This is another review I originally produced for a different site. At the time I wrote it, I was considerably less familiar with anime and anime subculture, so I have edited it to give (I hope) some better insights and context. At the time I originally watched it, the series was streaming on Crunchyroll. While no longer available on that service, it has found a home at Funimation.
Gosick, directed by Hitoshi Nanda. Starring Aoi Yuki, Takuya Eguchi, and Hidenof Kiuchi. Studio BONES, . 24 episodes 25 minutes (approx. ). Rated TV-MA.
An oddball anime with an oddball name, Gosic is a 24-episode series based on a set of light novels by Kazuki Sakuraba. Kalium at MegaTokyo described it back when it first appeared as more-or-less the best anime series of , and though it has some obvious flaws, it is overall quite good. Gosick is an attempt to blend four genres: Gothic horror, murder mystery, political thriller, and a more-or-less typical high-school romcom likely deriving inspiration from Toradora!
These four genres jostle each other on stage and frequently fail to get along, and the show’s well-meant attempt at Deep Meaning™ ultimately falls flat, but the visuals are consistently beautiful and Gosick succeeds exactly where it might be first expected to fail: Despite its use of shop-worn tropes, it is a well-crafted love story. Though weak in some ways, it accomplishes its main goal and does it with an unusual amount of class.
The Setup
The year is in an alternate universe where the timeline of the twentieth century has been condensed for plot convenience, and the place is a fictional and breathtakingly rugged francophone European country called Saubure (or Sauville in some translations). Like most anime, the story is set in a prestigious university-like high school with a curiously invisible faculty: In this case, it is St. Marguerite Academy, which pulls in a large number of foreign students.
The Protagonists
Despite the date, our hero is, perhaps improbably, a good-natured but somewhat befuddled Japanese exchange student, namely Kazuya Kujo, who seems suspiciously anachronistic in mannerisms and outlook; in fact, he resembles the typical everyman high-schooler from your typical Japanese sitcom of the twenty-first century. To the other students at the academy, however, he is known as the “Black Reaper” because the superstitious, ghost story-addled student body has decided that his black hair mark him as the harbinger of death.
Note that this country is supposed to be near the Mediterranean, and that of all the physical features these Europeans might have picked out on a Japanese guy, they chose dark hair as the one to be suspicious of. This is, apparently, another anime made by people who think all Europeans are blond.
While exploring the academy’s towering library with its steep, mazelike staircases—a library that would be singularly unpleasant to work or research in—Kujo discovers, on the top floor, an arboretum inhabited by Victorique de Blois. In appearance and personality, Victorique is the archetypal tsundere Gothic Lolita: Clumsy and small of frame, and dressed in elaborate quasi-Victorian gowns that must have given the animators migraines, she has an addiction to sweetmeats and books, but she also possesses a keen mind and uses mysteries to fend off her ever-encroaching ennui.
The basic premise is Sherlock Holmes, except with the protagonists of Toradora! standing in for Holmes and Watson. Victorique, with a pipe often in her mouth (in the anime, unlike the light novels, she never lights it), receives regular visits from her dimwitted half-brother Inspector Grevil, who uses her superior mind to solve murder cases. And as it turns out, Kujo has a bad habit of witnessing killings or stumbling upon dead bodies, and though he absorbs Victorique’s abuse with patient longsuffering, he can throw a good right hook in her defense, so the two become a team.
The Plot
Gosick is not particularly clever as a mystery story. Many of its mysteries are clichés, and others are simply too implausible even for a genre that is often allowed to strain credulity. Gosick likes to keep at least two muder mysteries going at a time and generally takes about three episodes to wrap up one story. Some of those mysteries are more entertaining than others, but none are on the level of the best mystery fiction.
Aside from implausibilities and sometimes overly simple puzzles, Gosick suffers from several anachronisms, and the least forgivable ones are unfortunately important to the story. In particular, there is an elevator that rises from the ground floor to the arboretum in the library—an elevator that requires no operator. Less vital but still distracting is a telephone that unleashes a series of beeps when a call is disconnected. The phones, like the elevator, do not appear to require operators.
Overarching Story
As the series progresses, the present-day murder mysteries move into the background, to be replaced by a political battle between Saubure’s Science Academy and its “Ministry of the Occult.” In the process, we get a lot of backstory involving Victorique’s diabolical father, the Marquis de Blois, who kept Victorique locked in a stone tower through most of her childhood, as well as her mysterious mother Cordelia Gallo, to whom he did even worse things.
On top of all of that, World War II—confusingly—threatens to start a decade ahead of schedule. The Marquis and the Ministry of the Occult have big plans to use Victorique as a pawn of some unspecified sort in a power grab involving an alliance with Germany, and as she and Kujo grow closer together emotionally, they are nonetheless repeatedly torn from each other by events outside their control.
