Did Not Light A Fire Under Me

 

First of all, Happy New Year 2022 to all my friends.

And now, onto my review of Tite Kubo's newest project, following the end of Bleach in 2016, "Burn The Witch".

 

In an alternate version of London, two similar dimensions exist side-by-side.  These worlds are Front London and Reverse London.  In the latter, the people are constantly plagued by monsters known as Dragons, which are usually invisible to those on the Front side.

 

Sound familiar?

 

The services of Wing Bind help to keep the people of both Londons safe from Dragons in need of either destruction or else harvesting for their useful abilities and resources.  And two of these such people are protagonists Noel Niihashi and Ninny Spangcole.

 

It is illegal for anyone outside of Wing Bind to come in contact with Dragons.  Violation of this rule results in imprisonment or death.  This is because ordinary people who get too close to Dragons become infected with their cells and become known as Dragonclad, those who inadvertently attract Dragons.

 

And it’s even worse on the Dragon side, as prolonged exposure to humans can pass on their negative emotions to them and turn them into destructive Dark Dragons.  Dark Dragons want to eat witches like those in Wing Bind in order to become immortal.

 

To her Ninny tell it, this will not actually happen.

 

One day, Noel fan Balgo and his pal Selby attempt to follow Noel through the magic phone booth (It’s bigger on the inside) into Reverse London, when Balgo’s dog Osushi explodes into a Dark Dragon.  Turns out Osushi is a Disguiser Dragon that can possess a corpse in order to live.  And so, it turns out, is Selby.  And he has been hiding out inside Selby’s corpse for ten years.

 

No way Balgo isn’t a Dragonclad by this point.

 

Behind the scenes, the higher-ups who run Wing Bind, the Tops of Horns, seek to eliminate Balgo for being a Dragonclad and essentially unwittingly spending a long time with hidden Dragons and making them into Dark Dragons by accident.

 

An investigation into a Dragon attack by Ninny’s former bandmate Macy leads the heroines to learn of the Top of Horns’ plot when member Bruno Bangnyfe appears to contain Balgo for elimination, aiming to pin the blame for the damage on him.  They flee from both Bruno and Macy’s Dragon Elly, only for the latter to molt in the moonlight and mutate into its true form: Cinderella, one of seven destructive Marchen Dark Dragons themed after fairy tales, and labeled as Kill On Sight.

 

Bruno attempts to fight Cinderella and destroy it, in order to stop its rampaging, but nothing works.  Ninny and Noel can only watch and try to defend the powerless Balgo and Macy.

 

In the end, an unlikely person shoots Cinderella in its weak point from far away and destroys it.  And Balgo’s kill order is lifted by Bangnyfe, thinking that his brief contact with Macy two months prior may have been a factor in Cinderella’s appearance, and that he may be useful in their plan to eliminate all of the Marchen Dragons.

 

BTW, Macy also joins the team as another Dragonclad.

 

Now, I am only a moderate fan of Bleach.  I lost interest early on, in both the anime and the manga.  A couple of years aback, I finally decided to catch up on the Bleach manga for some reason or another, and so began nearly a year-long quest to read the entire series from the beginning, one volume at a time.

 

Now, don’t get me wrong: it has its good points.  The character designs and superpowers are all great.  But it still seemed very forgettable at the end of the day.  The anime I liked more, though I have only watched a few episodes with my favorite characters and voice actors in them, over and over again.

 

The world was just too big and intricate for me to really absorb or memorize or care about, much as I fear it is in Burn The Witch.

 

Granted, this is only the first volume, but I get a distinct sense that things won’t always stay as black-and-white as Wing Bind vs. Dragons, the same as it did when Bleach branched out from Soul Reapers Vs. Hollows.

 

Tite Kubo is a very weird creator, all things told.  His works thus far (aside from, I think, Zombie Powder) have been liberally sprinkled with bizarre English-esque titles made seemingly out of Word Salad and snippets of foreign languages thrown in here and there like some kind of language stew.  When the people aren’t flat or comical, they are ultra-deep and brooding and speak in odd sentences and terms that sound like the half-formed thoughts of a monk who is deliberately trying to be obscure about everything.

 

And the naming also gets very bizarre, very often.  For example-one of the Tops of Horns is named Cquntnire Milieve.

 

Cquntnire.

 

How the hell do you pronounce that?  Does Kubo know English or not?  With names like these, it’s hard to tell, but then he drops in English words and things that almost make sense, like even the series’ title “Burn The Witch”.  It has nothing to do with the story, aside from the main characters being witches, but I guess it still technically counts as a coherent English sentence (which they aren’t always!), so I guess they were all like “throw it in”.

 

(FYI, the wiki says it’s pronounced like Kyuntonia.)

 

And Kubo has apparently set both Bleach and Burn The Witch in the same world?  The Dragons already operate like Hollows, and the magic used by the main heroines is an awful lot like the Hado used in Bleach.  Wing Branch’s full legal name is even Soul Society West Branch.

 

But this seemingly-cool move on his part only serves to raise more questions than it answers.  Are Hollows confined only to Japan?  I’d have thought that any soul that died anywhere had a chance to become either a ghost or a Hollow.  Do Hollows exist in Reverse London, as well?  Is Reverse London like the Soul Society “across the pond”?

