12 days of Christmas- I discover Guilty Crown is as bad as people say it is

I know I planned to write mostly positive things for my 12 days posts, and the title of this one doesn’t sound very positive, but, in a way, this kind of is. This autumn I finally discovered for myself just how terrible Guilty Crown is. This might not seem good, but considering how the majority of the anime fandom also nurses a fond hatred for the show, it enables me to further integrate myself into this fandom!

In fact, the only reason I started GC in the first place was because I wanted to be able to legitimately rant about it to other haters! So naturally, I was quite taken aback to find the first few episodes were pretty good!! The show was set in a dystopian society, one of my favourite kinds of setting, and whilst no characters leaped out at me, I was sufficiently entertained by the excellently animated fight sequences. However, it did not take long for cracks to appear in the show’s originally shiny surface.

Whilst entertaining over a short period of time, awesome fight scenes alone are not enough to carry an entire show, likeable characters are also important- why would you care about the outcome of the fight when you do not care about the characters fighting? I, like most of those who watched Guilty Crown, found it particularly difficult to like Shu and Inori. At points Shu was both needy and full of self-pity, and cruel and too-big-for-his-boots, neither of these being endearing qualities. The show itself even seemed uncertain about whether or not it wanted you to like him- he switched from being Japanese school-boy Hitler to hero once more not even in the space of a single episode! And I was never convinced by Inori’s character. Just why was she so devoted to a boy who’d done no more for her than many of the other characters?

But the worst (and at the same time, best, oddly enough) thing about Guilty Crown was that its story was so dumb. It left numerous plot points hanging, like disgusting gangrenous limbs. For example, why did Funeral Parlour bother rescuing Kido Kenji when he never did anything significantly useful? And other plot points were simply chucked in with little thought or care- what on Earth possessed writers to introduce a secret cult just episodes away from the show’s conclusion? And there are plenty of other examples: tragic rape scenarios, characters that won’t stay dead, and schizo lolis- it was almost as though writers gave other shows a cursory glance, and thought: “Hey, that seems cool, why not include it in this?” without giving the context such plot points were set in a second thought! And whilst I’m still 2 episodes away from completing the show, I trust all your claims that it got even dumber!!

So even though Guilty Crown was an awful, awful show, for the reasons outlined above, I’m still glad I got ‘round to watching it, or most of it, because now we’ve all suffered through this terrible ordeal, now we can all band together against this monstrosity and become a more cohesive group. It’s basic psychology.