English Dub Review: Black Clover “The Promised World”

One step forward, two steps back.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Asta and Fana are still duking it out as Fana becomes more and more enraged. Meanwhile, Fanzell and Mars are trying to escape Ladros, and with some quick thinking from Fanzell, are able to redirect one of Fana’s fireballs into Ladros using wind magic. The fireball is too much energy for the nutbar mage to handle, and he’s engulfed in flame. Mars and Fanzell touch down and Mars explains that he’s turned from the Diamond Kingdom and seeks to join Asta and friends in their fight.

Much to Mars’s surprise, he sees that they’re fighting Fana, who it turns out was his old childhood friend. While they were being raised together, forced to undergo magical experiments in the diamond kingdom, the two formed a strong bond with each other in the darkest of places. But, Mars was forced to kill Fana as part of his final test, which has weighed heavy on his mind ever since.

Mars begs Fana to remember him, which causes the third eye on her head to start hurting. It becomes clear that Fana is under some kind of enchantment that has suppressed her memories. Fana counterattacks and Mars despairs about his guilt over having “killed” her so long ago. Asta snaps him out of it with a quick speech, and the two set out to take on Fana together, combining their power. With both of them together, Mars is able to embrace Fana, which removes the third eye from her forehead, and restores her to her normal self. The two reunite as friends once more, and all is well.

Our Take:

So, the main centerpiece to this episode is the history between Mars and Fana and how that serves as the emotional engine of their fight. Mars doesn’t want to kill Fana because they suffered in the Diamond Kingdom together. This is supposed to weigh heavy on the audience, but how much emotional impact will have for you depends on your ability to immerse yourself and ignore the larger problems in the story. On its own, the tragic backstory of Fana and Mars is decent enough to warrant some tears, but anime plots don’t exist in a vacuum, and this one is encumbered by the many structural and writing problems of this show.

You can’t make someone become emotionally invested in a character in ten minutes in this format. You can’t do it in half an episode, you need to take more time to bring the audience into the world of the show and into the mind of the character in question. If Black Clover really gave enough of a shit to try and tug on some heartstrings, it would take more time with Fana and Mars’s backstory, or at least their relationship, to develop and immerse me in their story. But the problem here, and the problem that follows Black Clover at every turn is that the show wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to get the story wrapped up nice and quick so we can keep moving and pump out more episodes. Quantity over quality; production over art. Not to mention that the writing is so clunky and haphazard (At least in the dub) that the story can’t establish itself as legitimate. The result is something that feels awkward and rushed; a plot that has very little substance to it.

And what’s sad is that this one of the first times in watching this show that I actually started to feel something for these characters. Fana and Mars have a compelling story, but its presented as the bad poetry of a high school English student. It lacks the mastery of form to really get its point across. And in a show like Black Clover, which is especially void of real pathos, of real, human emotion, that’s a severe disappointment.

There are shows that can pull off great stories told in short amounts of time. Shows that have a strong economy of story and fast pacing that still draw us in, but those are shows that have more focused direction and more effort put into their animation. With stronger visuals and precise writing, a heartbreaking story of two friends can indeed be told in 22 minutes, but Black Clover has never put that much effort into its direction, and it certainly isn’t starting to here.

This really could have been something special.

Score
3/10