 

Are Witches Soul Reapers?  Are Soul Reapers Witches?  Are Hollows Dragon?  And are Dragons Hollows?

 

There is a mention that Dragons are outright killed as a regular thing in Japan, not like how they are sometimes kept around to provide services in Reverse London, but what does that mean?  Is there a Reverse, say, Tokyo, or Karakura that is killing these Dragons?

 

Give us some more details, Kubo!  I’m all for a bit of mystery here and there, but this is, to use the British vernacular, “taking the piss”!

 

Now, I haven’t watched the anime of Burn The Witch, but, so far, none of the characters are physically or personally appealing to me, just from the first volume.  Nobody’s design is incredibly unique or super-hot or super-cool.  Nobody has the kind of personality that I would love to watch play out in an anime or read playing out in the pages of a book.  For the most part, everyone is either stupid or a jerk.

 

But, when all is said and done, this is only the first volume (even though it was a chore trying to read the whole thing in one night in order to write this review).  So I suppose Burn The Witch has nowhere to go but up.  I will continue following this series for as long as I can, if only to see where it goes.

 

That being said, my final gripe about this series is the bizarre release schedule.  Wikipedia says that the “first season”, which I guess is the four or so chapters we read in this English release, came out and ran from August to September of 2020, and that a second season has been announced.

 

No idea what that means, but it sounds like they will only be releasing a few chapters at a time, spaced out over some unknown time span.

 

And I’ll admit that Coronavirus has thrown a massive spanner into everybody’s works worldwide, but maybe one could try and change their whole schedule plan, just a bit?

 

I mean, One Piece and Academia are still putting out one chapter a week, aren’t they?

 

Here’s wishing Tite Kubo and everyone else on the planet a safer, possibly returning to normal, New Year in 2022.

 

Look At What Just Drifted By

 

Back when I was in college, my dorm was not too far from the local downtown.  Naturally, this, of course, included a library.  I can remember spending at least a few hours down there, mostly reading manga and graphic novels that my own hometown did not possess.  One of said manga series I read there was Kazuo Umezu’s haunting series “Drifting Classroom”.

 

Now, it’s been around 10 years since I was in college, and, being younger then, I hadn’t quite seen enough of the world of horror to realize just how gripping and terrifying this series was.

 

But I know now.

 

Grade-school student Sho Takamatsu has not had a good day, and it’s about to get worse than he, or anyone save Umezu, could possibly imagine.

 

After a dramatic falling-out with his mother, in which both declared they never wanted to see each other again, Sho arrives at school like any other day…and then all Hell breaks loose.  A massive boom shakes the building.  No one can contact the outside world.  And what lies beyond the school’s gates has been transformed into a lifeless wasteland.

 

Left to survive with limited water, limited food and (soon enough) no adult supervision, save for the monstrous and cruel lunch delivery man, Sho and his fellow students are forced to band together as a community.  Dangers await them from both without and within.  Every chapter brings about a new challenge or mystery, up until the reveal that the school itself has been blasted forward in time, hence the “Drifting” in the title.

 

Most adults would find it hard to maintain their sanity in the grips of such a situation (and they indeed do find it so), so one can imagine how hard Sho and his fellows will have it.  And, from what I hear, things will often get worse before they get better.

 

Told in stark ultra-white paper and ultra-black ink, the real-life terrors of scarcity, the risk of death by starvation and dehydration, the terror of the unknown and the darkness that humans can be reduced to are all on stark display in this manga.

 

Now, I must admit, the library only had a small handful of the first few volumes on its shelves when I was there, so I only know so much firsthand.  But the series has recently been re-released in large, omnibus formats, one of which had just appeared on my own local library’s shelves when I just happened to go there yesterday.

 

My point is, I have apparently been exposed to only a fraction of what will soon lie in store for me if I continue to read “Drifting Classroom”.  (SPOILER) I have more-or-less read up to the end of the third volume or so, where, having encountered and failed to defeat the giant mutant insect monster (shown above), the children agree to posse up and hunt it down in order to avenge those it ate when it attacked the school.

 

So my horror is apparently just beginning.

 

And that’s saying something, with how bizarre and disturbing even the first major alien threat is on its own, with its realistically shiny, chitinous shell, its too-many legs and its mouthful of mammalian sharp teeth, all of which combine to make it thoroughly alien, yet just familiar enough to show us just how badly it was warped.

 

All I can say is, do not come into this series expecting the happiest of endings.  Many people, especially children, die in the first three volumes alone and, with a total of 824 people in the school to feed and contend with, you just know no all of them are going to survive.

 

I know it’s going to be horrible, but I just can’t look away.  It’s like listening to right-wing radio, in that way.

 

One final word of note: this being an older series, there may occasionally be some outdated ways of thinking on display, most notably in the form of a statement from resident genius Gamo, who claims that “females allow their emotions to impede their logic, and are better off giving birth and raising children”.

 

Needless to say, as horrifying as this is, it is by far one of the least horrifying things you will find if you pick up this series.