The Ranting Penguin

How to win a fight in anime:

1. fight rly hard
2. get the shit beat out of you and fall to the ground
3. get up slowly with blood dripping from your mouth
4. crack a smile and say something about friends and not giving up
5. win. that’s it. you automatically win after following steps 1 – 4

— Internet meme

I’m going to put this right out there. I am not a big fan of shōnen anime. I gave up after my first hundred and twenty episodes of Naruto, the first 24 episodes of Bleach. I’ve never watched One Piece, never got into any Dragonball, yet I did like Hunter x Hunter (the 1999 anime, I’ve yet to watch the reboot). And after 75 episodes of Fairy Tail, I’ve hit a wall, even though I actually own all 200+ episodes.

Now along comes Black Clover, the new “King of Shōnen” if you can believe the marketing. In a world where magic is everything and everyone in it has magical powers, Asta an orphan boy is born without magic. Yet he has high hopes to become the Hokage of the Leaf Village The Wizard King of the Clover Kingdom. And on top of that, he is obsessed of one day marrying Sister Lilly Aquaria, who isn’t only older, but isn’t allowed to get married. His declared rival, Sasuke Yuno, who was orphaned together with Asta, and raised together with him is a prodigy magician. He also wants to be the Number One Hero Pirate King Hokage of Leaf Leafe Village Wizard King. And as hot-headed and spirited as Asta is, Yuno is cool and aloof.

At the age of fifteen, both Yuna and Asta are eligible to attend the “Grimoire Acceptance Ceremony” where the wand grimoire chooses the wizard. Grimoires are magic books from a magical library that hold records of spells specific for its owner. Because of that, no other wizard my use it, though a wizard can have it taken away and do pretty much nothing else with it, I guess. As one levels up, more spells appear in the book. It’s not like they learn the spell it just appears because they defeat some enemy or something. I’m sure it makes sense to someone, just not me. Yuno, gets the rare card in the deck unique weapon grimoire, embossed with a four-leaf clover. It’s the Clover Kingdom you see, and you know, four-leaf clovers are special. Poor Asta gets no grimoire since he has no quirk magic in him.

So early on, Yuno is attacked by random bad guy for no real reason. Asta comes to his defense despite having no magical powers, but he is in great physical strength. In the fight, a grimoire magically appears in front of him where he pulls out as massive sword that bares a striking resemblance to Guts’ Dragon Slayer sword from Berserk. And it turns out it’s an anti-magic sword that negates any magic. Nifty, huh?

So there you have the groundwork. Loud spiky haired kid wants to be #1 at whatever in his world who all his life has been looked down but his greatest strength is not giving up. He gets big weapon that lets him play with the other kids and adventure ensues.

Now no shōnen copying a half a dozen other shonen would be complete without a large cast of supporting characters. And they come in the form of teams of Magic Guilds Knights, protectors of the kingdom in service to the King. Note that the King and the Wizard King are two separate people and titles. Yuno of course is recruited by the elite cream of the crop Magic Knights, The Golden Dawn. Asta is recruited by the island of misfit wizards the Black Bulls.

For tension within you have the nobles who are basically a class of entitled a**holes who look down on wizards from peasant villages like Asta and Yuno. Reminds me a lot of J.K. Rowling’s world. And of course you have a tsundere waifu character in the form of Noelle Silva, a noble who is one of the Black Bulls. She has great magical potential, too bad she can’t control it. She gets better control a few episodes later by getting of all things, a wand.

But here’s the thing, like eating Jack in the Box tacos at 2:00 in the morning after a night of drinking, it’s delicious bad food. Sure it’s bad for you, you know it is, but it satisfies the palette at the time. Like I said earlier, I’m not a huge shōnen fan, but I am a junk food fan. And possibly in an era where a show like My Hero Academia did not exist, it could well be a great show.

The show does its magical battles well and most of the involve teamwork. That adds a nice dynamic to the usual half a dozen episode battle wrecking everything in sight. In the case of Black Clover it also allows the supporting character to shine and contribute to the story as well. Noel’s story develops nicely within the first season and its nice to see her growth and contribute to the team. Yami, the captain of the Black Bulls may not get to jump into fight as much but when he does we all know that shit’s about to get very serious. Charmy, who is a tiny little glutton and is mainly comic relieve is a pretty bad ass powerful wizard.

I’ve read about 5 volumes of the manga and it seems to work quite well in that form. So where does the anime go wrong? Part of it is that while reading the manga, the full impact of Asta’s near relentless shouting of everything is not as grating. Another thing is that the anime chose to run its first season at 52 episodes. And Season 2 is actually picking up right after. The series is done by Studio Pierrot. If that name sounds familiar, they produced two of the big three of shōnen, Naruto and Bleach. (The third of the big three, Dragonball Z , was produced by Toei Animation, the studio responsible for Sailor Moon and One Piece.) Pierrot certainly knows how to stretch out their episode times with padding, such as recaps at the beginning of each episode, after each commercial break and in the case of Black Clover, closing minis that really have nothing to do with the episode. So basically for each 24 minute episode, you might have about 19 minutes of actual content. And when you have battles that last a half a dozen episodes it can get annoying unless you are bingeing. And you know how Naruto had full on runs of filler arcs? Black Clover suffered with filler episodes, from the very beginning. The good news is that most of that filler was in the early episodes and it seems to be transitioning from one arc to the next with ease.

This could have been eliminated with simply following a standard pattern of seasonal anime of 24 to 25 episodes per season so there is no danger of catching up to the manga. But Pierrot seems dead set on milking this to death. Nevertheless, except for a gap where I stopped watching for a few weeks I kept finding myself going back and anxiously going onto the next episode. The second season seems to be gearing up for a darker tone as Asta

Despite the show’s shortcomings, it can be enjoyable. So if you fee the need to fulfill that anime shōnen gap left by Naruto and Bleach, Black Clover is certainly a decent enough show to fill it with.

Black Clover streams in Japanese with English subtitles on Crunchyroll

Funimation has the English dub on their sight FunimationNow