C&C - Black Clover - "Asta and Yuno" [12/2]

If people find Asta annoying in the dub, the original would leave you gaping.

Definitely generic (many critics have pointed out how it borrows from Naruto, Fairy Tail, Harry Potter, Hero Academia, One Piece, among others) and by the numbers. I have been told by people I trust that the manga gets better later - I'm just not sure how long we'll have to wait in anime form...

 

I thought that the episode was okay. I don't think that Asta's voice bothered me that much, but I have heard clips of his Japanese voice so that might have helped. He still didn't leave a good first impression on me with trying to marry a nun. I've heard about this before, so I wasn't surprised, but it still didn't paint him in the best light. Fortunately, he wasn't being creepy and they weren't using the nun for fanservice in the process. It was supposed to be funny, but it mainly came off as stupid to me. Since I assume that the nun helped to raise him, this would be like asking your step mother or step sister to marry you. You could maybe write that off as being cute if he was five instead of fifteen, but it's just weird and stupid rather than funny. It isn't anywhere near as bad as what Jojo does with its female characters or even the recent DBZ Kai episodes that just love to throw in gross old pervert gags despite eighty percent of the world's population being destroyed, but it still bothered me.

I have mixed feelings on Asta, On one hand, he definitely comes off as annoying in some scenes, but there are also some cases where his determination does help to make him more endearing. His whole speech about becoming a Great Wizard King was so Naruto inspired that I was somewhat expecting him to make his own "Believe it!" catchphrase, but it seem like it came from a genuine place. Plus, I kind of felt bad that no one had any faith in him aside from the nun and not getting his Grimoire in front of everyone didn't help his situation either. We didn't really get much insight into Yuno, but I was curious about what could have happened in that day in the past that changed both he and Asta so much.

The use of magic doesn't seem too interesting right now either, but visually, it looked pretty neat. Asta wanting to help Yuno does help to create a sense of friendship between them, even though they had to go with the rival term instead being Shonen tropes. While it was expected that Asta would still get his Grimoire, it was a pretty cool visual scene and I thought it worked as a good ending hook of the first episode. It made me more interested in seeing the next episode to see where it's going.

Overall, I thought that the episode was okay. I do have mixed feelings on it. I kept going back and forth on whether or not I was liking it even when I was watching the episode. I can definitely see where the complaints were coming from. This series definitely feels like a combination of Naruto and Fairy Tail. I think that the manga started shortly after Naruto ended, so that might have made the comparisons more noticeable. That wouldn't be that much of a problem if it had some more unique spin of those concepts, but so far it doesn't. It comes off as a more generic Shonen series than it really needs to be.

That being said, it didin't turn me off or bother me nearly as much as it did with other people here. Nothing came off as offensively bad or so poorly written that I couldn't even consider watching the second episode. This is no where near Akame ga Kill levels bad for me. Considering my issues with other shows Toonami have picked up over the years, I'll take generic over offensively bad/gritty edgelord nonsense any day of the week. Generic isn't necessarily good, but it also isn't necessarily bad. My feelings could change as the series progresses, but at the very least, I'm willing to see the next few episodes to see where the series is going and see if I still like it enough to watch it.