LOVELESS

DESCRIPTION

CAST

MANGA FantasyLOVELESS
SPECIAL ComedyLoveless Specials

REVIEWS

• 

  TheRealKyuubey

  10/100
  Four out of five doctors recommend Loveless for cases of extreme insomnia.

  At only twelve years old, Ritsuka Aoyagi has already gone through enough trauma for one lifetime. Two years prior, his older brother Seimei was mysteriously killed, inflicting a sudden case of amnesia on Ritsuka that changed his personality dramatically, but even worse, Seimei’s death left Ritsuka alone to deal with their mentally ill and chronically abusive mother. Immediately upon moving to a new school to finish out his elementary years, he is set upon by countless odd individuals... The highlights of whom include a tall, busty pink-haired girl with the brains of a toddler who falls in love with him at first sight and refuses to leave him alone, and a cold, twenty year old man named Soubi who claims to have known Seimei, and now considers himself Ritsuka’s property. Before Ritsuka can sort any of these bizarre characters out, he and Soubi are attacked by other pairs who are bent on fighting them... But why? What won’t Soubi tell him about the organization behind it all? And what does any of this have to do with his late brother?

  Also everybody has cat ears until they have sex.

  Loveless was produced by JC Staff, and it’s pretty clear from first glance that it wasn’t very high on their list of priorities. The budget was obviously bare bones, and while it doesn’t look outright terrible, it’s immediately apparent that they were working under limited resources. Director Yuu Kou, who spent his career on storyboards and directing standalone episodes for other peoples’ projects, does his best to compensate for this, but Loveless is the only major directing credit to his name outside of Uta no Prince-sama, and his lack of experience in leading a project does seem to have hindered him. Key frames drag on for just a second too long, full body movement is stiff and often repetitive, he abuses facial close-ups in the early episodes especially, and while everyone does stay on model as far as I could tell, there’s nothing visually stimulating about this show. The color palette is consistently dull and dreary, with washed out environments and bland backgrounds that could have worked as a stylistic choice to accentuate Ritsuka’s depression, but I don’t think that was the point, it feels more like the lifeless backgrounds were an afterthought.

  Of course the character designs aren’t much better. Just about every character in this show looks bland and generic in the worst way possible, like they were assembled from the unused scrapped concepts lying around the cutting room floors of so many better anime. Soubi looks like your stereotypical cold and emotionless dude with long white hair, only since he’s not a villain, he’s drawn with empty eyes and a cocky smile. Just call him bishounen Sephiroth. Ritsuka looks unnervingly like the typical yaoi version of a shonen protagonist... You’ve got the spiky hair, but you’ve also got the sad eyes and scrawny twink frame where even if he wasn’t so much smaller and younger than Soubi, you could tell instantly who was intended to be the bottom. They both look so generic they could be from ANY yaoi series. The only spot of brightness in the entire series is the pink catgirl Yuiko, whose contrast with the world around her actually does more harm than good. She does not stand out in an appealing way, looking way too old to be in Ritsuka’s grade, and having a strikingly ugly hair style that does not match her personality.

  The music is fine... It’s generic for the most part, but it’s listenable enough. The only standout piece is a fairly catchy italian-style tune, which is pretty cool up until the overplay sets in and you realize you’ve heard it about a dozen times. I don’t have a lot to say about the score, but lord have I been itching to talk about the English dub. Now, if you’re looking this series up on Behindthevoiceactors.com, which is ordinarily a very valuable resource, the English language actors are myteriously unlisted. They don’t have fake names or anything, they’re just not there, like the dub doesn’t exist. You’ll get a list of names if you look up the series on Wikipedia, but only ANN offers the full story here. Licensed for a US release by Media Blasters, the production of the dub fell upon Swirl Recordings & Film Inc, and if you’ve heard of that company before today, then you watch too much hentai and belong in horny jail. Yes, the company behind the Loveless dub was a porn company. The only non-hentai titles this company has ever dubbed were Loveless and a handful of Urusei Yatsura movies. The ADR director was a woman named Shannon Settlemyre, a Swirl staple, and she also voiced several characters, including Yuiko, who she plays with a whiny, high-pitched falsetto that will split the fuck out of your ears.

