HAMETSU NO OUKOKU

DESCRIPTION

CAST

MANGA ActionHametsu no Oukoku

REVIEWS

• 

  jahver

  10/100
  Marilyn Manson Now Going Door-to-Door Trying to Shock People

  I’ll be the first to admit I am an inconsistent writer. My life is a constant barrage of new tasks and distractions that keeps me from accomplishing, well, pretty much everything I set my mind to. Things get especially difficult to manage around the holiday season but here I am, back in the game, because over the past 13 or so weeks I’ve been subjected to one of the most indefensibly piss-poor, psychologically agitating pieces of “art” I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Hametsu no Whatever, Who Actually Gives a Shit About the Title of This Garbage is the rare kind of complete and utter disaster that only surfaces once every few years, whenever anime studios have to really start scraping the bottom of the barrel for content. It single-handedly snapped me out of my depressive stupor because of how eye-openingly bad it was. It even inspired me, in a way, to never produce anything on this level of quality, lest I never call myself an artist again in my life. I’ve started writing and illustrating again thanks to Hametsu, and I at least owe it or the author of the webcomic or the staff behind the adaptation a bit of thanks by trying to interpret this work of pure schizophrenia before I inevitably sink back into the oblivion of daily apathy.
  Hametsu is an anime where not a single aspect of it is pleasant or inviting. It shocks you in with a bleak, cynical first episode full of rape, slavery, genocide, and just about every one of humanity’s worse vices before shifting gears and psychotically jumping between genres every single episode like an ADHD kid who managed to ingest a red skittle and keeps trying to entertain himself with whatever’s around him. We go from EXTREMELY fucking edgy revenge fantasies where characters unironically say stuff like “I don’t even feel like raping you so I’ll just kill you” that sounds more like an Anal Cunt song title than real dialogue while standing waist-deep in pools of blood rife with faux-philosophical melodrama about how “humanity is…LE BAD”, to corny shoujo shenanigans where the unbearably annoying main girl fawns over the edgelord bishounen MC and gets scared by a spider or something and turns into a chibi while silly comedic music plays. It genuinely feels like a series that was on the brink of getting axed every chapter. At a certain point I should’ve discerned that there was nothing of value on display here and moved on, but it’s hard to look away from a trainwreck.
  From the very first episode, Hametsu wants you to know that this is a serious show. The comically evil and petty human emperor genocides every witch on the planet because modern technology has made magic obsolete (the emperor actually says “the fruit of our wisdom, the smartphone” is superior to fucking magic that can level cities) and sexually assaults Adonis’ mentor/love interest in front of him before shooting her in the head while thousands of people salivate like animals. Adonis is then placed into stasis (for some reason, they never really explain this brilliant little moment of bad writing) to let his hatred marinate for a few years until he’s ready to kill his way to the emperor. Want to understand the complex mechanisms at play that led to all of this happening? It’s simple, really. The queen is actually a time-traveling witch who has the power to mind control everyone on earth except for other witches, who are all female and reproduce asexually using a magic tree on the moon, and the other female MC is a reincarnation of her from the future who has the same magic power as her or something according to the author Yoruhashi’s previous work (which is untranslated so I’m doing my best to try and interpret it using what meager Japanese I know) so she decides to mind control the king and everyone under her rule into hating witches so she can wipe them all out and end any competition to her reign, and also the anti-witch technology is giving everyone super cancer.
