far East") who can cut darkness and dimensions in half. Alongside Asta, there is also Noelle Silva (Jill Harris, who voices Fern in this year's slow-burn fantasy world banger, Frieren, and is married to Asta's voice actor in real life, which makes Noelle's stereotypical himedere/tsundere behavior towards Asta as believable as it is overplayed), the black sheep of one of the four great aristocratic families of the Clover Kingdom, and the younger sister of the Silver Eagles' captain. She has water-based magic and is ostracized by her family because she has more mana than them but can't control it initially, which becomes an overplayed ejaculation gag at Asta's expense whenever he sets off her repressed romantic feelings for him.

When ample screentime isn't taken up by repeating everyone's single character traits ad nauseum, we get some badass fights with epic animation and average character progression (but I'm kind of being generous with "average," because it's usually done via a sequence of mid-fight flashbacks when Character X is losing so they can come to grips with something that made them the one-note character they are, causing a new spell to write itself into their grimoire so they can win...only for them to be the same as they were before the fight but more powerful). Things get good and bonkers, but also kind of post-Season 3 Seven Deadly Sins bad, when the Eye Of the Midnight Sun (a group of elves who were "betrayed" by the current Wizard King and use their ancient magic to reincarnate into human hosts, which, it's revealed near the end of the arc, also includes the captain of the Golden Dawn, whose name is Vangeance because subtlety still does not exist in Black Clover, and because reincarnation, time travel, and a Devil was behind it all along). It's cool in the moment, but makes no sense looking back on it, except that it almost explains where Asta gets his powers and his anti-magic swords from (the petals of the shamrock represent Faith, Hope, and Love, each of which are antithesized by one of the three strongest generals of the Eye Of the Midnight Sun; the fourth leaf of a clover represents Good Luck, and in the fifth leaf lies the Devil, so Yuno's grimoire is related to Asta's, which used to belong to the leader of the Eye before it was taken by a Devil...I think...). Like I said, the Midnight Sun stuff gets super-convoluted.

In the wake of this insanity, it's revealed that there are other devils to fight (which never happens in the anime) and three other kingdoms to visit (Heart, Diamond, and Spade, because playing cards, remember?), the Wizard King (but shouldn't that mean that each of the four Suit Kingdoms has their own Wizard King, thereby making the title a quarter as special as it should be?) steps down because he died and used time travel to reincarnate as a kid, and Asta and Secre/Nero (a Sealing mage who was friends with the Wizard King the first time he was a kid and sealed herself into the form of the anti-magic-sensing bird who's been woodpeckering Asta's head for over a hundred and twenty episodes, and she's voiced by Monica Rial, who's probably voiced a character in every anime I've reviewed, and I'm not exaggerating by much) get put on trial under suspicion of being Devils themselves. Also, Yuno is the Moses'd long-lost prince of the Spade Kingdom where a Devil-possessed Magic Knight is running amok, everyone does more training for the fight with the Devil that never happens, and after a hundred and seventy episodes, we finally get a flashback that explains where Asta came from and why his anti-magic Devil powers ackshully weren't an ass-pull he got from screaming really loud in the first episode, or a curse from an elder witch after all. And that's it. Asta's mother made friends with the Devil who now lives in his grimoire because her magic drains mana from other people and the Devil (whom she names Liebe) has no magic (which doesn't make sense because Asta can't get Devil powers from a Devil with no powers), but she's killed by another Devil and Liebe wants revenge. So then the ass-pull and the rest of Black Clover happens, Asta and Liebe fight each other and finally become friends so they can kill Devils together, the end, please read our manga, senpai.

Does it count as a rage-quit if I watched the whole thing not knowing it was the whole thing and then said "fuck it!"?

I mean, the manga is still going on, and there's a movie on Netflix that I'm going to review on Friday, but that "ending" and the delayed explanation of Asta's powers triggered me so much!

Please trigger your memory to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment a new spell at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest grimoires of news on my content.

Anti-magical Animeister,

Out.