Gosick wants to get a lot done in a mere twenty-four episodes. That’s innumerable murders, a love story, a lot of intrigue, a handful of plot twists, and a world war that have to be dealt with in only twelve hours.
Criticism
Gosick’s biggest fault is that it’s rushed, which causes its various elements to bump against each other in such a way that they don’t get developed properly. Heck, even world politics get rushed in this show, with Germany invading Poland in 1925. Some murder mysteries are solved so quickly and off-handedly that it’s a mystery why they’re introduced at all while others suffer from an excess of complexity (and implausibility) delivered at too rapid a pace.
The overarching story has serious plot holes: Most importantly, we never learn what exactly the Marquis de Blois wants to do with Victorique, except use her as a sort of mascot or figurehead, which is nonsensical, considering that the marquis considers her mental prowess to be of such importance. And though Gosick does a great job with its two central characters (more on that in a moment), it fails to develop any but one of the others. The marquis is a mere cardboard villain, committing evil for evil’s sake, and Cordelia Gallo gets few scenes with little exploration.
The most underused character, however, is the blonde, blue-eyed, and bubbly English exchange student Avril Bradley (Noriko Shitaya), who develops a crush on Kujo—completely ignoring all cultural conflict this might entail—but instead of becoming a proper third leg of a love triangle, she gets no development and has little role in the story. Only Inspector Grevil gets rounded out, turning out to be more than the buffoon he appears to be at first.
Praise
But though Gosick leaves much to be desired in some departments and fails to satisfy completely as a murder mystery show, it has such slick visuals and succeeds so well in developing its two protagonists that the failings barely matter. This is surprising—or maybe predictable, depending on how you view things—since Kujo and Victorique are both pulled from the grab-bag of ready-made anime stock characters: Kujo is the standard good-natured, bumbling Japanese schoolboy with inexplicable babe magnetism, and Victorique is the standard high-maintenance tsundere girlfriend. As already mentioned, in fact, they resemble the protagonists from Toradora!
With a great deal of patience, chivalry, fortitude, and physical endurance, Kujo manages over time to break through Victorique’s chilly façade, which we soon learn is not merely a rom-com plot device but the outcome of a lifetime of abuse. Their relationship is never clearly defined as romantic and physically extends no further than hand-holding, but thanks to some sharp writing, good character design, and impressive vocal performances, by the time the last half-dozen episodes roll around and Kujo and Victorique are struggling, perhaps in vain, against a combination of national politics and global war just to be together, their plight is both deeply moving and entirely believable.
Final Comments
If Gosick is strongest in its wholesome display of love, it is probably weakest in its attempt to deal with Deep Meaning™ and Larger Issues™. As is customary in murder mysteries, all supposedly supernatural happenings are exposed as fakery and parlor tricks, but as the main plot takes over, we get a battle between the Ministry of the Occult and the Science Academy, with the ultimate message, delivered with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, being that Way Smart People don’t believe in magic because SCIENCE! That would make more sense if the show could resist using magic as a plot device: We learn that the Ministry of the Occult had, thanks to an especially gruesome form of augury, accurately predicted the outcome of the Great War, and when Victorique and Kujo are told by a necromancer channeling spirits that another great war is coming “many years from now” (which in Gosick’s collapsed timeline apparently translates as “next month”) that will separate them forever, they both believe it without question and rage against fate rather than dismiss it as poppycock. World War II is even blamed on an excessive credulity toward fairy tales (!?), and the show ends with a paean to science, technology, and progress … delivered unironically after scenes of aeroplanes carpet-bombing cities.
This war between science and magic, as depicted, is artificial; C. S. Lewis, who ought to know, points out that the two grew up together; chemistry grew out of alchemy, astronomy out of astrology. Besides that, this championing of technology is oddly misplaced, since the story occurs in an era when global war dashed naïve optimism in vaguely defined progress. And let us not forget that eugenics, which the Nazis finally made unpopular, was widely accepted by the scientific minds of the day as sound science.
I would pass over this with a mere hand-wave if Gosick’s war between Science and Occult didn’t always place religion in the occult camp. This may be due to the same innocent ignorance that informs most depictions of Christianity in anime, the same ignorance that muddles the show’s depiction of European culture and history; it may be that some Japanese men looking at the West have a hard time distinguishing a Christian from a magician just as Western men have had notorious difficulty parsing Eastern religions and traditions. It’s also worth noting that Gosick evinces little interest in religion as such and only rarely mentions it directly. Still, I find it unfortunate that one of the strongholds of occultism in the show is a Catholic convent (with the un-convent-like name of “Beelzebub’s Skull,” no less). At any rate, this is backwards: The Catholic Church has generally taken a high view of science and a low view of the occult.