  Got all that? Good, because after Pinkshit (I’m not even going to dignify this character by calling her by name, you’ll learn why later) manages to execute a prison break by stealing the controls from a wildly out of place caricature of a transsexual, Adonis breaks out and decides that instead of killing the emperor, he’d rather cause 9/11 2 and gun down thousands of innocent people (children included) onscreen because they’re guilty by association. From there, the show descends into misery porn and over the top wangst for the next 5 or so episodes. They go to the moon, all the witches want to revive Adonis’ mentor and kill him, he summons the humans to kill them instead and revives Pinkshit (an annoying nag he’s known for all of a day), kills a guy named Yamato who wants to fuck his sister or something, burns down the magic witch tree and leaves. Is this Alpha Male behavior or blatant stupidity? Also, remember the king? The queen brainwashes him into an heroing by throwing himself off a building because he got super cancer from the anti-witch technology. He’s not important after all. What is important, however, is her becoming an Idol of all things, because it wouldn’t be a product of the absolute dregs of the anime industry in 2023 without idolshit being forced in even when it makes zero sense in-universe. Now the two are suddenly back on earth and the show takes a few episodes to devolve into a bunch of thinly-connected shoujo-lite moments where Pinkshit and Adonis are radically different characters out of nowhere and there’s an unfunny quip or silly moment every 5 seconds.
  This is where the series’ two main issues become clear as day; firstly, it can’t commit to anything. The tone shifts around with little restraint in between episodes, sometimes multiple times within the span of 2 minutes. It introduces a dozen new characters every single episode and either kills them off before they can meaningfully grow or develop or blatantly writes them out of the story once the writer gets bored of whatever subplot they spawned from. Even Adonis’ revenge plot gets phased out halfway through the fucking anime. This is not how you write a compelling story; this is a teenager’s emotionally charged fanfiction you’d read on LiveJournal in 2006 where every character is based on someone from their high school.
  The second glaring issue of Hametsu is how unlikeable each and every character is. I don’t think Adonis requires or deserves an in-depth explanation; he’s a one-dimensional perpetually emo dipshit with zero critical thinking skills who can’t even seem to remember his own motivation. He gets his ass kicked in every single fight and only manages to win because of his tremendous plot armor. No one ever refutes his insane rhetoric outside the other worst character, Pinkshit, who is honest to God one of the most insufferable characters ever written. She is a walking woman moment; nearly every single line of dialogue from her is her whining and crying about how Adonis shouldn’t kill the enemy combatants who are literally trying to murder and/or enslave the both of them and their entire race at any given moment. She doesn’t shed any tears for the innocent people Adonis slaughtered earlier in the show, but she’s more than willing to slap him in the face and bitch him out for defending her from the never-ending onslaught of armed soldiers and cyborgs who want nothing more than to see them hanging and literally killed off the last members of her entire fucking race a few minutes ago. Pinkshit’s even more out of touch with reality than the guy who wants to commit mass murder, and she’s supposed to be the moral high ground of the anime. Every 5 seconds she’s whining about how “we can all still live in peace!” like a braindead hippie who reduces every single complex human thought process down to the simplest possible rationalization. Sure, she may have a point, this conflict is only arbitrary and would’ve been avoided altogether if anyone in this setting wasn’t staggeringly retarded, but just because every character is a slave to their own emotions perpetuating a totally pointless and dumb as fuck battle doesn’t mean we need a character pointing out what’s already obvious every single minute they’re onscreen as if that isn’t the most annoying thing a writer can do. I’m not sure if Pinkshit’s intentionally written to be out of touch because you can never be sure of anything with this show, but if she is it shows the author has only an incredibly shallow and cursory grasp on the concept of pacifism. Writing a character who is both naïve and likeable is admittedly difficult, and Yoruhashi decides to forgo that entirely by writing Pinkshit to be so comically stupid and braindead that any sense of likeability is automatically thrown out the window whenever she opens her hole. The only thing she really excels at is rabidly simping for Adonis and taking the brunt of his abuse, because pandering to the “I can fix him!” crowd is a guaranteed way to print money.
