Review of The Labyrinth of Grisaia: The Cocoon of Caprice 0

TL;DR - Labyrinth of Grisaia (& the Cocoon of Caprice story it begins) is dumb schlock that sets out to offend & leaves you entertained. By the end of it, Yuuji has an engaging backstory, the rest of the Eden of Grisaia story is well setup & you've found yourself laughing awkwardly at rape jokes. Not for Tumblr. Fruit of Grisaia was, all things considered, a disappointment. A rushed attempt to cram five story routes from the visual novel into twelve episodes, the result was a watchable but not particularly enjoyable harem where main man Yuuji blitzed his way through the back stories& personal problems of the girls at Mihama academy. Now, with The Labyrinth of Grisaia & indeed the whole Cocoon of Caprice story arc, we finally get to find out more about the mysterious assassin who is Grisaia's cool & composed protagonist. (note, this review takes the whole Cocoon of Caprice story into account, not just events of this episode)

& what a back story he has. I don't think it's a stretch to assume that everyone expected the route Yuuji took to becoming a cold hearted assassin was going to be a traumatic one. But the tragic back story told in The Cocoon of Caprice goes far beyond what one might have been anticipating. Incest, domestic abuse, murder, child sex slavery, child soldiers, rape, war & the kitchen sink are thrown at the audience with abandon. Yuuji has been through more in his seventeen years than most would go through in multiple lifetimes. A life so brutal & a mind so traumatised that it's a wonder he has come through it with an shred of humanity at all, if indeed he has any left. It's a traumatic & depressing journey of despair...

...& I laughed.

I laughed throughout all of it. I laughed when Yuuji was sexually assaulted by his sister. I laughed when found his mother naked & hanging from the rafters. I laughed when he murdered a man wearing nothing but girl's panties, & I laughed when his dog was eaten by a bear. I laughed, laughed & laughed some more, at this utter clusterfuck of a story that seemed the result of the writer being told "Yuuji needs a traumatic past" & he just went to town with no editorial or self-restraint.

Over the course of Cocoon's two hours, Yuuji goes from neglected younger brother, to child soldier, to trainee assassin, to US Marine, to not-CIA agent before reaching high school. The story seems to have taken "inspiration" from a number of films & other media including Leon, Hanna, Platoon, Come & See, the Hansel & Gretel story from Black Lagoon & heaven only knows how many other possible sources. Even Forest Gump is in there.

Despite it all, it's a pretty simple story, serving to let us know more about Yuuji, his up till now only talked about mentor Asako & his relationship to the blonde terrorist Heath Oslo, who appeared in the last episode of The Fruit of Grisaia. If you've watched any of the above named films, you'll know pretty much how each part of Yuuji's journey will play out. What you probably won't be expecting is how gleefully offensive the story of Yuuji's "traumatic" past gets.

This story contains so many taboo & offensive subjects it almost feels like that's the intention. Be it Yuuji being molested in the bath by his sister, or him raping Yuria Harudera at the insistence of his mentor & molester Asako Kusakabe (&, of course, her liking it) while still a minor, this story just throws taboo & traumatic scene after scene like there is no bottom of the barrel to be reaching to. One should really be offended by all this, since over the course of Cocoon pretty much every cliche & trope that makes people give late night anime a wide berth is shoved in with no discretion. Rape as a joke, sexually assaulting a minor as a romantic pairing. It's all here.

Fortunately, the writing of Grisaia is so cack handed that even in it's darkest & most tragic moments, all I could do was laugh. Cocoon handles the subjects it raises with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, & while it plays its subject straight it's pretty apparent that the whole thing is a joke; an attempt to see just how far they can push it & still come out with a coherent story at the end. & to the show's credit, Cocoon is the best story arc in the Grisaia series so far. While Fruit of Grisaia felt like it was rushing through most of the girls back story to get to Amane's, which then ended up mostly being about Yuuji's sister anyway, Cocoon is focused purely on Yuuji & devotes two hours to it.

Also to the writers credit, the story makes the effort to setup things which happen later on that a lesser script would overlook. The most obvious example is how the girls of Mihama academy, who play a very minor role in this story, are able to find out about Yuuji's past despite the fact that he's telling this story in person to Yuria (& us) at a debriefing meeting. It might seem odd for me to give props to the writers when I've dismissed the story itself as cack handed, but whatever I might have to say about the story, the screenplay is pretty good, & not just the bits lifted from other sources. The script is pretty dumb, both in terms of the dialogue & things like how no matter where Yuuji ends up, there's a pretty girl there to take a pointless interest in him (guy's got game). But by accident or by design, I was entertained by it all, even the Forest Gump/Platoon part which did drag on a little.

Cocoon of Caprice is what one can call schlock as a compliment. It's a dumb as a post story that tries to offend every sensibility you have, but does so in a way that I, at least, found both amusing & entertaining. I don't know how intentional all this was, but from what little I know of the Grisaia visual novel I know that it isn't something that takes itself as seriously as some of the anime adaptation's fans seem to. It's an entertaining tale of depravity that benefits immensely from the longer run time given to tell its story. Even people who didn't like Fruit of Grisaia should check it out, because the focus on Yuuji means you need almost no knowledge of preceding events in the series. Here's hoping the rest of Eden of Grisaia matches up to this.