  The entire cast are either career porn actors or no-names who never appeared in anything else. The weirdest thing about this dub in spite of that is, despite everything I just mentioned, it isn’t half bad... Not great, but somewhere between mediocre and good. Say what you want about porn actors, but they have the enthusiasm to deliver their lines properly, if not the talent to convey emotion or subtlety. Hey, I have a soft spot for over-acting, I’m not about to complain.The only cast member who had an actual career outside of dubbing porn was Marc Matney, who voiced in several OVAs in the nineties before coming back in the late 2000s and early 2010s to appear in a handful of foreign shovelware knock-offs of such movies as Brave and The Fantastic Mr. Fox. He has a minor role, but he brings his A game to it. The lead role is played by Ashley Thrill, no I am not sure if that’s her real name, and she plays him kind of like a brooding, emo Naruto. She does the angst and shonen screaming well, but she makes his misanthropic ramblings sound downright pathetic. Anthony Lawson sounds a little better as Soubi at first, he definitely has a deep and seductive delivery, but you realize pretty quickly how one-dimensional and one-note his performance is. Compared to Black Butler, Brina Palencia and J Michael Tatum gave much more depth to a very similar pair of characters. It’s a surprisingly okay dub, not as bad as I expected, but I’d still rather recommend the sub.

  So I’ve watched a ton of anime in my life. Scrolling through any of my lists and can be a daunting task, because there’s no real consistency to what I keep putting myself through. The only kinds of anime I try to stay away from are hentai and anything that requires a massive time commitment... I would rather watch a dozen thirteen episode anime of varying levels of quality than one good 300+ episode series. I’ve seen the wholesome and the debaucherous, the critically acclaimed and the critically reviled, the exciting and the boring, the manly and the girly... And unlike most insecure straight dudes, I have dabbled in yaoi from time to time. I don’t know, maybe I’m more willing to walk on the queer side because I’m asexual, and I’m technically an outsider to both gay and straight material? Whatever the case, I’ve found gems in every genre of entertainment that I’ve dived into, and shonen ai is no exception. I loved Yuri on Ice for its depiction of a healthy queer romance, even if it stayed a bit too safe for my liking. They should have kissed, damn it! I also loved Love Stage because it’s legitimately one of the funniest anime I’ve ever seen, yaoi or otherwise.

  Having said that, yaoi does have some reoccurring issues, like any other genre. One that it kind of shares with the yuri genre(to varying degrees, of course) is the element of sexual assault. A romance in a yaoi story... And, to a lesser extent, in a yuri story... Rarely ever begins on a purely consensual note. There can just be unsolicited kissing, like Citrus and Bloom Into You. Or, it can be more severe, which is far more common in yaoi. Like, one of my favorite things about Love Stage is how the assault in that series is handled. There’s an attempt made, but rather than transitioning into a genuine sex scene like most yaoi would, t’s interrupted before it can go too far. From then on it’s treated like a terrible thing to do to someone, and the culprit genuinely feels remorseful for his actions and spends the rest of the series going above and beyond to redeem himself for them. It’s some genuinely compelling stuff, but that still leaves one question unanswered... Why do we need assault to happen in LGBT stories in the first place? Why is there so much non-consensual content in anime that revolve around queer romance?

  That being said, I did not have the best expectations coming into Loveless. It’s a property that I’ve always known for its reputation... In most anime friendly spaces that I’ve been to, there were young female fans of this series. I mentioned its name at a trivia game I was hosting at a convention, and there was an audible gasp from a tween in the front row. I went to a smaller venue for a mini-con at a mall FYE, and the girls hosting had their own trivia game featuring no less than five Loveless related questions. I had heard about the cat ears... That weird gimmick where you lose your cat features when you lose your virginity... And I had heard that the central romance was not only extremely problematic, being between a twelve year old catboy and a twenty year old pedophile, but also extremely popular, for distressingly the same reasons. I’ve always kind of seen it as one of the big yaoi titles, and since I haven’t reviewed a yaoi OR a yuri anime in quite some time, I decided that I was going to bite the bullet and watch this show at some point during my reviewing comeback. I was expecting it to creep me out... I was expecting it to piss me off... I was expecting it to offend me. I was even allowing the possibility for a pleasant surprise, like it had some redeeming qualities I’d be surprised to find. I was not expecting it to bore me the fuck to sleep.

  For a little background, Loveless is based on a manga that’s still ongoing to this day, which makes the property exactly twenty years old. And yet, in that time, they’ve only released 13 volumes. At the time the anime began production, it had been two years since the manga’s debut, and there were only four manga volumes out... I know the math doesn’t add up, publication apparently slowed down over time... So the anime was forced to make do with nothing but the early volumes. There are ways they could have spun this... Namely, just make something up and fill in the holes in the story... Instead, the series just ends abruptly in the middle of the story, not unlike Sweet Blue Flowers. You’re supposed to read the manga to see what happens next, but for the life of me, I can’t understand why anybody would care. I guess I kind of feel sympathetic for Ritsuka... Losing a loved one is always hard, especially someone as close as a sibling, at such a tender young age... But as morose as he acts, his woeful soliloquizing never genuinely come across as grief-related, at least not to me. It just sounds like bored, misanthropic ennui.

