Review of Shiki

Another pretentious show with very little substance that contradicts it's own themes and logic, makes philosophical arguments it can't back up, and culminates in a gratuitous gore-fest of mass carnage and destruction for the sake of the spectacle. It doesn't do anything special or unique with the vampire genre, poorly explains or suppoprts their existence and motives, tosses around paper-thin relationships between dozens and dozens of unlikeable characters, and conflates the repetition of forced tragedy with that of brilliance. A mysterious illness is ravaging a small countryside village, one with only a few hundred residents. It started with the discovery of several deaths among the elderly,not uncommon for the rural population there, but spread rapidly to include people of all age groups including teenagers and small children. Dozens and dozens pass away within the span of a month and local burials and temple services are booked for weeks. They all share the same initial symptoms of weakness and fatigue, followed by anemia based complications and ultimately death within a few days.

You would think, such a small, tight-knit community with barely a few hundred people, having lost a good 20% or more of their residents, friends and family they see every day and know by name, would lead to a major uproar and mass investigation from within and without. The death of so many young individuals especially, national treasures in Japan's aging population, should cause a major panic. Even entire families succumbing to the same illness. Nope. Instead, they make any and every excuse imaginable to NOT do anything and pretend the problem doesn't exist. They even make ridiculous excuses like saying the disease isn't new or dangerous because that JUST CAN'T HAPPEN in a small hick town in the middle of nowhere, otherwise it would be national news. For one, that's EXACTLY where most new diseases come from, zoonotic diseases in particular. And second, the nation isn't gonna know about your hick town problems unless you tell them about it or ask for help. They even go so far as to refuse autopsies. There are not enough rugs in all of Japan to sweep all this shit under.

And what does the local quack do? The kind-hearted, young doctor who dies a little inside every time a patient passes away? He nonchalantly calls it an epidemic and only half-heartedly describes it as such to avoid a "panic", as if the people weren't laid back enough as it is when he does tell them about the possibility. His first instinct was actually that it was a vector-borne disease transmitted by mosquitoes. Does he tell people to use common insecticide? Nope. Does he recommend the village be professionally sprayed down to decrease the mosquito population? Nope. Does he ever say jack squat at village meetings? Nope. Even his nurses and staff are always just casually smoking and drinking tea as if the death of the whole village is inevitable, that the villagers should calmly accept their fate, and that the health professionals at this clinic are smarter than the average village idiot and can avoid the disease (by sipping tea of course) so it's not their problem or responsibility. When all the members of a household die within weeks of each other, there should be giant ass blaring sirens going off telling anyone with half a brain that this is a communicable disease that's highly contagious and dangerous. Not once does ANYONE in the entire anime ever realize or even prepare for the possibility that the disease can be spread from human contact. It's laughably unrealistic. There are no masks. There are no isolation wards. People cozy up to dead bodies like they are still alive and not rotting flesh filled with pathogens. The nurses smugly fawn over their own immunity. They aren't even worried they'll lose their jobs as their clientele quickly shrinks.

This is the entire first half of the series. A dozen episodes of people dying, over and over and over again, accompanied with funerals, and everyone a mixture of apathy, stupidity, or ignorance. It's almost like a monster of the week shounen. But instead of a monster being vanquished, it's a hideously ugly old man or woman, followed by other family members. And my god are the characters in this anime ugly. It's like really bad fanart of pokemon/digmon/children's anime characters stretched in all the wrong ways, with vertical eyes, creeptastic irises, pointy chins, gravity defying drag queen hairstyles, and grotesque wrinkles and warts. The old people look horrific while the younger ones look like utter clowns out of place in rural Japan, some even with fashionable cat ear tufts on their head. Is this supposed to be an existential horror anime or just a really bad comedy?

Speaking of how ugly the character designs are. The characters themselves are even worse. The very first one you meet, Megumi, is a self-centered bitch obsessed with the main male protagonist. She constantly complains about being trapped in a hick town that doesn't appreciate her sophistication. How in the world did she survive 15 years there then? Her entire life? Natsuno, the male protagonist, with a cold, distant demeanor, also hates the village, as well as his narrow-minded parents who brought him there. There are also literally dozens of other characters that are shown one after another after another, with forgettable names, faces, circumstances, and family relationships. They all have the same things in common. They either have pent-up animosity towards each other from lifelong family issues, a general disregard or disrespect for one another, or a very uncaring and selfish attitude towards those who have died. There are only weak familial bonds and throwaway friendships. It's a miserable town full of miserable people. You don't care if they die. Even when the anime tries to force an emotional situation, a sense of tragedy or grief, you just don't care, especially when the characters themselves don't care about each other.

Eventually, after a dozen episodes of pure tedium and watching unsympathetic characters die one after another, the whole vampire plot finally starts to materialize. There is no disease spreading. The victims are actually being attacked by Japanese vampires dubbed Shiki, who rise from the dead and need to feed on human blood. One host can provide several feedings over a span of several days before dying from blood loss, with a small chance of turning into a Shiki after being interred. These Shiki are actually being created and controlled by the Kirishiki family, a bunch of weirdo outsiders that had recently moved into the village and built a strange, western-style mansion looking down upon the village.