  Meanwhile, every other character in Hametsu is some kind of raving degenerate with no moral compass or a weird sex pervert. They’re all shallow, one-dimensional psychopaths. As a matter of fact I couldn’t tell you any of their names, but I can tell you what atrocities they engage in, because every character in Hametsu would feel right at home in the Dirlewanger Brigade. And the more savagery and inhumanity gets thrown in your face, the cheaper and emptier it starts to feel. There is no moral gray area here outside of Adonis; everything is presented in extremes. In Hametsu, you are either a good guy or a remorseless monster who will gladly inflict any type of suffering onto whoever you can when it’s convenient. The only in-between is Adonis, whose mass-murdering behavior gets portrayed more like a he’s just a tortured bad boy making a few mistakes rather than a victim warped into a mass murderer by his circumstances. He has no depth. If the story even bothered trying to explore his thought process and rather than trying to gloss over his atrocities, there’d be at least some semblance of humanity to him. But then his previously defined personality gets thrown out because Pinkshit’s intolerable idealism starts rubbing off on him. At the end of the day the only character I can say I thoroughly enjoyed watching onscreen was Shirousagi, the white guy with dreads and an absolutely baller hat who beats Adonis so hard he looks like he’s about to cry and gouges out Pinkshit’s eyes onscreen. What a Chad. He is exactly what he’s presented as, and in his case that’s alright because he’s a stone cold badass and the closest I came to actually rooting for a character in this entire anime. Hametsu is probably the only anime where a guy who looks like Brian Welch rips out a Mori Calliope clone’s eyes and then crushes them, so at the very least you can’t call it unoriginal.
  You’d think I’d at least have something good to say about Hametsu after I spent nearly 2000 words railing on it harder than a Thailand ladyboy, maybe some words of praise for the production quality of the anime? Woefully, there is none. Yokohama Animation Lab is just about the very bottom rung in the anime studio society; almost every project of theirs is rated a 6 or below on here, and that’s probably not an accurate gauge considering how many users wantonly hand out 10s to every anime they watch. The opening animation is probably where 99% of the show’s budget went, and if I’m being truthful it’s not that bad. The song (Kieru Made by Hana Hope) is far too pretty and refined for a show like this. It almost feels dishonest; I was expecting something more like Musashi Gundoh’s infamously deranged opening, that’s a clear and present indication of exactly what you’re about to watch, but Hametsu’s opening feels like it belongs to a much more refutable anime. And on that note, I can’t bring myself to praise its extremely shitty animation and presentation. I’m not sure what I expected considering the source material was almost entirely unknown outside Japan before the anime was announced, but this anime treats drag and drop animation like a fucking Olympic sport. Every fight is a slideshow where off-model characters slowly move across still frames and jitter around. There’s a scene in episode 11 where Pinkshit drops to the ground that’s utterly weightless, and she looks completely stiff. This scene was so ridiculous looking I had to pause the episode and get a drink to steel myself into finishing it. The anime was directed by School Days director Keitarou Motonaga, a guy who is infamous in this day and age for fundamentally not understanding the source material of the projects he directs (see: Digimon Adventure tri, an incredibly pretentious borderline fanfiction-tier movie series that almost killed the franchise in terms of animated projects).
  Hametsu is a show I can’t fathom anyone taking seriously, even the people behind it. The part of my mind that’s still trying to comprehend why this even exists can only rationalize it as being some kind of avant-garde parodic work. It is one of the few anime I’ve seen that goes from comically overblown edge and misanthropy to goofy preschool humor within the span of a minute every single episode. There’s a scene in episode 3 or so where Adonis brutally kills a bunch of soldiers onscreen and within 20 seconds or so it cuts to one of the villain generals chibified and dancing around while making stupid noises. That’s basically the thesis statement of this anime. Either nobody had any idea what they were doing behind the scenes, or they knew exactly what they were doing and none of us are intelligent enough to grasp this kind of cutting-edge satire.
  Either way, tl;dr: https://i.imgur.com/WYNwMyK.png

