Dansai Bunri no Crime Edge

Dansai Bunri no Crime Edge is a rather recent anime based on a manga by Hikagi Tatsuhiko. The anime was handled by Studio Gokumi, a studio I only know from their work on A Channel. They don’t really have many works yet since they’re a pretty new studio, their first work wasn’t even four years ago. This will be the second anime I’ve seen from them. Let’s see how it compares to the first.

Our story opens with Kiri, our protagonist, going to the house of a rumoured spirit with long hair because… that’s his fetish. I’m not even kidding. He goes because he has a hair fetish. When he gets there he finds a petite girl roughly his age with hair down to her feet. He decides to stare at her, scissors in hand while breathing heavily. Contrary to common sense or basic survival skills, the girl, Iwai, decides that the best way to handle the situation is to invite him inside. Because in the land of poorly written characters, actions don’t need to remotely resemble what anyone with a single functional brain cell would do. It turns out that Iwai has cursed hair that can’t be cut. In spite of Kiri trying several pairs of scissors from her drawer. But that’s okay because his pair is magical as it was a murder weapon at some point and it can cut her hair. The worst part is that that isn’t even the stupidest aspect of this series. That’s right, my friends, the idiocy escalates. It turns out that there are lots of people out there with magical murder weapons called authors and if any of them manages to kill Iwai, the “hair queen” they can get any wish they want and escape the spirit of the original murderer that still possesses the weapon. Kiri decides to protect her because she’s surprisingly uncreeped out by him. The series from there follows the pair as they try to fend off a bunch of “authors” who either want to kill Iwai or Kiri. There are many problems that plague the narrative. The most obvious being that the premise is really stupid. Even if it was well-executed, which it isn’t, it would still be just an absurdly stupid premise. Which might work in a parody but they play it seriously and try to play up the “drama.” Which is terribly written and the romance is cringe worthy to the point where it would fit into a Stephanie Meyer novel. I have nothing positive to say about the story. It starts out as mind-numbingly stupid and only gets worse eventually ending on an expositional onslaught about how much more there is to come.

The characters in this are horribly written. Their actions and motivations have no verisimilitude whatsoever. Kiri has a hair cutting fetish and protects Iwai because he’s in love with her based on her hair. Iwai is an archetypal damsel in distress who spends her time either fixated on her love interest, crying or yelling for help. Most of the characters are defined entirely by exaggerated fetishes and the rest are just one-dimensional. The best characters are the dogs that appear briefly in two or three scenes. Just because they’re the only characters who never do anything grossly stupid or incredibly annoying. To make things even worse, character motivations and actions change quite a bit in this for really flimsy reasons. They really couldn’t use actual character reasons since the characters in this have less personality than a half leaf of lettuce so they have to resort to the tired “characters change because the plot says so.”

The art is meh. It’s not as bad as the rest of the series, but it’s nothing special. The character designs are pretty standard. The action sequences tend towards the slow, dragged out and uninteresting. They also mute the colours when things get violent. Having fetishy characters, including a pedophile, running around is fine, but showing blood would just be going too far. (Facepalm) There’s really nothing visually interesting about the series.

The voice acting is pretty bad. Not because of the cast, I’ve heard most of them deliver good performances before, but because the characters have nothing to them. And actors can’t make something out of nothing. As a result, the performances are pretty flat and the actors frequently just sound dis-interested. The music is okay.

The ho-yay factor is a 3/10. There are a couple homo-erotic scenes between two girls. Unfortunately, those girls are twin sisters. So it just ends up being disgusting. What is with creepy terrible writers and adding romantic subtext to relationships between twins? Looking at you too, Bendis.

This anime is horrendous. There’s really nothing I can recommend it based on. The writing is terrible, the plot is stupid, the characters are bland at best and downright unpleasant at worst. I could only recommend this one to someone I hated and you’re all such lovely people that I couldn’t do that to you. Final rating 1/10. Next week I’ll take a look at 5 centimetres per second. I know, it’s not on my request queue, but I’m trying to finish Legend of the Galactic Heroes and it’s quite long. Unfortunately, I don’t have anymore requests that are short enough to watch in the meantime. Thank you all for being patient with me. This Friday I’ll do a little something special for all of you. It’s something I’ve thought about doing for a while and it seems a good time. And no, it’s not images of myself in lingerie for Valentine’s. I’m sure most of you would not be interested in seeing that anyway.