Black Clover

Episode 17

There's a lot about Black Clover that makes it a frustrating contender for "next big thing" status. Most of its emotional beats are ripped from better Shonen Jump series, and the anime just comes across as flat and dull 90% of the time. But even then there are moments where I at least want to like this show. Even if its ambitions are to follow the generic Jump formula, I see potential for a well-executed version of said formula.

"Potential" is the operative word there.

With the Lotus battle over, it's time for the Black Bulls to regroup with the Golden Dawns and help them out in their fight with Mars, the remaining combatant from the Diamond Kingdom. I think underdog power fantasies are one of the easiest and most reliable ways you can make a shonen series fun and engaging, and that seems to be the goal here as Klaus freaks out at the idea of Asta and friends succeeding where he and his squad could not. The main emotional through-line remains between Asta and Yuno, as the episode is propped up by a flashback motif telling the story of a spar they had as kids that climaxes with Asta's surprise victory, coinciding with his present-day victory against Mars. There's a lot of effort to admire here as the show attempts to hit all these themes and tie them together in an elegant fashion, but of course, Black Clover still really struggles to make it work in the end.

This is a doozy of an episode to critique, because it's such an onslaught of everything good and bad about the series at once. Up front, this is clearly the episode where Studio Pierrot put their best animators to work, because it's a million times more crazy and energetic than anything we've seen in this arc so far. The animation is very expressive as the fighters dart from attack to attack, but then again they also kind of look like fish out of water, flopping around in the air. It's very impressive-looking, surely aiming to end up on people's "best of" sakuga compilations, but it's also violently undercut by the excessive use of CGI. The villain, Mars, specializes in diamond magic, and while I'm tempted to say the use of computer graphics is appropriate for inorganic rocks, I still ultimately hate how it looks.

The themes of never giving up, friendship, rivalry, etc. are all paths that have been charted so thoroughly that it's a wonder they can still fall apart as easily as they do in Black Clover's hands. With an episode this full of fervor and passion, it would be nice if that fire could elevate the writing, but I continue to find the character arcs confusing. Asta's use of anti-magic is the main issue, since it seems to end just about any fight in only one or two blows. I was warned that this was going to be the case with this show, and now it's really becoming a problem. You can have strong heroes who win all the time and make it fun (or even commentative, like in One-Punch Man), but it's so at odds with what I was enjoying about the show from the beginning, which was that Asta's an annoying kid who has to prove others wrong with passion and hard work. This episode tries to go hard on the "I'm going to be the Wizard King!" stuff, but it feels so irrelevant to the actual challenges our main character faces. Even I, a One Piece superfan, suddenly realize how much I've taken Eiichiro Oda's approach to these same scenes for granted. Can a shonen series be a power fantasy but also have a message about effort and willpower? Yes, but Black Clover is trying to have its cake and eat it too by approaching all shonen themes at once, and it ends up saying nothing at all as a result.

And even after all that, I can't hate this episode. When you see Asta cheering for victory after a fight well fought while the rockin' ending theme bleeds into the background, I still feel a smidge of infectious excitement. I can see why an author would want to make a moment like this work, as been-there-done-that as it is in theory, and as far as anime adaptation goes, there's some fantastic stuff going on this week. I'm also looking forward to learning more about these villains, since even Mars seems to have some kind of backstory (even if what we know so far is literally just Zabuza from Naruto), making me think these Diamond Kingdom characters might stick around a little bit longer. I'm up for more of them.

This episode is an awkward smorgasbord, offering electric excitement and gobsmackingly vapid nothingness at the same time. Once again, I find things to like and character interactions I want to see more of, but the show's total lack of cohesion is mind-boggling. I've been patient with this series, but for better or worse this Dungeon Exploration arc is the point where I lost some faith. I'm a fan of the shonen basics, and I had no idea you could botch them this badly.

Rating: B-

Black Clover is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Sam Leach records about One Piece for The One Piece Podcast and you can find him on Twitter @LuckyChainsaw