  On top of that, I don’t know jack shit about his brother. Sure, Tadashi’s death in Big Hero Six was predictable as all hell, but I spent enough time with him to know he was a genuinely nice guy who didn’t deserve it. What was Seimei like? Any relation to Uke? Did he defend Ritsuka against their mother? Or was it Ritsuka’s transformation after Seimei’s death that drove her mad? Speaking of Seimei, you never learn what the point behind all these battles is, and like what happened to Seimei, I kind of don’t care, because the action isn’t that exciting or fun. Characters stand around and announce their team names and attack names in a black subspace which had to have saved the animators a ton of money, and I guess that kind of translates to the magical effects of the attacks everyone’s using, but it all still feels generic and, well, plastic. It never feels like anything is at stake in these fights, and I never felt suspenseful over the results. What the hell are these people fighting for? Don’t get me wrong, I WANT to root for the good guys when bad guys are coming after them, but at some point you have to give me some fucking explanation as to why they’re in this predicament.

  The narrative is also bloated with too many unnecessary characters, which is detrimental to an anime whose main characters I didn’t even particularly care for. I didn’t give a shit about the 23 year old virgin teacher who bawled like a baby in the middle of class because a student repeated a phrase Soubi told her off with. I actively hate the annoying pink haired girl who acts consistently infantile and is in love with Ritsuka for no reason other than his main character status. There is a character in this show, I swear I’m not exaggerating, whose entire identity revolves around the fact that the pink haired girl lied to him when rejecting his confession, and apparently that’s all he needs to be a part of Ritsuka’s friend group. “She won’t date me because I’m short? But you’re also short!” He says to his new lifelong friend. The couples that Ritsuka and Soubi fight are consenting adults who the narrative allows to be intimate, making them marginally more interesting than Ritsuka and Soubi. The standouts are probably the lesbian couple in the second half, whom even the story itself seems more invested in for a time. Soubi has a blonde friend I didn’t hate, but I can’t remember a thing about him. There’s a therapist who gave off future badguy vibes.

  I think that’s all the characters, and I don’t know if there’s anything more to say about this show, but you know what? It’s possible I’ve forgotten some stuff. I binged the first ten episodes monday, then I watched the final two episodes tuesday morning. I then watched the final two episodes again later that night before writing the first half of this review, because I was having trouble staying awake through it previously. I didn’t even notice until my second time through that episode eleven is a Rashomon homage. I’m honestly not confident in saying, from my perspective right now on this muggy wednesday night, that I even remember 20% of this series, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if I’ve forgotten the entire damn thing by the thursday evening that this review will likely be uploaded. Guys, I’m sorry, this is not one of my better efforts. I hated this series, and while I have no intention of kink-shaming anyone or telling the entire fujoshi fanbase what kind of fantasies they can or can't indulge in, I just want to put this series past me.

  Loveless is available from Mediablasters on a DVD that’s called the “Vocal collection,” I do not know what that means, but the DVD is a liar because it says ‘2-disk,’ when it’s actually a 3 disk set. The original manga is available from Viz Media.

  One of the main reasons I reviewed Loveless was because I thought, for better or worse, at least it would be more interesting than Gravitation. Now that I’ve reached the end, I’m pretty sure I chose wrong. I’m guessing the story is a lot more fleshed out and well-executed in the manga, but I’m also willing to bet Soubi eventually takes Ritsuka’s cat ears in the manga, so yeah, I’m happy to just take the L and call things off right here. Loveless is an unfocused clusterfuck of ideas that could have been pretty cool in the hands of a better writer, who was able to present them in a way where there was something more compelling driving the story than just the will-they-won’t-they dynamic between an adult and a child. I’ll give them credit that sexual assault was avoided for the most part, but the way Soubi acts in some scenes is still super uncomfortable, like when he tries to drag Ritsuka away from his friends and teacher by the wrist. There’s some forced kissing, but it’s at around a Say I love You level, which isn’t great but it could be worse. Actually, you know what? The leads in Say I Love You were closer in age, this IS worse. Jesus Christ, Citrus gets shit on for shipping a couple of step-sisters who weren’t even raised together, but THIS pedo shit is considered a timeless masterpiece by an entire demographic?

  I give Loveless a 1/10.

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