Anime Spotlight #59: The Brilliant Healer's New Life In the Shadows
a.k.a. The Brilliant Animeister.
I'm also incredibly humble, Ticketholders! And I've never made that joke before. At least the stream of repetitive harem trash with a protagonist who's really good at curing people has dried up, right?
Right‽
I mean, it's not like he's an alchemist adventurer or an apothecary alchemist; he's an ex-adventurer healer this time. And his hair isn't silver, so that's something different, isn't it? I promise, this last week of Anime August does not have a theme! And I'm definitely not "coping," either!
The Brilliant Healer's New Life In the Shadows began its life at both the best and worst possible time (November 2020) as a novel series by Sakaku Hishikawa, who also writes the light-novel, webtoon, and manga adaptations, all four of which are still ongoing. If you know what 2020 means, you know what I mean about the worst possible time. But as for the best possible time part, the series is about Zenos, a "self-taught" healer (though we find out later that he had a master at one point because the story structure and writing here aren't exactly...Brilliant) from the slums who believes healing magic shouldn't be reserved for the rich and that compensation should equal the quality of service provided (though he does often contradict his own philosophy if he feels a "rich asshole tax" is justified so the viewing audience can have self-insert catharsis). Granted, there is opportunity for anti-vaxxer and anti-establishment types to read into the "academic medicine bad, practical homeschooling good" throughline of the show, but in a happier hellscape when COVID was starting to be dealt with and Trump was on his way out for the first time, it was probably refreshing to have a "healer of the common man" protagonist in some form of media.
The good news/bad news doesn't stop at the novels' possible real-world implications, though, because I have to talk about the franchise's unoriginal aspects, why the story structure is a mixed bag of a mess, and what makes Brilliant Healer a touch smarter than the two anime I reviewed before it.
However, I struggle with where to begin because some of the things that make the series unoriginal are also what makes its world interesting. Take the slave/ghost/demi-human harem aspect, for example. It's unoriginal (and gross) that the protagonist's first female connection is an underage elven slave girl with a brocon fetish, but the slavery element tells us off the bat that the series takes place in a very dangerous, classist world. It's unoriginal that he has an alcoholic himedere ghost living upstairs, but she's probably one of the best characters in the show, her morbid sense of humor is fun, and her presence provides a basis for some cool lore bits about undead beings and offensive uses for Zenos' healing magic. It's unoriginal that the rest of his unrequited harem consists of a cat-girl, a lizard-girl (probably his least creepy and most personality compatible option if he were to pick one), and an ogre. But their humanoid designs compared to the majority of their respective species informs a JRPG-like evolution process, and their status as leaders of feuding slum factions plays into the demonstrably classist power structure (systemic perpetuation of chaos in the slums draws public attention away from the evils of the selfish aristocracy; an on-the-nose allegory for real-world gang violence). This also introduces another harem member to the mix: a holy knight with a one and only multitude of flaws and a magic gun who comes to the slums to assassinate The Mediator of the suddenly ceased gang war, only to find they're using Zenos' underground clinic as neutral ground.
But it's also unoriginal that Zenos is a healer who was kicked out of a prestigious party for fear of tarnishing their reputation because he isn't licensed, even though he's inconceivably better at every known and forgotten healing method than anyone the licensing system could ever produce. Granted, this plays into the series' social reform and anti-establishment themes, but it's referenced so seldom that it could be stricken from the plot and not change a thing. As the title suggests, the story is about Zenos' new life, not his past.
So now that I've mentioned story and backstory, let's desperately grasp at that straw so I can awkwardly segue into talking about the writing and structure of the season/series.
As I said above, there are moments of The Brilliant Healer contradicting its own character lore, such as Zenos being a self-taught healer in the first episode but the final arc being partly driven by his search for information about his master. But the real jarring thing about the series is how off-putting its initial sense of time is.
The Brilliant Healer's New Life In the Shadows begins in medias res, expecting the audience to understand the world, characters, and genre of the show with a whiplash-inducing lack of context, and ending the pilot episode with "suddenly, monster-girl harem; bye!" We do then get a series of flashback episodes that show how he met and changed the lives of each of them before things shift back to the present for the holy knight's introduction via a predictable but not unfunny missed connections/mistaken identity sequence that escalates into Zenos negotiating and healing his way out of a magic bullet to the face.
Much like Takumi's peaceful life in the countryside in Possibly the Greatest Alchemist Of All Time, Zenos' New Life In the Shadows is not meant to be for long (as if the monster-girl harem of rival gang leaders, lolis, and ghosts using his clinic as a crash pad were too subtle of a clue to that effect already), because with word of his feats having reached the aristocracy, Zenos is next approached by a couple of researchers from the Royal Academy who want him to enroll undercover and get close to a prestigious healing instructor they suspect of kidnapping and murder. Because almost everyone in this story (including the Brilliant Healer himself) is a Metropolis-level moron, going undercover involves Zenos changing his name to Zeno and wearing different colored clothes. But as his harem and his friend group both continue to grow (including a goofy rival who calls him bro, Sailor Mercury—she has a name, but she's a blue-haired magical nerd, so that's what I'm going to call her—and a noble's daughter whom he surgically removed a curse from), the mystery at the Academy complicates to involve spiritual possession, political intrigue and corruption, and a really good, emotional (but kind of predictable after a certain point) twist reveal where karmic justice is served and the groundwork is laid for the story to continue.
I almost didn't watch past the first episode because of how inaccessible and backwards it felt, but the more I watched (and the more I talked through this review), the more I found to appreciate despite the series' flaws and unoriginal elements. It's too soon for any word on a second season, but given how light on action The Brilliant Healer's New Life In the Shadows has been so far, I don't foresee too long of a wait if the greenlight hits, and I'd likely watch to see if the story goes anywhere beyond "add more girls" because there's been more to it than that already.
Tomorrow, I'll be bingeing two Cutie Honey movies for Sunday's Anime August finale, and bringing you my schedule for the first week of September. So Stay Tuned and please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can heal and survive this violent, classist slum of a year, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.
Animeister,
Out Of Mana.
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