Next on our magical alphabet journey is K. That’s it, that’s the title. Relish the purity, it’s not actually all that common. As for the show itself… well, I have some explaining to do. This is going to be a review of K, and nothing else. There’s evidently a sequel movie and then a sequel season to the movie, but for the purposes of this week I’m going to take the easy way out and just review K as its own self-contained story rather than getting into the quagmire of everything K-related. I’ve done omnibus style reviews in the past, but I’ve also done season 1’s and the like, and since K is full-length on its own, I think that will be fine.
This is a show where the first few scenes are pretty indicative of the kind of show you’re in. We open up with a group of thugs who are so forced-cool you’d think they were from The Matrix pulling some absurd mission impossible stunts against suits in a penthouse, only for their little girl in gothic lolita dress to declare of the lead suit that “he doesn’t know”. They then decide to make their exit about as violent as their entrance
On their way out they’re confronted by some clean-cut types who have that look and feel where they’re either military or school prefects or something else with sticks up their bums. Both sides pull out wildly over-the-top superpowers that manifest giant floating swords in the sky and… why should I care?
Despite the fact that subtlety seems to be extinct in this universe, we know basically nothing about the two sides fighting. Okay, one side is punks who seem to revel in chaos while the other side has a very orderly vibe but… who are they? What did the punks want? Is their cause righteous, or are they just jerks? Who are these military folk? Are they serving and protecting despite an overly sour disposition, or are they oppressive and tyrannical? You can kind of guess that team red and team blue are opposite factions in some regard, the show does have enough visual storytelling for that, but we have no evidence on which to even make an educated guess on what the opposition really is.
This is a common problem in bad action shows, but since K comes on really strong with it, I’m going to get it out here at the start: It doesn’t matter how cool your powers and fight choreography are if the audience does not have any reason to care. It doesn’t have to be much, but give us something so that there’s an emotional narrative to the fighting that underscores what we’re seeing, that creates at least an initial impression of what we might want to happen. This is scripted media. With dialogue. Not a fireworks show. And fireworks shows can be entertaining, but that’s neither here nor there. I gave Kemurikusa a hard time for how obtuse its opening was, but at least we got enough visual coding and understanding to want to follow the humanoids and understand that Red Bugs were bad.
And yes, good material sometimes opens in media res, even directly to combat. But better material knows how to deploy a hook. The first episode of Shakugan no Shana hits us with the show’s first fight before the five minute mark, but even if Yuji wasn’t monologuing (he is) I think we could tell that the monster was bad news and that the girl who shows up to kick its rear is probably somebody we would be rooting for.
But then, it’s a pretty strong indicator when one side has a normal human face and the other doesn’t so much. How about humans versus humans, like K here? You can still do it. It’s not that hard. To skip to western live action, The Dark Knight famously starts with a heist, much like K here, and it can even be confusing at first what’s going on. But you never think “maybe the mask gang are the good guys”. The entire scene and environment is set up in such a way that bank robbers steadily bumping off their own are clearly not people you have to feel sorry for getting axed, even if you don’t know who Batman is. They have a clear motivation as well: money, even if that’s ultimately revealed to be a total sideshow for the important one. And before the sequence ends the film reveals its iconic antagonist and makes the heist an important scene that connects to what comes next.
Speaking of things that other productions have used well that K doesn’t know how to, camera work. This becomes more obvious when we’re in an ostensibly normal scenario, rather than the headache-inducing opening credits or over-the-top super-powered badasses land, but this show is persistently at dutch angles and viewed through odd lenses, combined with random filter effects and just plain bizarre composition. These sorts of things are meant to portray a sense of unreality, but first, it works better when used sparingly and second, that’s not really on the menu here. Sure, we’re in a different universe where everyone overacts or underacts in some catastrophic way, but this is an “Earth except where noted” sort of affair, and it’s a normal day for the locals more or less.
Better directors will sometimes tilt their camera or apply a weird lens or a gel or filter in pursuit of something, and they’d be right to do it. K does it in that where where they know skilled folk do it, so they’ll do it to show how “skilled” and “artsy” they are without knowing why they should, ironically ending up showing off just how much they have yet to learn about the art of cinema.
Perhaps that’s on-brand. I looked it up and the studio behind this is GoHands. I don’t think I’ve mentioned them before, but I have reviewed two of their shows, both of which were also visually idiosyncratic. On the good side was Coppelion, but perhaps being based on a manga enforced some needed restraint, because K cleaves much closer in look to disasterpiece Hand Shakers, less the incredibly tragic CGI. And both K and Hand Shakers are GoHands “Original” works.
So, yeah, these are some heavy sins for the show to bear before we even get to the plot hook. How does that go?
