Mendacious

A contrived world and people

On the Crunchyroll comments and elsewhere Black Bullet has been favorably compared to Attack on Titan! Other than for the basic premise of a people under siege from something malevolent there is little similarity in these two shows. Attack on Titan! is an exceptional series and Black Bullet is not.

Before criticizing Black Bullet into oblivion first lets cover its good points. It is of a reasonably good production value. Artwork, sound, voice acting and music are good but not exceptional. There is one or two memorable characters and a few plot twists, if heavily handled ones.

WARNING FEW MINOR SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT!

Now the descent into oblivion. The world of Black Bullet is horribly contrived. In the opening scene of the first episode we catch a glimpse of our collapsing world. In a damaged Tokyo a mass of frightened people huddle in a stadium while battle rages in the skies. A giant monster falls from the clouds killing many of those people. Fast forward ten years on to the present and we learn that Tokyo has become a giant ghetto. Humanity has lost control of most of their planets surface and now hides behind giant monoliths surrounding various cities from monsters called Gastrea. The Gastrea sole purpose seems to be to kill humans. It would be reasonable to expect that the world would be radically changed from the one we know well. Only it isn't. Nothing about the conditions of peoples lives seem to have changed at all. Your average Japanese citizen continues to eat a rich well balanced diet, dresses stylishly, drives nice shiny contemporary looking cars on tarmac roads between lots of big nice new skyscrapers. The trains run on time, the airports continue to operate, nothing is any different after the cataclysm than before it.

Varanium is a special metal that the gastrea have an adverse reaction to. The black bullets our protagonist use are made form it. Now although the government have more than enough varanium to construct multiple mountain sized monoliths around their cities, they don't have enough of the to mass produce varanium bullets for their police officers. Furthermore the police continue to carry the same small pistols and body armor and squad cars that they did before the arrival of the gastrea. Black Bullet has very many of these kinds of inconsistencies that give the whole series an absurd contrived feel where everything exists solely as instruments for protagonist's story.

Can a contrived world have genuine characters? Maybe (I have yet to see one) but it doesn't happen in Black Bullet. The protagonist Rentarō Satomi is another pretty flat and forgettable male. He is far from the worst I have seen though. During the arrival of the gastrea he lost his folks. Later he was attacked by one of the Gastreas and torn to bits. The good doctor Sumire Muroto used advanced cybernetic technology to put him back together again with added benefit that his new varanium implants that make him abnormally strong - at least when it is convenient for the story – otherwise he is no stronger than your average human. I wonder if the gastrea that ripped his leg off also took his reproductive organs, it would explain a lot if it did.

Now even though the government or corporations having invested in a huge way in these varanium cybernetic implants, what does it do with the people bearing them? Turn them into front line shock troops in the fight against the gastrea. No, it makes them civil officers. These civil officers seem to spend most of their time upholding the rule of law in the safety of the city. Their concerns are of a legal, social and economic nature that are just ridiculous in such a setting. In such a world the collective of humanity would only have one concern and only one concern and that's the total destruction of the gastrea and reclamation of their land and control of the planet, nothing else. This series seems to advocate or ridicule – I have not decided which - the normalization of extreme passivity. The Japanese army is still called the defense forces even though the world has changed so as to render this continuing anti-militant ideal a practical impossibility.

What of the supporting characters. Well the males fall into one of two narrow categories good guys and villains. The good guys are all pretty stereotypical tall handsome young adults with friendly casual personalities. They are all bland and inoffensive. The villains can be identified the second they appear as they all tick all the boxes of the villainous caricature: wear strange out fits that cover the faces, mustaches and monocles, evil sneary smirky faces, personality traits such as: creapy, thuggish, arrogant, superior, power seeking, psychotic, violent etc. There are no surprises to be found in the characters here, they all conform to the archetype to which they belong.

Sōgen Saitake is one of these bad guys and is called a 'dictator' by Rentarō Satomi before we even see him so we know he is going to be a bad guy. He wants to place a giant rail cannon on the moon so they can destroy the gastrea around the planet. It is the only known thing that can destroy a super class five gastrea and they presently keep it in gastrea controlled territory undefended and with no ammunition. Seitenshi the idealist is suddenly worried that our evil dictator might use this cannon to unduly influence other nations, shock horror. It would seem that she is quite prepared to risk the destruction of her own people in order to prevent the possible reemergence of hostile expansionary militarism within Japan.

Then there are the females. None of them are villains, they are all on the morally correct side of things and of course they all like and often love the protagonist. Well I suppose there is one slight exception to this but I won't give it away. Doctor Sumire Muroto is by far the most memorable of all them due to her witty and cynical banter. Unfortunately Her role in the story is limited to discussion with Rentarō Satomi and she never actually proactively does anything. I was hoping that Rentarō Satomi would try hitting on her but no dice.

Seitenshi is the ruler of Tokyo. I have no idea how she got that job. Apparently she is an idealist, one who has no original ideas. Besides parroting the nondiscrimination doctrine of a bygone era that is.

Then we come to the majority of our female cast the cursed children. They are all tens years old or less. They were born after the arrival of the gastrea and somehow the gastrea's biology got mixed with theirs giving them super strength and agility and resistance to disease and red eyes. However this also considerably shortens their life spans causing them to die at an early age. For some unexplained reason many of Tokyo's citizens have developed a deep hatred of the cursed children. The cursed children are physically very strong but emotionally broken n large part due to their social segregation. No meaningful reason is put forward for why this is the case and instead it is used to depict many of Tokyo's citizens as inherently and irrationally intolerant of difference and discriminatory. This makes little sense and is a clumsy attempt to wring outrage and sympathy out of the viewer.

Enju is a curse child and Rentarō Satomi's partner. She behaves as a typical ten year old might under such circumstances. It is a little strange the Rentarō Satomi on one hand has no problem walking her into battles but on the other treats her as his younger sister and professes to care for her well being.

You have to hand it to the people of this world. They might have lost virtually all of their land to hostile monsters but they have managed to hold on to their capitalism and democracy as well.

My recommendation would be to go an watch Attack on Titan! Instead of this.