Shakugan no Shana was kind of a surprise to me this last fall. So much that I didn’t start watching it until recently. Much of this fall season’s shows have had to do with the occult and I tend to find the occult not very interesting, particularly vampires. So I checked this one out due to a recommendation or three. I was pleasantly surprised by what I found.
The boy we follow from the start is Sakai Yuji. He feels like he leads a normal life until the one day he finds out something rather different on the way home from school. He and another friend are engulfed in an odd darkness (known as Fuzetsu) that freezes everyone but him. As he finds himself able to move about monsters from out of nowhere appear and begin eating the people around him. Again, almost out of nowhere, a small girl appears and begins killing the monsters. As she does so she cuts Yuji in half to kill another monster. No doubt that Yuji is a little confused that she can patch him up and all. What he finds out after the heroine dispels the Fuzetsu, is that the people that were “eaten” by the monsters have been replaced by likenesses of themselves, with blue torches in the center of their bodies. He looks down and sees a familiar torch inside him. The girl, who becomes known to Yuji as Shana, tells him that she’s a Flame Haze. Basically she hunts these creatures that would upset the balance of life in our world with another world known as Guze. So what Yuji finds out is that he’s already dead, and once the flame goes out, his existence is terminated. When they say existence, they also mean everyone’s memories of you as well, like you weren’t even there.
So thus begins an interesting story of love and intrigue between Shana and Yuji. You’d like me to say that wouldn’t you. Yuji’s persistence actually pisses Shana off a whole lot. She ends up taking the place of Yuji’s friend, who’s torch eventually fades, to keep an eye on him. Yuji actually is something called a Mistes, who has something inside them. They never really tell you what it is, just that it’s like another existence, and it actually replenishes Yuji’s torch every night at midnight. So Yuji helps Shana out in her duties as a Flame Haze.
Shana is tough, Yuji’s a wimp, and the combo works well. Shana is so tough to the point she’s pretty mean at times. It works pretty well, until she starts to fall for Yuji, even though her life has never afforded her the chance to love, she finds herself falling nonetheless. Now that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it has the potential to fall into anime cliche-dom. Not that there isn’t some of that already, it’s just been light. The characters are all rather interesting, from Shana to her rival Margery Daw. Even the villains are interesting, considering they have odd fetishes. The one seems to be into dolls, and the last one I saw was two young children with a passion for french kissing each other. They were a little creepy.
The animation is good and character designs decent. The eyes can be a little weird in places. Shana is drawn with a perpetual downturn in her eyes, which makes it look like she’s scowling all the time. She usually pissed about something, so it works for the most part. All in all it’s a pretty good show.