Going back to the whole diatribe about how braindead stupid the villagers are. This is a backwater locale with the temple steps running down the middle of the village leading to the temple itself at its apex. They are dutiful to their funeral rites and traditions and it's their primary source of income. There is also rich folklore of corpses rising from the dead to feast on the local populace. There are sightings everywhere of strange phenomena and the ghosts of the deceased wandering about. A bunch of creepy, inhuman looking weirdos with PITCH BLACK eyeballs and no sclera have moved into town, only come out at night, and people have been dying by the droves ever since. And yet, no one is willing or able to make the connection between all these occurrences, or even humor the possibility. Yet another absurd justification is used. The villagers claim "modern rationalism" keeps them from believing in things like demons or vampires, much less poking around or asking questions. It's like some running joke. At the very beginning of the anime, Natsuno complains how everyone is up in everyone else's business because it's such a small town with nothing to do. And here we are, the same people, denying their better nature, ignoring their own superstitions and suspicions, their own old-fashioned beliefs, their own prejudices and fears, because they have somehow all become pedantic scientists grounded by the realities of "modern rationalism".

Through the latter half of the anime, when the village realizes the existence of these shiki vampires and goes on a systematic killing spree to rid themselves of these monsters, the anime tries to shine a sympathetic light on their existence. It's a complete 180 from their previous portrayals, wandering the countryside and attacking anyone and everyone with a big smile and acting like a gang of rascals released onto a playground with joyous fun, giggling as they took pleasure in tormenting victims they had harbored petty vendettas with in their previous life. Now, they run and cower in fear like prey lamb being attacked by a pack of wolves, even though the role was completely reversed not so long ago. Why are they so weak and useless all of a sudden? Even in the dead of night when they have the highest advantage, they hide in the pitch black corners and cower away. They are literally incapable of using weapons and always attack with their fangs. And all that superhuman strength and speed is just a fairy tale. The anime even places an invisible wall around the whole perimeter of the village to make the situation feel even more hopeless for these shiki. The only way out is the main road which is blocked by the villagers! We obviously can't tiptoe around them or run into the woods, because God designed us with tires for feet and to run only on paved roads and nowhere else!

The last few episodes are especially grating as they spend an inordinate amount of time showing Shiki pleading for their lives and justifying their actions through inner monologues. The most annoying and repetitive, droning on for minutes at a time, is that of Kirishiki Sunako, the oldest Shiki there and the one who pulls the strings. She's your typical loli but with pitch black eyes and a very punchable face. She keeps repeating that all she wanted to do was survive and that she wasn't a Shiki by choice. Over and over and over again, reaching it's height when she enters an old church and the whole place starts burning. It's supposed to symbolize how god has forsaken her, and there's this entire worthless subplot involving the monk in the village writing an allegory about abandonment, but it's all extremely pointless when the actual Shiki are portrayed as one-dimensional villains and the Queen Shiki herself, Sunako, masterminded the death of an entire village. She never wanted to "just survive". She was systematically killing people to make more of her kind, like a bitch in heat jumping on every willy and dong in sight. That's actually giving her too much credit. It wasn't some primal urge and sexual desire to procreate. She was commanding other Shiki to create her Shiki utopia. It's now purely greed and selfish desire.

Throughout the show, you get bits and pieces of the Shiki's existence, their motives, and why the Kirishiki family moved into town. The anime makes you think there is more to the story, a grander plot, a more thought out and sensible purpose. But in the end the reasons are a mindless and shortsighted "conquer the world" scheme bursting at the seams with flaws and more suitable for a children's cartoon on Disney. Sunako wants to turn everyone in the village into Shiki by gradually killing them off. She also brings in Shiki from the city to take on perfunctory governmental roles to avoid suspicion from the outside. Her end goal is to make the entire village her own Shiki paradise where she can walk outside without fear. Fear of what exactly? The only reason people feared her and feared those that emerged from the darkness was because she decided to start mindlessly killing them all. She has been living with them peacefully for centuries, being able to hide persecution from her need for blood, because everyone believes it's just a disease when her victims fall ill from blood loss. But now she wants more. It's far beyond just mere survival. The whole spiel the anime tries to shove down your throat, that there's this innocent loli girl crying with tears streaming down her eyes, is actually the tears of a power hungry devil.

