Grimoire of Zero

Episode 7

After last episode's downer ending, Grimoire of Zero moves into slightly darker territory this week, though the results are decidedly mixed. While I appreciate GoZ attempting to dig into the prejudice of its world and its effect on Mercenary as a character, the actual end product is just as uneven and lackluster as so many of the episodes that have come before it. This is largely due to the show's muddy sense of morality, not to mention that a solid 50% of the episode feels like a retread of things we've covered before.

It's the morals that bug me the most though, namely in how the beastfallen are depicted in this society. As a general concept, the beastfallen are one of the few factors that helps Grimoire of Zero stand out from other fantasy anime, but the show just isn't doing anything interesting with them. Apart from Merc himself, every single beastfallen we've met so far is just as traitorous, bloodthirsty, and deceitful as their stereotypes would have us believe. I feel like the show wants us to empathize with how Mercenary is being misjudged and mistreated by the bartender and her father this week, but instead I can't help but notice that a lot of this world's prejudice against beastfallen seems justified. Not only do they seem universally untrustworthy, but they also fall into unpredictable bouts of man-eating rage.

Contrast this to the witches of this world: some of them are selfish, some of them are kind, some are martyrs, and some are villains. The sampling of this group we've been given is more complex and nuanced than the beastfallen by a huge margin. As far as we've seen, Mercenary is the exception to the rule, and even though the ending of this episode hints that Mister Wolf might have more going on than we suspect, it feels awfully late to start humanizing the only other beastfallen who's been given any kind of character development. I almost feel like this is an attempt to make the world of GoZ more gritty and complex, by showing how people will feed into the stereotypes that define them and behave accordingly, but this is not Zootopia. GoZ simply hasn't taken the time to develop any of those ideas beyond basic subtext. Instead of making the world more complex, the writing surrounding the beastfallen only makes things more simplistic.

It also doesn't help that this whole episode feels like a waste of time, offering nothing new by way of storytelling or characterization until the final minutes of the episode. The whole plot with Mercenary befriending the tavern girl is predictable and trite, only serving to repeat ideas we already know. “Humans can be cruel.” “Beastfallen can be cruel.” “Beastfallen and humans don't get along.” “Beastfallen sometimes eat people's loved ones, which is a completely rational thing to be afraid of.” Was there a point to restating any of these ideas? A part of me hopes that this tavern family comes back, so the amount of time spent on their story can retroactively be justified. Another part of me hopes they never show up again, because Grimoire of Zero has proven repeatedly that any characters outside its core duo of Mercenary and Zero will fail to be interesting.

Speaking of failing to be interesting, we get an update on Albus's story, though it doesn't add up to much. He resists Thirteen's Faustian dealings, which only serves to set up Thirteen and Zero's fight, which is really just a fake-out to stall for more time as Mercenary gets into his own brawl with Mister Wolf and a band of witches. This Mercenary fight is the best part of the episode, because things finally start happening. In quick succession, we see the bloody result of Zero and Mercenary's magical bond, we watch as Mercenary almost devours a young woman alive, and then even Mister Wolf finds a way to work himself into the plot, revealing that somebody has charged him with protecting Solena's granddaughter. All of these things are genuinely interesting turns, and I am curious to see how they develop in the coming weeks, but it also speaks to how weak the rest of this entry is that every good thing about it occurs in episode's last five minutes.

Rating: C

Grimoire of Zero is currently streaming on Amazon's Anime Strike.

James is an English teacher who has loved anime his entire life, and he spends way too much time on Twitter and his blog.