Throughout the years, I’ve been trying to get better at worrying about my dropped anime. What I mean by this is that I don’t want to obsess about clearing out that list as much as possible. There’s something wrong with me that I want to finish every show I’ve started, even if I know I won’t enjoy the show much. Unfortunately, although there has definitely been improvement, I’m still not very good at letting go. I spent the last month or so making my way through several shows I had on hold. This includes some bad shows I won’t even bother to mention, the second season of The Promised Neverland, Sakura Quest (which was actually really good) and now finally Black Clover. Black Clover was never really on my dropped list, to be fair to it, but it was on my list of stalled anime. Mainly because I didn’t feel like watching it and wanted to pick it back up later. Well the future is now old man, and I finally sat down and (mostly) finished Black Clover.
When I say ‘mostly’ I’m talking about the dubious amount of filler and stalling episodes that are in the second half of Black Clover. The story of Asta isn’t a particularly unique one. A commoner with no magic power wants to become the strongest authority on magic in the world by pure willpower and grit alone. He joins the gang of outcasts who each have a backstory of their own and they end up becoming crucial in protecting the kingdom. A tale as old as time. What Black Clover has going for it – most of the time – is that it knows all of this. It doesn’t pretend to have deep themes that make you really think. I don’t want to call it shallow, there’s a lot of heart there, but it’s not posing any philosophical questions. It boils down to: guy with sword hit stuff. And he yells a lot while doing so. Half the reason most people didn’t continue past the first handful of episodes of Black Clover is due to Asta’s voice actor screaming their lungs out while voicing him. Once you get past that though, you are rewarded for your patience.
Black Clover moves fast. Once it gets going, it doesn’t really stop going all that much. Whenever you feel like the show is progressing slowly, just open up a filler list and you’ll understand why the episodes you’re watching feel boring. For a good chunk of its story, Black Clover rushes from fight to fight, not wasting the reader’s time. That’s what makes it such a good show.
This made it that much more disappointing to me that the final arc the anime covered wasn’t really started properly. We get a few dozen filler episodes and training episodes only to get the start of the next arc and then the show ends. Unfortunately the manga is plagued by a long hiatus so it might be a while before it picks back up again.
So should you watch Black Clover? It depends. Do you like to read manga? Then read the manga. You could watch some of the cool fights, the animation is decent most of the time. If you do not like manga all that much, then I do recommend you give the anime a chance. The first few episodes are rough, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. The voice acting is grating and it takes a little bit to get going. But once you get past that, and you keep a list of filler episodes at the ready, you’re in for a pleasant shonen anime that has all the right tropes and knows what it’s good at. Also, one more very important thing about the anime. The openings. Oh my word, the openings to this show are incredible at the best of times. Two of the openings are sung by Vickeblanka and they’re both some of my favorite songs to come out of anime. There are other bangers in there as well, this show was blessed on that front. If you take away one thing from this post, go listen to both ‘black catcher’ and ‘black rover.’
Why am I talking about Black Clover right now? Well for starters I just finished it, but there’s a second reason. I was initially going to talk about Mashle today. I try not to talk too much about things I don’t enjoy, but I almost made an exception. For those unfamiliar, Mashle is an anime that has some similar ideas as Black Clover. Someone without magic gets enrolled in magic school and has to pretend to have magic, which quickly fails, unsurprisingly. For as annoying as Asta’s screaming can be at times, Mash’s lack of any characteristics was far more uninteresting to me. His entire personality is just a few traits rolled on a randomized table and then kept one note. It does the whole story of an outcast becoming the hero so incredibly poorly that I cannot understand why it’s relatively popular. The other students at the school are sociopaths doing things that quite frankly should land them in jail, but the school not only overlooks them, they’re often impressed by how talented they are. Mash has no emotions throughout all of it and just fights when things get too difficult. I started the second season, hoping it would pick up a bit in quality – seeing as it seems to be a tournament arc – but I still found myself bored with every episode so far. The racism against people without magic is so over the top that it’s grating. The wizard houses are even more generic than the ones in Harry Potter, and those already boiled down to ‘good guys,’ ‘bad guys,’ ‘smart guys,’ ‘everyone else.’
I shouldn’t rant too much about this, I know there’s people that enjoy Mashle and think it’s really funny and that’s okay. For me personally, it lacks the humor of One Punch Man, the fights from Black Clover and the creativity of a show like JoJo. It takes elements from all of these stories but misses the mark. Where was I going with this? Ah right, go read Black Clover. It’s not the best manga you’ll ever read, but I promise it’ll be a fun experience that doesn’t require you to use much energy thinking about stuff. Just a guy with a sword beating up bad guys. Who doesn’t like that? Thanks for reading, I had a bad day at work today, so I’m going to go take a nap now.
Opal Kaharis 