In one of the middle episodes, when Natsuno, the male protagonist, meets his dead friend who had turned into a Shiki, he tries to negotiate, asking why they couldn't coexist, why they couldn't establish a line of understanding to help one another. His friend says its IMPOSSIBLE, even if humans provided voluntary blood it would not work. That one short conversation is literally all the time the anime bothers in exploring any sort of reconciliation between the two groups. It's a cop-out, to avoid complexity in a simple black and white story that the author doesn't want to delve into, yet tries to instill humanity into the Shiki in the latter half of the show as a cheap ploy to give depth and meaning. This goes back to the original question of why Sunako wants to turn everyone in the village into Shiki. For one, how the fuck are they going to survive if all the livestock is dead? In every other functioning vampire society, they don't stupidly outright kill their only source of blood. They either round them up like cattle, allowing them to recover after each feeding, or pay for blood donations. In the world of Shiki, you forcefully feed nonstop on a single victim until they die, possibly creating another Shiki, who also goes around town doing the same thing, until eventually there are no more humans to feed off of and everyone DIES from hunger. How in the world is such an ecosystem sustainable? Do these Shiki still have the intelligence of humans, or have they regressed to savage animals unable to avoid the typical predator-prey overpopulation collapse?

The newly risen Shiki are confined into a room, served several meals to adapt to their new bloodlust, and then unceremoniously kicked out to fend for themselves and devour the villagers as they see fit. How can such an uncoordinated approach not jeopardize revealing their existence? What happens when they are fighting over the same prey? What happens when there is no more prey and they start fighting each other for survival? There are supposedly Shiki tasked with city duty who go into the city and find victims to feed the less experienced and newly created Shiki. Do they even have a process or a system in place to provide a continuous food source from the city once the villagers are all dead? Do they plan on creating more and more Shiki, compounding the food problem to untenable levels, or will they eventually stop and start managing human farms and actually use their pea-sized brains for a semblance of a sustainable society?

There are supposedly varying positions and a hierarchy, but the anime doesn't bother with any real structure and treats the Shiki like a loose group of bandits. Sunako is the scheming leader, but she has nothing tangible to back up her clout and is a weak, useless girl otherwise. She has an attendant named Tatsumi, a rare species of Shiki called Jinrou that can live amongst humans during the day and survive on human food, and the other Shiki listen to him because they are afraid he will drag them out during the day and watch them burn to death. But he is not an unstoppable monster and can be easily taken on by a group, even a human one, and killed with a stake to the heart. So the whole Shiki organization can barely be called one, the civilization even more primitive than a nomadic tribe, and their plans even less thought out than a doodle on a diner napkin. There is zero effort made here yet Shiki tries to sell you it's brand of fake bread that barely has any flour and substitutes most of it for poisonous alum and plaster.

Another poorly thought out philosophical question that the writers try to shove in your face involving the shiki is whether they have sinned or not, which the town monk won't stop debating over. We've already established they are doing all this for more than mere survival, so much of that argument in their favor is thrown out. The other question the anime poses is whether they should kill Shiki, who are just trying to live and survive, or even do the bare minimum of defending oneself against them, if it means violence. Violence committed for basic survival is not a sin, the monk purports, but can violence against the Shiki, who are just trying to survive, be considered a sin? The monk has spent too much time staring at dead leaves on the ground and has let his brain rot. A straw you can see through from one side, you can also see through from the other. If it's not a sin for Shiki to attack humans in order to survive, than it's equally not a sin for humans to attack Shiki in order to survive. Animals and other living things in nature attack those they perceive as threats, and especially in this case, actually ARE threats to their very existence. They are not sinners.

The monk is displaying the age-old, wildly inaccurate cliche of a buddhist monk unwilling to hurt a fly or take a breath in fear he might swallow a spider. It's pacifism to the extreme, submission to any and all opposing forces. It's doubly more incredulous as this is a Japanese work, not some clueless white hippy writing about peace and love in his downtown studio apartment. The Japanese should know better. Buddhism has never preached pacifism. There are warrior monks and they practice martial arts not only as a means of defense, but also to wage war against existential threats, including genocide if they deem necessary. They aren't there to conquer or oppress, but they sure as hell aren't going to wilt like a flower in front of an enemy.

There are also other vague possibilities not fully supported and just mentioned in passing of why he would help the Shiki. Maybe he's just trying to be rebellious in defiance to his clean-shaven, peaceful role as the benevolent monk, a role he inherited. Maybe he's undergoing an existential crisis and doesn't know his purpose in life. Maybe his morals are far more fluid and questionable than once thought. In any case, he's just another anime cliche, a poorly written character serving only to oppose one of the main protagonists of the story, Dr. Ozaki, and of course they use to be besties. It's the Suzaku to every Lelouch. The Sasuke to every Naruto.

The anime abruptly ends with no real conclusion, with everything bloody and on fire. It did it's job in checking the boxes to make an "adult" and "thought-provoking" shitshow that viewers will applaud as deep and profound but can't support in any sensible argument. Death, murder, and violence? Check. People crying and pleading for help? Check. Moral ambiguity and depravity? Check. Stuff on fire? Check. Long, drawn out philosophical musings? Check. Shock value? Check. No happy endings and everyone dies? Check. The moral of the story is...nothing really matters and the universe is chaotic but at least I'm getting paid by technically ticking off every checkbox.