So, has anyone else out there seen the one-shot OVA "Holy Knight"? Apparently it got a dub, but my local public library only has streaming access (via Hoopla digital) to the original sub version. Anyway, it feels like a 60 minute product pitch for a proposed much longer series that never got green lit. The pacing is crazy fast and it throws every anime trope and the kitchen sink in, too. It was reasonably entertaining I guess, but also left a lot of unanswered questions. The main character's sword, with cryptic Russian writing on the blade (which looks cool, but when I paused it and tried to read it, I noticed it was mostly nonsense, full of consonant clusters that don't actually get used in Russian, etc.), is a bit of a red herring, at least in this OVA. Seems like it should play a bigger role but they ran out of time? It's kind of nuts. In the image below, the character is looking into a mirror, so the script on the sword is shown as a mirror reflection also (which come to think of it violates literary Vampire canon, but whatever)...but even if you flip this image and try to read the Russian script, you'll see the nonsense I'm talking about. The Russian double "ii" (with special mark over the 2nd "i") only appears at the end of words, not internally within a word, like it does on this sword.
Still, I found it considerably more entertaining than all of Vampire Knight, but I guess that's because I'm definitely not in the target demographic for Vampire Knight (teen girls & women) while Holy Knight was definitely made with dudes firmly in mind (Read: it's unabashedly pervy and weird). I'm identifying vampire chick Lilith as the main character, even though ostensibly the main character is intended to be milquetoast audience insert character Mizumura Shinta, your average everyday Japanese high school student.
This OVA feels like a condensed re-cap movie for people who want to re-live in condensed form the "highlight reel" from a 26-episode regular series. A series that never got off the ground, apparently. Which is unfortunate, because the foundations of a rather good supernatural action show are present and could've been reworked into something great or at least respectable. The OVA teases an awful lot of potential but doesn't have the time to pay them off or adequately develop the characters or anything. It makes the OVA very frenetic and kind of incoherent. The "moral" of the story, if there is one, is "fuck tradition, fuck destiny, we'll make our own future and find love".
It's sort of Romeo and Juliet only with Juliet as a vampire chick who's inexplicably horny and half-Romanian, half-Japanese, carries around a weird Russian sword, while Romeo is your average Japanese high school dweeb who's also horny but awkward around girls and has a childhood best friend with big boobs who totally wants his dick but loses out to weird foreign vampire girl.
I was entertained, but damn this is a weird show.
