Review: Guilty Crown

If you look at this and decide you don’t want to read it, then scroll down and play the track. It’ll almost certainly be worth your time.

Not every show is universally good or bad. Search the internet hard enough and you can find good and bad reviews for pretty much any show. One of the more divisive shows out there is Guilty Crown, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi show, based on a unassuming boy called Shu who gains the power of the king. Here’s my review.

Background

10 years ago a virus swept across Japan. The event known as Lost Christmas crippled the country, forcing it to take a huge amount of foreign aid and to be run by a undemocratically selected government called the GHQ. Even 10 years on after the incident, the government shows no signs of moving on or helping to completely eradicated the virus. Our main characters are Shu, a socially awkward student and Inori, a singer of the (now real) band Egoist and member of terrorist/liberation group, ‘Funeral Parlour’. After school, Shu goes to an abandoned military building to work on videos that he creates. On one occasion he finds that Inori has taken shelter there after stealing an important item for Funeral Parlour, and after a brief introduction and discussion she is found and taken away by the military. Shu is, unexpectedly left with the item that Inori stole and takes it upon himself to get it to the people that want it. After meeting some of the other important characters in the story, most notably Gai, the leader of Funeral Parlour, the ‘antibodies’ (government secret police types), go after a group of innocent citizens in an attempt to find the vial that was stolen by Inori. Funeral Parlour go after them to save Inori, with Shu tagging along. In an attempt to show he isn’t always a coward, Shu, who still has the vial, runs out to protect Inori who has been injured. In the gun fire, the vial breaks and Shu absorbs the power of the King, allowing him to pull out people’s voids (objects of varying usefulness that reflect what’s in a persons heart). He pulls out Inori’s void which is an incredible sword, and defeats all of the mechs.

He makes quite the scene when draws Inori’s void. Call it their connection.

Plot

The first half of the story follows Shu, Inori and Gai as they fight against the antibodies and the government seemingly with the view of freeing Japan from oppression. In a lot of ways up until episode 12 we are getting an introduction to Guilty Crown. This is the time used to develop Shu and Inori’s relationship, find out more about Shu’s power and Shu and Gai’s connected past. Though the real point of the story doesn’t develop until the final 2 or 3 episodes of the arc, the screen time up until that point is used excellently. While it is fair to say that this is both character and plot development time, the way the show gets through this is by no means dull. For example, in episode 4, the real aim of the episode is develop the relationship of Shu and Inori: in terms of episode plot though Funeral Parlour are attempting to free Kenji, a high security prisoner, to gain access to his void for Shu. For much of the plot the action scenes, in truth, aren’t really necessary, but the way in which the story is written makes them feel like they are.

Guilty Crown Episode 17 Revolution: Exodus

As I said in my last post I’m a big fan of this show, so when I say if you were to watch a lot of episodes and think the show looked interesting, you can appreciate that there’s no attempt at objectivity there. With that same mentality I’d say of all the episodes throughout the series, if there was one to drag people in, I think it would episode 17: Exodus. It’s a busy episode in as much as a lot of plot points are covered, but I can’t say it feels rushed. It’s also an episode with a huge shock, which, apparently, is one of the reasons the show is so divisive but you know where I’m coming from and if you want a negative review, the internet is a big place. Shall I just get on with it?

Slowly but surely, the only person left for Shu is Inori.

The episode continues from Shu’s revelation in episode 16 that the destruction of a person’s void causes their death. Instead of going into himself and stopping the use of voids, Shu gets even harsher on the students. In a conversation with Inori in their oasis paradise type thing (nope, not even I can accept that that place should be in the middle of the school), she reveals that she thinks she attacked Arisa. Think being the optimum word here as she lost consciousness just as the ceiling collapsed in gym at the end of the last episode, only to reawaken with blood on her hands, facing Arisa in the recording station.

Guilty Crown, Episode 10 Degeneracy: Retraction

I’m not going to lie, I’m massively excited to be writing about Guilty Crown. At the risk of alienating a lot of my readership, it’s a show I really love and as a result over the next week or so you’ll probably get two or three more Guilty Crown themed posts.

Episode 10 of the show sees the first arc of the story begin to head towards it’s climax. After the events with Jun and Yahiro in the previous episode, Shu is having hallucinations about people getting infected with the apocalypse virus which leads Funeral Parlour’s mission to break a convey to fail.

Jun’s death in episode 9 set’s up the following episodes plot fantastically

This sets of the chain of events that cause all the problems and allows for the fantastic resolution throughout the rest of the episode. After Shu refuses to be part of Funeral Parlour any more, he returns to his house to find Inori leaving. For the first time we’re given an insight into end game of the show: as Inori prepares to leave she offers Shu a new song, but in another hallucination he sees another girl covered in the Apocalypse Virus in Inori’s place, causing him to lash out at her, destroying the song disk. Its just one of the many examples of the writers dropping small hooks to keep the viewer involved, and let me say it completely worked for me.