Review of Black Clover

At some point, we have to stop entertaining mediocrity. I have never met another series that falls so squarely into the "mediocre" category more than Black Clover, and this is not meant as an insult. It is an absolute, as objective as can be, accurate description of this series quality level. Never as good as to get you properly engaged and give you strong emotions, never as bad as to rage drop it. It simply, exists in between and offers a good service when you want something to watch and not pay much attention to when you eat your lunch. A big part of this isthe direct result of the Pierrot adaptation of 170 episodes that could have easily been reduced to one third of it. Instead of elevating the material to help the manga's best qualities to shine, they buried it under a ton of poorly paced antics and bad animation - especially in the beginning. Now, not that the manga had much more to say, but it could offer some beautiful action scenes to keep you hooked. Unfortunately for its anime adaptation, it was chosen to replace Naruto Shippuden's endless cicle of Action Anime for Little Boys by WSJ TM, consisting of what I am hoping was the last attempt to "endless" shounen battle anime. But, judging by the content, would you really blame the staff for choosing this one to sacrifice?

Black Clover has only one original thing to offer to its audience: That there is remarkably absolutely nothing original about it. Every character bit, every plotline, every flashback, absolutely freaking everything about it, has been copied shamelessly from other better manga that came before it. The one common characteristic of successfull series is that, even when they borrow themes from previous ones, they all have something of their own they want to say. When the author gives out something to the world, it is because his sense of self has something he wants to convey to a larger audience, and that is becoming obvious as the series presses on. The one question we always think of, is: "Why do you write? What do you want to write about? What do you have to say to the world?"

Well, Tabata just wanted to draw cool magic battles. That's it. That literally is all there is about it.

Black Clover pretends that it has other ideas (classism, racism, etc) but it ultimately is just that: play pretend on what made One Piece popular. Black Clover knows that rivalry as a theme is very well received to wider audiences (Naruto), but it honestly, purely, fundamentally does not understand the reason why, nor is it trying to. It just uses it to sell itself, without ever owning it. Also for some reason somebody told it that a number of female characters having inexplicable feelings for the mediocre non-charismatic protagonist also sells. So here it is, take it and no explanation or reason needed.

The characters are another exactly mediocre point of Black Clover - they are all likeable. But they are all also one-trick ponies. The cast is huge, so when somebody goes off screen for a quite big amount of time, you literally forget about their existence. I sincerely forgot that Yuno, the aforementioned rival, existed, more than once. One trick ponies as they are, when you make one "the cool, quiet, capable, few words man" he is automatically forgotten about the moment he leaves the screen. Asta, the protagonist, is less of a human and more of an amalgam of shounen MC tropes. Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you. "Mada madaaaaaaa" he constantly screams as a catchphrase. Why do we still bother with such low writing efforts in the 2020's.

Nevertheless, Black Clover is quite humorous. Asta really works best when he puts in his screaming into making tsukkomi (=retorts) towards the rest of the cast's stupidity. Noelle is also a good tsundere lead - as the heroine she was doomed to catch feelings for Asta from point 0, but she has a storyline of her own, she fights for her female friends and is treated as an equal to Asta and Yuno narratively, even though she doesn't aim to be the "Wizard King". (Really, how shameless. I can't even begin to count the series Black Clover is copying. Just think of literally every other well-known shounen.) Yami is also quite cool a character. Some episodes with serious battles also got exceptional animation efforts, and there is a filler mini-ark towards the end of the series that is surprisingly deep, dark and complex. That is because Tabata didn't write it, and it is becoming so painfully obvious because the entire atmosphere of the series suddenly shifts.

All in all, some people wil still like this. It's like comfort food. Familiar beats, nobody dies, plot explanations are horrendous and don't matter but nobody really cares about that. There is no twist that surprises you, there is nothing you haven's seen before, and even if you are new, it's very unlikely that absolutely anything in this will manage to move you a lot. But it is still watchable I guess. And sometimes, it's what people are looking for. Though I would recommend they should rewatch much better series, sometimes you need updated character designs. You have nothing to lose, but also nothing to gain if you watch this one.