Well, we spend some time puttering around at school. Who are we following? Well despite some false leads and a naked catgirl…
Okay, wait, full stop. This scene needs to be talked about. Normal girl is following a mysterious white-haired schoolboy who mooches food off literally the entire school, trying to give him a bento, and part way through her quest this random naked catgirl just… appears. No human acknowledges her. Is she invisible? Well I’m going to say no because the visuals indicate that the talking roomba trash can sees her, so is she invisible to “normals” but not robots? Is the girl just oblivious? Is naked catgirl a normal thing?
There’s no continuity with her either. White haired boy – main character Yashiro “Shiro” Isana – hangs out on the rooftop and is interacted with there by a small white cat but it’s unclear what if any relation the cat has to the catgirl. We don’t see her transform or call minion cats or anything. One moment she’s just there, and a few cuts later a regular cat is just there. And then it hangs around Shiro like it’s his familiar.
And yes, this will make sense eventually, but what’s the point?
Anyway, Shiro gets sent on some errands to the city, where he gets spotted by some of the thugs from that intro scene. They seem interested and hunt him down and attack him. The skateboarder of their group even uses a baseball bat like this is Paranoia Agent. Guy, your other allies are riding motorcycles and throwing fire like Ghost Rider, Shounen Bat was only scary in context!
Anyway, he’s rescued by some stoic telekinetic katana bishie, who jumps him up to the rooftops and then spouts something about kings before proclaiming he’s going to kill the guy he just saved. The punks hack every screen in town to display a scene of Shiro’s doppelganger murdering the PoV, which seems to be the crux of the issue and which gets Team Blue, who apparently took the leader of Team Red into custody, mobilized to do… I don’t know what, really.
He escapes this scenario by spinning a load of bull and deploying some flashbangs he just happened to have in his bag, but sword boy Kuro (yes, they’re Shiro and Kuro, white and black. Subtlety is a cryptid.) is still on the case.
Shiro makes it home, however, to find that the tiny cat gets jump cut into that naked catgirl. In his bed. This is about as shocking to him as it would be to a sane person, so I guess he didn’t already know?
This is Neko. Yeah, the cat is named “Cat”. Between that and the animated wallpaper that I think is random future hologram stuff in context but is clearly just GoHands showing off the obnoxious styles they prefer, subtlety has been divided by zero.
Kuro shows up shortly, and they have themselves a merry little chase, helped along by Neko’s weird powers, that ends with everyone exhausted, marker drawings all over Kuro’s face, and the three somehow having breakfast together like some quirky friend group rather than a nudist catgirl, avenging super (who is really bad at actually killing his mark with all his powers), and suspected evil supernatural assassin king.
Let me remind you, K is not by in large a screwball comedy. It’s sort of an action-mystery-thriller thing. So why are they doing this routine that you’d more likely see in Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle? Your guess is as good as mine but it’s canon. I guess.
At this point, we’re two episodes in and I’ve written more than some of my shorter reviews. Please just assume, as I try to get through the rest of this Haruhi-damned sideshow, that the level of stupidity remains about level unless otherwise noted. If I have to pick on every moment for the whole show, GoHands will drop another sequel before I’m done.
Thus, dodging loads of incoherent talk about powers with cool names and no real comprehension of what they are or mean (much like Hand Shakers had), we get the picture that Kuro’s specific motive was to find the successor to his former master, the Colorless King, and kill that person if they were evil. Since the video person introduced himself as Colorless King, that implicates Shiro. Eventually, Shiro is able to clear his name with Kuro, but then almost immediately finds a smoking gun the other way for himself. Huh.
By way of more wasteful puttering, we eventually get the answer: Shiro’s whole life and identity is a lie constructed with Neko’s perception-altering powers, which can evidently go so far as generating false memories and hiding real ones. He doesn’t get all his real memories back, just enough to know he’s not who he thought he was and arrived on campus due to getting pushed out of a blimp. Shiro does seem to possess King power, though, so at least he has that. Whatever him summoning the “Sword of Damocles” like the other Kings means other than the literal sword that can evidently reshape geography when it falls.
The guy in the blimp is said to be the Silver King, whose name (Adolf Weissman) is related to some of the technobabble of king powers. He also appears to be quite the psycho, or to have become one of recent. Shiro and gang goad team blue into challenging him and secretly ride along, but Weissman… um… blows up his own blimp.
Cut to Dresden in January of 1945, looking a little less firebombed than canonical history would suggest, where Adolf (with a lab coat and suspicious armband) plays science experiments with a magic rock that seems to be the source of the asinine King powers.
You know, retroactively, I’m a little glad that Hand Shakers explained nothing if this is the coherency and sense that GoHands is capable of.
