English Dub Review: Black Clover “Defectors’ Atonement”

Ladros needs to take a chill pill.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Fanzell stands tall against the forces of the Diamond Kingdom, led by Mars the diamond mage, and Landros, a relative newcomer, but a student of Fanzell’s as well. He cuts through the Diamond Kingdom troops one by one, while Mariella leads the witches down below to fight back against the Diamond Kingdom as well. Dominante assists too, using her magical tech abilities to restore some of the forest’s automated defenses.

Back up above, Fanzell and Landros face off, and Fanzell has a flashback to his time training the former students that he now faces. It seems like Fanzell has the advantage over Landros, but Landros is able to absorb all of Fanzell’s magical attacks. In addition, he’s able to take the absorbed magic he takes in and unleashes it back outwards as well. Landros shoots out the magic he had stored up from Fanzell’s attacks to devastating effect on the Witch’s Forest, killing his own men as well as the enemy forces. It looks like Ladros has Fanzell on the ropes and is about to kill Dominante, when Mars steps in and stops Ladros.

Ladros isn’t particularly bothered by this though and gets ready to kill Mars along with Fanzell, but Mariella shows up at the last minute and stabs Ladros in the back. Mars confirms that he’s allied himself with Fanzell, and informs Fanzell that the only way they can beat Ladros is either by stuffing him full of more magic than he can handle or by using anti-magic against him. Meanwhile, Asta and the Black Bulls face off against Fana, who’s cornered with her salamander familiar.

Our Take:

Once again, Black Clover fails to meet the standard expectations of a shounen anime and delivers a weak episode in all aspects that we’re forced to endure as just another by-product of the anime industry. There’s not much I can say in defense an episode like this that is so poorly executed it feels like I’m watching a cringey Saturday morning cartoon from when I was a kid. There’s no excuse for a show like this in this day and age, but the complete failure of this episode to bring anything remarkable, in terms of both visuals and storytelling, tells us that it’s still possible to sink this low even in our modern anime environment.

The biggest issue here is the writing, which feels like it needs a second, third and fourth draft to meet any kind of professional standing. The lines feel forced and drawn out, full of awkward pauses and bad dialogue, that appeals to the lowest common denominator of simplicity to just convey information and nothing else. So much of these lines are just exposition, repeating things we already know in order to waste time and make sure that every single person who might watch this episode can know what’s going on, without giving any respect to the idea that the people who watch this show might already know who these characters are. Not to mention, Landros’s characterization is nothing short of ridiculous. A mustache twirling, a cackling villain without any complexity or empathy, Landros brings new meaning to the word “One-dimensional.” He and Mars could have been interesting villains for Fanzell to fight against because of his past with them, but the show has eschewed that kind of character complexity in favor of making a villain that the stupidest people in the room can understand. After all, Black Clover wouldn’t want to confuse any of its audience, who it clearly doesn’t respect enough to bring them an anime of greater complexity than a 4th-grade reading level.

There isn’t much to be said here that hasn’t already been said a thousand times before, but there is really no excuse for an episode that proves to be this boring and this pointless. Not to mention, even setting aside the story, the animation itself is ugly and poorly made. One would think that a big battle with powerful magic users would at least be visually stimulating, but it ends up just being another cheaply made mess that fails to capture any sense of imagination in its fighting. Does an anime of this poor quality deserve to even exist? I don’t think so, but it seems to have enough of a base watching to justify its prolonged syndication. I guess there are always people who will watch something, even if it’s of worse quality than an episode of “Speed Racer.”