English Dub Review: Ulysses-Jeanne d’Arc and the Alchemist Knight “The Girl Called Jeanne”

Of all the anime Jeanne d’Arcs, why’d I have to get stuck with the loli?!

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

After a brief history(?) lesson on what happened while Montmorency was staring at a flask for seven years, we see a…naked twelve years old.

*sigh*…god dammit, Japan.

Okay, so this is Jeanne (Bryn Apprill), a girl who lives around fairies and spends time burning wooden sacrifices as she prays for miracles. Things like the English armies going back to their own land, the war ending and…her body developing, because why go five seconds without sexualizing children, huh? Well, true to his historical roots, Montmorency shows up with Astaroth to make use of the ruins she’s using for his alchemy so he can try brewing the elixir. Jeanne, not knowing anything about this, makes him mess up and the elixir explodes. Montmorency is knocked out and wakes up sometime later, depressed at how much time he’s wasted just to get this far. Jeanne comes in to apologize, but he forgives her.

This tender moment is interrupted by the arrival of La Hire (Dawn M. Bennett), leader of a French mercenary group that is here to protect Jeanne’s village from an incoming Burgundian invasion. However, due to lack of pay from the royals, they’re shaking down the village for compensation before they do anything. Naturally, she’s also another male historical figure turned into a buxom lady, but at least she’s most likely to still be an adult. Montmorency can’t stop drooling after meeting her, but it turns out that’s because of the exploded elixir, which is making tons of saliva so he can finally ingest the Philosopher’s Stone. Astaroth advises against this for now, since he’ll likely only be able to use the power for three minutes at best before it “spirals out of control”.

That gets put on hold once the enemy forces arrive, and La Hire and her men head into battle. That doesn’t stop the enemy from burning parts of the village down and slaughtering the fairies…though they were pretty annoying, so I’ll let that slide. Jeanne witnesses this and gets stabbed herself, and Montmorency arrives too late to save her. Unless he passes part of the stone to her and makes her drink is magic spit GOD DAMMIT JAPAN. She’s no longer a normal human, but can now easily kill the remaining troops with ease, though her personality shifts to be more bloodthirsty. With no place for her in her village, she joins Montmorency on his journey.

OUR TAKE:

The skeeve and squick arrive in full force and wide range with this episode, going everywhere from oversexualized battle clothing to straight up naked children. The former is problematic in and of itself, but it pales in comparison to the latter, which is one of the things I’ve been trying to avoid more and more in anime I watch. But I couldn’t escape it here, and it’s going to get boring having me rag on it every time it comes up (which I imagine will be a lot), so I just want to make my stance on it unambiguously clear now and save my inevitable rants for when it gets really bad. I mean, the scene of Montmorency shoving the stone in her open wound while she cried for her dead mother and then was kissed by him is already pretty bad, but I doubt there we’ll have long to wait before we hit something even worse.

As for Jeanne herself, this served well enough as her introduction and origin story as to how she becomes the warrior we see in the opening credits. In terms of versions of this character, I’d rather take her Clone High or Fate Grand Order versions over this runt. Though even without knowing the historical context regarding Montmorency and kids, I still feel really uncomfortable at the idea of them having to activate her powers by kissing due to the age difference. And yet even revulsion is a stronger feeling in me than the plain lack of interest I have in this whole Philosopher’s Stone plot. I guess we know that it can make people really powerful for a few minutes, but I would figure something as legendary as that would have more uses. They have another half of it, so some experimentation should be in order.

There’s also still an obligation to find out what happened to Montmorency’s friends from school now that they’re all on different sides of the war. The soldiers fought today come from Burgundy, the country Philip is from, and La Hire works as part of Charlotte’s army, and the opening credits show us older versions of both of them, so their next appearances should be soon. There’s also Richemont to look out for since she’s clearly not dead and has her own chainmail bikini outfit to leap into battle with. Maybe tapping into the bad romantic parts will distract me from disgust and boredom for the next ten episodes. At the very least the Ending Credits are way better than they have any right to be in this show.

Score
3/10