The allied bombers arrive shortly after, Adolf has his power and… we’re back in the present. What? It turns out that he’s dead but maybe not, and a weird spirit with his attitude tries to possess the red king in his prison. Red king takes this as his sign to bust out, after which he leads Team Red to take over the school with a display of shamefully animated damage where a clock tower falls like no real solid object.
The blues come and clash with the reds over this, including the kings fairly directly having it out. Main character team resurfaces after a couple of episodes deciding they need to do something to remain relevant to the incoherent plot and go to save the useless girl from the opening act. And maybe other students, it’s not well exposited.
Anyway, the possessing spirit/Colorless King runs around making trouble and fanning the flames of conflict between Red and Blue, while the Red and Blue kings end up in a death battle of their very own after Blue interrupts Red from fighting Kuro.
And then, fairly arbitrarily, the Colorless King reveals it has taken over the useless girl by using her body to stab Shiro.
This works just enough to let Colorless leap to Shiro.
Like Red before him, Shiro manages to fend off the mental assault. This allows him to reclaim his memories and reveal that he’s the real Adolf and that the power of invincibility and immortality is his, hence why he never takes damage. Colorless bodyswapped him before, but is now just running around messing with kings because… motivation not announced. Anyway Adolf Shiro manages to forcibly calm down the Red and Blue regulars by appealing to the seconds in command and telling them stuff off screen, and then goes to mess with the Red, Blue, and Colorless kings, the latter of which seems to be glitching out in possession of the useless schoolgirl.
Shiro takes on Colorless in a fairly embarassing anticlimax of pulling the reverse card on a possession attempt, trapping Colorless as powerless inside his body, but that’s not the end: we still have a clash of the Blue and Red kings with Red close to self-destruction that would, we are told, take a chunk of city with him
Shiro interferes with this and seemingly pulls a suicide by Red King. This is I think because Colorless wasn’t totally contained, so I think Colorless was in control of the body when the hit landed hence why he wasn’t invincible, but it’s fairly confused so that’s just my best guess. When the dust clears, Red chooses suicide by Blue rather than out with a bang and I have literally no idea why he does this rather than abdicating his authority like Blue told him to do repeatedly over the show in the face of that whole “gonna die when the sword falls and take a lot with you” thing. Was that not an actual thing a king could do? I don’t know. Maybe after Shiro’s stunt he just decided he wanted the show to be done as much as I did.
Anyway, the Reds mourn their departed king as they lose their powers, Kuro and Neko kinda mourn but also resolve that Shiro must be out there somewhere, and the show decides it’s over. The end.
I… don’t know what this show really meant to accomplish. K was thirteen episodes, but it was only thirteen episodes because it operated on a zillion lines with a zillion characters who were barely introduced and who never felt like they mattered to the main point. Neko, Kuro, and Shiro were the core of this show. Their real struggle was to find and neutralize Colorless. Red and Blue mattered in as much as they wanted Shiro at first, which they wanted because Red Team wanted Colorless for murdering one of their members, fair enough, and Blue Team… um… is just some official unofficial kingly cop force so they do whatever it is they do.
We see Shiro’s story start to finish, but it didn’t have the running time, so they drop us awkwardly into the middle of these other stories, like the rivalry between the Red and Blue kings, or the one between the Red King retainer and the Blue King retainer who was a former Red who defected, and abandon us with these total side characters for vast swaths of episode. It would be pretty hard for me to care less about the fanservice second of the Blue King and her slow burn crush on him, or the idiot skateboarder and the traitor fighting it out. These things are not introduced well and not supported well. They’re just waste.
In a lot of its structure and ambition. K reminds me a good deal of Eden of the East. I mean, that show also had an amnesiac who may have been a bad person and esoteric talk about Kings. But, in a sense, K aped Eden of the East’s worst threads and tried to hold just those together with duct tape and chewing gum rather than the connective tissue that made Eden of the East almost work for a while.
And thus I’m drawn back to Hand Shakers. The stylistic choices are glaring and obnoxious. In fact, I’m going to give a little “love” to the one I didn’t call out before.
That’s right, it’s Fanservice. If you ever want to know how Fanservice looks when it’s awkward, artificial, and still somehow casual, look no farther than K. It’s not even like Rosario + Vampire which was at least prurient the whole way through. Here, I think they’re just afraid of losing the audience’s attention and the only moves they know how to make that would promise to retain it are fighting, which costs actual money to animate, and panties. So we get panties here and there.
The fact that this made me call up Rosario as the better version is a pitch black mark of shame.
Those of you following along have likely guessed it, but K gets a big, fat Fail from me. It’s an incoherent mess that fails on just about every level. Between K having a movie and sequel season and Hand Shakers having a sequel that I’ll probably have to review at some point, I feel like GoHands must have figured out some Uwe Boll style tax loophole to keep these trash fires burning, because they certainly aren’t worth watching.