Review of Absolute Duo

((Reviewer's Note: This review contains mild spoilers, some profanity, and a Donald Trump reference guaranteed to be dated in about six months. Reader discretion is advised.)) You know, there comes a point in one's anime hobby where the viewer has to roll their chair back, adjust their glasses or rub their eyes, and wonder exactly what in the hell would possess them to give certain shows any more than a second glance. For me, it was this one. Absolute Duo might just be the single worst anime I've ever seen. In fact, I'm almost certain that it is. I've never beheld something that is not only completelydevoid of the slightest trace of originality, but takes its generic ideas and smashes them together into an incoherent Frankenstein rollercoaster of awe-inspiring incompetence. It actually kinda scares me that this got picked up to be adapted. Granted, 8bit has been known to take chances on, shall I say, less-established (read: garbage) source material, but the lack of quality in this just makes me wonder exactly what would possess anyone to think the source material was any good, either, and how it managed to get a high-enough profile that an anime studio felt comfortable putting manhours and their name on adapting it.

I guess I can start with the story. Tor Kokonoe is our main protagonist. He is a completely average looking, inoffensive dude who is off to this bizarre battle school to learn to fight after a tragedy in his past left him feeling unable to protect anything. Immediately, this should be setting off alarm bells. This sounds like every light novel adaptation in the last five years, and with good reason: this show is the distillation of every light novel trope, cliche, and standard that has been floating in the anime toilet bowl since Sword Art Online rose to prominence in 2012. Nonetheless, I will continue.

Tor meets Julie, who ends up becoming his "Duo", a partner to eat, sleep, and live with throughout his time at Battle Harem School. What's a Duo? Well, besides just an arbitrary pairing, exactly what a Duo is is never really defined by much of anyone. The blackhaired loli school principal implies that the whole point of the school is to find a pairing capable of attaining "Absolute Duo", but whatever that means, and why she's after it, is left to the viewer's imagination.

And thus we get to the next big sticking point I have with LN adaptations in this decade: they are always woefully incomplete, and that has something to do with the way that light novels are written nowadays. See, nowadays any hack writer can attach themselves to a decent character design artist and start his own light novel, or at least a web novel that may eventually find itself published in the light novel format. As long as there are moe girls to be found within the pages (and crucially on the front cover!), it will likely sell, regardless of the quality of the actual writing. And as long as these light novels are continuing to produce an income for their writer, there is no incentive for there to ever be a proper ending.

As for why I bring this up, well, Absolute Duo is one of the most incomplete adaptations I've ever seen. The 12 episodes produce roughly a dozen plot holes big enough to drive a bus through, and scarce in the way of explaining or elaborating on the very concept they named the show after. What the hell is an Absolute Duo in the context of the show? Why do Julie and Tor have all sorts of unexplained powers that constantly take their enemies by surprise?

The concepts that propel the show's copious battle scenes are pretty stock: every student at Harem Battle High has a "Blaze", a weapon materialized from their soul or some such that somehow can't actually be used to hurt people (unless, of course, you want it to, or something). Instead it inflicts non-lethal wounds that eventually render the enemy unconscious, quite convenient for when you wanna hype up your heroes without actually having any meaningful stakes in the battle. After all, killing is wrong! It defies reason how hard it is to care at all about battles where each blow means nothing, where no one is in danger of being maimed or killed, where the drama is completely subverted in favor of unpleasant fanservice and incompetent, unfunny romantic comedy.

And yeah, there's harem shenanigans in this show. The best harems, like the girls in Nisekoi and Monogatari, give clear and understandable reasons why each girl likes the harem protagonist. Usually these reasons are tied to his personality, sometimes its his looks, sometimes its his skill and confidence, sometimes its a promise he made them when they were kids. Hell, sometimes its just because he happens to be the only piece of man meat within 10 kilometers! Tor, on the other hand, is just a charmless puppet, a soulless, emotionally bereft clod who couldn't muster up the testosterone to hold a girl's hand, much less deal with the unyielding overt flirtations of the girls at Harem Battle High. The four main girls in the show are all just tripping over his dick to an uncomfortably fanatic degree despite the fact that he acts and looks like he has no interest in the opposite sex whatsoever. He's not particularly competent in battle, or even that attractive. He's a self-insert fantasy, the kind light novel hacks have been flogging onto the willing masses in droves, and he's about as transparent as you can get.

