Anime Spotlight #61: The Beginning After the End
a.k.a. The Animeister.
It's kind of fitting that, after returning from the epic Quest that was Anime August, I chose today's series for a chance in the Spotlight. Sure, it would have been more symbolic if The Beginning After the End was the first piece of content I reviewed this month, but I was mildly burned out and last week seemed like the perfect time to rest well, as a certain Turtle Hermit once said.
And, as a certain Realm of madness once said, endings are followed by beginnings that will someday end, so let's get to The Beginning After the End!
So, the plot is something I came across a lot in my foray through Webnovel back in the day: a dragon, demon lord, evil king (as is the case here), or other terrifying dominant force is slain by a hero figure and reborn (sometimes in a different time period in their own world, or as the case is here, in a different world) with a chance to learn humility and compassion so they can repent and live a better life for the sake of others.
For King Grey (reborn as Arthur Leywin—so, obvious King Arthur pun, but also a last name that means "dear friend" or "lion" because surnames in this series are subtle), part of his learning humility involves being reborn into an infant's body with his adult mind intact from the previous world. This, of course, had me dreading that The Beginning After the End (abbreviated in the fandom as TBATE) would be a Mushoku Tensei ripoff. But despite Arthur's mother being a stacked cake of a woman, he quickly comes to see her as the ex-badass cinnamon roll that she is, and makes protecting his family the driving motivation for getting stronger (thus, he's more Monkey than Greyrat in that regard).
So it's a good and a bad thing when Arthur uses his understanding of ki from his previous life (a common route to OP status in the isekai genre, and one we'll see again in next week's anime) to awaken to fire magic at age four and accidentally blow up their house. Thankfully, this isn't an MHA Villain origin story, and the Leywins are Misfit Demon King levels of understanding, so the badass father is like, "honey; isn't our son super-awesome‽" and everything's fine until Arthur gets separated from his parents in a bandit attack. This is one of the few areas where I think TurtleMe's writing is lacking, as he uses a lot of timeskips and offscreen plot contrivance (like Arthur's parents surviving the bandit attack somehow and having a daughter when he comes home later) to speedrun to whatever cool thing he has in mind next. But when there is a character in need of fleshing out (like the ex-aristocrat ninja lady who volunteers to go adventuring with Arthur at the end of the season for what are probably Japraved reasons because age gaps exist) or the world needs building, TurtleMe gives it his full attention.
Anyway, while lost in the wilderness after the bandit attack, Arthur ends up with a surrogate dragon-mommy who dies in battle and gives birth to a cute little mascot who later leads him to a magic lightsaber, and he befriends an elven princess whose scary uncle trains him to fight better and cures him of the magic heart disease he got from absorbing dragon-mommy's core. The elves' attitudes toward humans (because aristocratic mage families hire bandits to kidnap elves for...breeding purposes, which comes up near the end of the season and is handled pretty well for something so gross) is another good bit of world-building, but the princess and the aforementioned ninja lady hint at the future of the story devolving into an unrequited edgelord harem, which I am not looking forward to. Arthur's rivals on the other hand (a volatile, stuck-up fire mage born of that elf eugenics nightmare I mentioned before, and an enigmatic, calculating young man with powerful connections) have the potential to make things interesting in the future.
The animation by studio A-Cat (Transformers: Energon, but also the anime where an old wizard gets age-regressed and gender-morphed and we spend a third of any given episode listening to them have code one bathroom emergencies) is a mixed bag of magic spectacle, sakuga running, and rapid sword-flailing that reminds me of the Meliodas/Escanor fight from Seven Deadly Sins, so it's kind of understandable that Crunchyroll wanted to scale back the season from twenty-four episodes to twelve. I don't know enough about the production (which is to say I know nothing) to state whether animation quality was the deciding factor, but it's logical that the anime streaming giant would want studio A-Cat to cook the second cour a bit longer, especially if the story to come is moving in a more battle-focused direction.
Though I see a few existing and potential problems with TBATE, the characters are enjoyable and intriguing enough that I'm looking forward to whatever beginnings might follow season one's end, and I think you should, too.
I also think you should Stay Tuned for tomorrow's look at the I Know What You Did Last Summer novel, 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 continue to hope for new beginnings, 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 After In.
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