  Continue on AniList
• 

  lezvie

  20/100
  Promised "edgelord revenge", delivered sexism

  This review contain spoilers.

  This season featured three different edgelord anime, which is kinda uncommon. Berserk Gulattony ended up being far too generic from the start, while Ragna Crimson gave us an hour long first episode that was kinda weak. The third on our list, Kingdoms of Ruin, delievered a very impactful first episode that took everyones attention. But the hype made people overlook what was apparent in the very first episode: the show would rely on shock value to make you overlook everything else wrong with it.

  This anime follows a particular writing style i've seen popping for a while now in all kinds of media. It is the style of "Make EVERY episode memorable". You probably know this, as Jojo's Bizarre Adventure author Araki clearly said in his book that you should make every chapter end in a cliff hanger, so that the reader will be eager to know what happens next. This is not a bad philosophy per se, as Jojo's Bizarre Adventure is still one of the most succesful and memorable mangas (and anime) of all time. But i'd say you need to have talent in order to write a good story that manages to pace itself well while getting the reader's attention on every issue.

  Kingdoms of Ruin attempts this by creating the famous "impossible situation, oh my god, how will they solve this now?" type of cliffhanger. It is very bold, but still not bad, if you know what you are doing. What is bad is when you don't know how to pace everything, making your plot all over the place. The secret to good writing is a good balance between tension and relief. But Kingdoms of Ruin only thinks about stopping for a bit to breathe by half of its episodes. We go from "okay, our Main Character Adonis has seen his master being killed because of witch racism, now he wants revenge on the empire" to "mc hates every single being in this planet, the empire, its civillians, people who sufer by the hand of the empire and even the witches, and will kill every single one of them" in FOUR episodes.

  Yes, plot twist, the witches were alive, but, plot twist, they are also bad, but, plot twist, MC already knew that and decided to kill them all. Oh, and remember that the empire took over control of the WHOLE WORLD with its amazing scientific technology that emancipated humanity from those (b)Wiches? Forget that. There are other kingdoms. It is not a plot hole if you call it a plot twist, is it? The first half of this anime is plot twist after plot twist after plot twist, to the point that you don't believe in nothing you see anymore. You don't even know the MC's goal anymore. You just know that our angry boy will keep on bullying the pacifist girl that decided to follow him, the killing machine boy.

  Which leads us to the elephant in the room. One of the things that also was hinted on the first episode was how sexist this anime would be. I did say MC's master was killed in front of him, right. I didn't say though that she was humiliated with her powers blocked, stripped naked in front of thousands of people, and then killed. There is a common trope well documented by feminists called Women in the Refrigerator. It is a recurring trope in western comic books, named after what happened in a Green Lantern comic, in which the hero finds his girlfriend dead in the refrigerator, killed by the main villain. This serves as the ignition to his character growth in the comic. This theme happens all the time in media, with Barbara Gordon being shot on Killer Joke, or with Uncle Ben's death in Spyder Man, or even when Bruce Wayne's parents were killed. But feminists noticed the majority of cases are with the suffering - and sometimes sexual suffering - of women. Some times, the main purpose of the woman in the story was to be tortured, sexually abused and/or killed, all so the main character would go through this traumatic events and begin his growth in the story. In Kingdoms of Ruin, this is what Chloe's character is all about. We know almost nothing about her. Only that she was kind, charming, and a mother figure (or crush, it alternates between these two) to Adonis. There was no need to strip her naked before brutally killing her, but all of this suffering make a very strong reasoning for the MC's bloodlust, right. The same trope is used later in the show, though i won't spoil.

  The thing is... character growth isn't always the reasoning behind woman suffering in this show. Most of the time, is out of sheer shock value. There is a part where the witches are fighting some soldiers. This scene is a bloodbath on both sides, but while the women are visually cut in half, impaled, shot and every thing else, the soldiers (which are all man) are clad in armor, so their deaths, while also visually gory, feel like "ok, recruit B, C, and D just died". Yes, there is a lot of violence in the show, but it wants you to pay attention specifically on the violence towards women.