That said, Tor is a perfect match for the girls of Absolute Duo, because they too are bereft of anything resembling a character. Julie, our lead girl, is yet another albino deadpan loli. Now, deadpan lolis can make for great characters: Shiro of No Game, No Life is one of if not my very favorite lolita character, and she's as deadpan and socially inept as it gets. That said, Julie just comes across as creepy and eerily infantilized. She's been through some trauma, sure, I get that that can stunt a person's development and hinder their idea of boundaries, but Julie takes it to an insulting and uncomfortable extreme. She behaves like an infant, incapable of doing anything for herself except when danger is imminent, constantly reliant on Tor. It transcends the cuteness factor of her being a helpless girl and starts to trip into creepy land when she starts invading his bedspace in the nude in later episodes.

Then we have Julie's opposite number, the outsider looking in, Lilith Bristol. Lilith is perhaps the closest we get to a character with something resembling a personality instead of a list of traits stapled to a character design. She's resourceful, intelligent, feisty, and is easily the strongest student that doesn't rely on plot armor or a superpowered darkside. I won't go so far as to say she's a well-written character, but she's the closest the show comes to producing anything of substance, even if her three episode arc in the middle of the show was rather poor. Hell, "rather poor" is actually doing pretty well as far as the rest of this travesty goes.

The other two girls, Tomoe Tachibana and Miyabi Hotaka, are a Duo themselves, which leads to some obligatory yuri-baiting as they shower together, change together, and embrace each other buck-naked in one of the EDs. Absolute Duo knows how to pander to the least common otaku denominator, and it does so with great pleasure and glee. However, these two are also interested in Tor's cock-a-no-way, and thus the harem is completed. Oh, joy. Their personalities are bizarre, like the author was grasping at straws trying to find some original gimmick, and then just settled on:

--Tomoe being really angry at the slightest hint of ungentlemanly conduct from Tor and then apologizing profusely when it's a misunderstanding every fucking time; and
--Miyabi being useless but then turning evil near the show's climax so they can show her in bondage power armor. Oh, and F-cups. Because those are necessary.

Have I given you a glimpse at just how bad this is? I could go on, but I think I've already spent about a thousand words too many eviscerating this turkey. Nonetheless, there is more to cover, but I'll try to be brief from this point on.

The art in this show is nothing to really write home about. There are some decent stills, and admittedly the OP is very poppy, high-energy stuff. The first ED is also kinda artsy and came very close to striking a chord with me with its visuals highlighting Julie's loneliness and how arriving at Battle Harem High is her first step into overcoming her solitude and obligatory tragic backstory. The animation is dreadful. 8bit have shown that they know not what they do in this department, with an over-reliance on terrible 12 frame-per-second CG effects. The color scheme is all over the place with no real grounding in a fixed aesthetic style. It's just generic. It looks like the basest, most simple visualization of anime.

The sound design is functional but doesn't strive for anything more. The voice actors in the original Japanese audio do the best they can with the script they've been given. If you look at their filmography you can tell that they're all relative newcomers to the industry looking to make a big break, with the exception of Tor's voice actor. I don't know if I should praise or condemn Yoshitsugu Matsuoka's performance, because he manages to make Tor sound like the gormless loser he really is. This man is the voice of Soma Yukihira and Sora Nai. He should be lending gravitas to the performance, but it's obvious that he didn't care any more than the director of this fecal festival did.

I think that about exhausts all I have to say about this show. This has quickly become the longest, most rambling review I've ever posted on this site, but this is what this show did to me. It's not just bad, but it's the kind of bad that is all too pervasive in anime today, the ever-present idea that a show shouldn't aim to actually say or do anything meaningful in the medium, the pervasive notion that you can just pander really hard to the worst demons in an otaku's nature and glean some quick bucks out of it. It's sickening, and it's not worth your time. I hope you'll do yourself a favor and not only stay away from Absolute Duo, but make a point to avoid anything that looks like the same kind of show. We can make anime great again, but it starts with building a wall between our wallets and this ocean of half-baked light novel mush.

Until next time, remember that hugs can cure anything, including post-traumatic stress disorder and violent schizophrenic hallucinations.