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| I think this is the light novel cover and not the anime cover. |
Tokyo Ravens is not the best show I've watched and it's not the worst. First off, I found the story a bit amateur because the ideas have been done before. I didn't like the characters too much because they followed common archetypes in a very straight forward manner. For example, Harutora is the typical slacker with a good heart and Natsume is the typical girl that will pound her crush. The storyline is quite obvious from the beginning and the characters haven't changed much. I will say that I will continue to watch Tokyo Ravens even though I am not satisfied with a couple of things because there are some interesting things that they include in the series. The animation is pretty good and I like the combination of onmyouji and highly modern city. Their opening theme, X-encounter, was nice to listen to and the opening animation was nice to watch. It tries to be funny in a lot of scenes because Harutora is a very dense character, but his denseness gets in the way of the plot and I didn't find the humor appealing. I prefer more witty humor. I did hear that there are some twists in the future and perhaps it'll change my mind.
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| Manga illustration. That's Hoozuki right there. |
Hoozuki no Reitetsu is a comedy about Japanese Hell (and Chinese because both cultures share the same ideas about the Underworld). Their humor uses puns, pop references, and some witty language. The Crunchy Roll subs did a bad job on a few episodes due to inaccuracy such as naming Zhuge Kongming (Zhuge Liang) as a Japanese scholar when he is a Chinese scholar from the Three Kingdoms era. Thank goodness I know my Asian history and enough of languages to pick up on the mistakes. I was thrilled to see that they used Yusa Koji to voice Hakutaku. I had an immediate liking to Hoozuki as a character because he doesn't follow the standard badass image too strictly. He's cool and has a soft side while wielding a large spiky club. Aside from bad English subs, the original content was very good. The references to Chinese medicine were very accurate since I study a bit of Chinese medicine myself and Hoozuki and Hakutaku's relationship is really poking fun at the Chinese-Japanese relations in real life only on a much lighter scale. I don't think the author will actually put in his personal opinion on real politics into his story so let's leave it at that. It's too controversial to talk about it.
Both stories share a similarity in the occult genre. Tokyo Ravens deals with onmyouji which are the Japanese equivalent of western shamans. I have a great deal of interest in onmyouji and onmyoudou because they were greatly influenced by Chinese Daoism. We(since I am a Daoist) share a relative similar pantheon of gods and goddesses and similar rituals/beliefs. The use of seals called ofuda are the same idea of Daoist fu. The ritual heavy Daoism is part of the esoteric belief system which onmyouji took most of its influence from along with local Shinto beliefs. Tokyo Ravens made the old rituals more modernized by designing the shikigami to be a lot more like mecha robots and the special effects to resemble more like modern weaponry. Even the set of commands that each onmyouji uses is like military combat.
Buddhism has its fair share of appearance in Hoozuki no Reitetsu. They refer to Heaven as Shangri-la which is Buddhist paradise and use Enma as lord of the Underworld. Though the anime focuses more on Hell, Buddhist Hell is different from Western Hell. Everyone who dies goes to the Underworld to get judged by Enma first. If you are guilty, you obviously end up in Hell. The subs sometimes refer to it as River Styx but Styx is a Greco-Roman term, please refer to it as the Sanzu River instead. The anime makes use of Japanese Hell specifically and they occasionally acknowledge the existence of other Hells like European Hell when they introduced Satan and Cerberus into the story. For people unfamiliar with the eastern culture, it may be hard to grasp all the ideas at once, but a bit of research will do the trick.
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