English Dub Review: Black Clover “Flames of Hatred”

Fana is one pissed off lady.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Asta, Finral and Vanessa are up against Fana, the mentally unbalanced fireslinger of the Third Eye, who is accompanied by her powerful fire Salamander spirit. Her initial attacks against the Black Bulls are powerful, but Asta, endowed with magical endurance and self-healing is quite confident in their abilities. So much so that he decides the best course of action is to talk to Fana about why she hates them so much.

Fana isn’t up for talking, however, and meets Asta’s attempt at diplomacy with a healthy dispensing of fire to Asta’s face. Yet, Asta persists, eager to learn what Fana’s major grudge is against them. We are treated to a quick flashback to Fana’s early years where she endured some sort of serious trauma. Her emotions summon a font of magical power within her, and her Salamander morphs into a powerful dragon that unleashes fiery hell upon our heroes.

Noelle tries to use her water magic to counteract Fana’s fire, but the Salamander’s heat plows through her magical water defenses. Noelle still knows that her magic is the key to winning this fight, and she tries to gather her confidence. She has flashbacks to being bullied by her family, but remember’s Asta’s voice telling her she’s strong. Using the power of friendship, Noelle is able to direct a powerful wave at the Salamander, which brings down the beast. However, Fana surprises them all by being able to use the mineral magic Asta saw Mars used. Asta tries to find out if she knows Mars, but she denies any involvement with Mars.

With Fana bearing down upon them, our heroes combine their powers to unleash a special move by using Vanessa’s string magic to launch Asta at Fana’s Salamander. Asta soars through the air like a spear and annihilates the Salamander. As she falls to the ground, Fana remembers her past once more.

Our Take:

This episode is the big finale to the “Witch Forest” arc that has been built up to the last few weeks. While this is no doubt supposed to be the big showstopper that brings everything together, its much less of a final act and much more of a dress rehearsal. While its not atrocious, this episode expects a certain level of emotional interest from its viewers that simply isn’t there. There is probably a way where this episode could have been more involved and interesting, but because the episodes before it didn’t do much to earn the audience’s attention, this finale falls pretty flat.

Fana is the main villain of the assault on the Witch Forest, and she doesn’t measure up to the job. A good villain has to be able to stand for something that matters in the larger thematic structure of the story’s plot. Fana needs an element to her character to make her matter in Asta’s story, not just be an arbitrary obstacle for Asta to face. Her major pathos is that she hates humans for some undescribed but surely obvious past trauma that made her despise all of humanity. But that’s where her character starts and finishes. Like many of the characters in this show, her personality is one note played over and over again, to diminishing effect each time. It’s not enough for her to be troubled, she has to have something to her that makes unique in order to be a strong villain. Not to mention, she isn’t even particularly threatening, and her magic too straight forward to be interesting. I don’t know why, in the medium of anime of all things, Black Clover gives their characters some of the most obvious and vanilla power sets, but it certainly does. Surely, there are more interesting powers a villain could have than “Fireballs”, but Black Clover doesn’t seem interested in creating them.

The animation has gone downhill again, and in a battle based on motion and intensity, that’s a particularly noticeable sin. Overall, this is a messy, unfocused and unapologetically boring thing to endure. In a world where anime is constantly pushing the boundaries of choice and story, settling for a show like this is just awful. There are so many better shows with better characters, better fighting, better emotional moments, better everything. This arc is just about over, it seems. I can’t imagine there is a whole lot more story left to tell save for an elongated flashback of Fana’s that will no doubt take up the majority of the next episode with its emotionally simple bulk.