  Overall, kingdoms of ruin felt like it was written by a teenager incel that really hates women. But this teenager incel knows nothing about quality writing, so if you managed to finish it, you will still be asking yourself what is the plot about. Revenge? World Genocide? Clashing Kingdoms? Class Struggle? Multiverse? The plot is so much all over the place, it literally doesnt matter. It can be whatever the author wants it to, so long as a lot of woman are abused, enslaved and brutally killed. You don't have to notice how dogshit the animation looks sometimes, no. Instead look, the women here were enslaved because they created sentient sex robots that are so horny, this city can sell all of its women now, because that was the ONLY purpose of women here. You don't need to worry about the awlful pacing, direction, writing and plot holes, instead look at the plot twist of how those Kunoichi you hyped were killed off screen by the psychopath villain you thought was weak. It tries desperately keep you from noticing how bad it is. But honestly, it fails miserably. By the end, you can't help but wonder what you just watched, what was the point, what this is all about. BUT LOOK, SEASON FINALE CLIFFHANGER PLOT TWIST, YOU WON'T BELIVE WHAT WE ARE COOKING FOR THE SEASON 2

  Continue on AniList
• 

  oliveirafre

  78/100
  Tragic, exciting, horrifying...

  This review is extremely biased, because, having read (and loved) the manga, I was excited for this anime from the moment I saw its first episode airing, and god damn, I was right to be excited, this is great.
  What. A. Great. Adaptation. Seriously. It is beyond a faithful interpretation, the entire manga, with all its hard hitting moments are not only done justice to, they are also made so much better here!
  It's not your conventional story anti-hero or power-fantasy story. A better way to describe it would be something more akin to Gesellshaft Blume. The story isn't of a man who lost everything and simply wants revenge (though Adonis does love to say so, he clearly feels otherwise and his feelings do change over time, as we can see for the first time as he passes by Vagrant town and his feelings change over time) at all cost. Nor does Adonis want to create a better world where everyone can live together. This is a tragic story. A story about a boy who had only 1 yet that was taken away from him in front of his very eyes. The story of a boy who never was allowed to have his youth or to express his anger, his sadness, his everything.
  It's a very serious and touching story. Fights aren't presented as these exciting moments, but as disgusting, unfair, violent, and most of all, pointless.
  It all takes place in this oh-so desolate world that was left to rot in favor of a parody of our modernity-obsessed, celebrity-worshiping societies that is brimming with creativity and tells you so much about itself without it needing to be told through dialogue. From the modern, sky-reaching towers of the capital of the Redia empire to the immaculate halls of the Nation of Witches, from the desolate feel of Sand Land and Mamuta to the lively, yet depressing reality of the Vagrant village, every location in this show is distinct and memorable, while also serving as powerful world-building tools.
  All this is tied together with very simple animation (especially for any scenes including Director Shirousagi) that puts in work when it needs to (it isn't all that flashy, but it nails all the scenes that needed strong visuals (for instance, during the uses of Grande)), beautiful music (including the intro and outro songs, which I never skipped), great jokes that all land, powerful moments (episode 11's start is beyond disturbing) and wonderful characters that are given life through exceptional voice work and amazing writing.
  It's finale is also done perfectly in my opinion, closing the current arc while also leaving you with enough to be excited for the future, closing with a smooth transition into the show's wonderful ending theme.

  High 7. God fucking damnit, I want to re-read the manga now.

  Continue on AniList

SIMILAR ANIMES YOU MAY LIKE

• ANIME

  ActionAkame ga Kill!
• SPECIAL

  DramaGrisaia no Meikyuu
• ANIME

  ActionTate no Yuusha no Nariagari
• ANIME

  ActionSabikui Bisco
• ANIME

  ActionCross Ange: Tenshi to Ryuu no Rondo
• ANIME

  ActionGuilty Crown
• ANIME

  ActionMajo to Yajuu
• ANIME

  ActionKimi to Boku no Saigo no Senjou, Aruiwa Sekai ga Hajimaru Seisen
• OVA

  ActionHELLSING OVA
• ANIME

  ActionToaru Majutsu no Index
• ANIME

  ActionToaru Kagaku no Railgun
• ANIME

  ActionHazure Waku no [Joutai Ijou Skill] de Saikyou ni Natta Ore ga Subete wo Juurin Suru made