Akame ga Kill!
Leaving you to discover the plot for yourself, the anime explores a whole host of socio-political (hence moral) and existential arguments, utilizing almost all of the battles between the characters as metaphors for a specific (but always multi-layered) clash of principles. The imperial arms, or Teigu - weapons, armor, whatever, formed with materials from superpowered creatures, and bequeathed in a way not unlike the wands from the Harry Potter world are - give a significant, interlocking set of justifications for how the anime unfolds (thus serving as the backbone for the anime as a literary piece). Unpacking those two sentences inevitably requires spoilers, but since I am three years late in this review since the anime's release, then whatever.
There are way too many battles among characters for my lazy-ass brain to list, so I'll just talk about three major ones. In Episode 22, the sisters Akame and Kurome fight with their respective Teigu, the katana Murasame and Yatsufusa, and this was done so beautifully I think I peed my pants. These two aces in their opposing organizations (the revolutionary Night Raid and the capital's Jaegers) are destined to fight each other: for if the one you love chose in opposition to your principles and hence has to die, then they should die by your hand. (We see this same reasoning applied by Esdeath to killing Tatsumi, or by Sabretooth to killing Wolverine. Yeah, I just did. Sorry.)
I will tell you this now, and I suspect it will be true for a good number of years: there is nowhere I have read nor seen that shows as pristinely as this episode did what the contaminatory opposition is between a social scientific macrotheoritcal approach and a microtheoretical one. Code Geass lost this theme somewhere in the middle of its R2, Zetsuen no Tempest is too literary, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood became too metaphysical, Rurouni Kenshin is more existential (and at any rate I don't want to touch it since I have a lifelong crush on Himura Kenshin), and any book about philosophy of the social sciences that you'd care to name would have been didactic to death. Less pedantically put, this battle (like the rest) is an exploration of the intricacies in battles involving the large (society, norms) and the small (individuals, principles). In one sense, Akame fights against her sister because of principles that lean towards what is "objectively" just in the larger political sense, i.e., against an oppressive capital that starves its people; Kurome fights against her sister because of principles that lean towards what is individually just, i.e., for her comrades who have already died. However, the difference in their Teigu reverses this: Akame's Murasame poisons with one cut and gives all the individual feelings of those it killed to its victim; Kurome's Yatsufusa allows for an army of mindless things to be controlled according to the wielder's will.
The episode also demonstrates this by having their respective teammates, Tatsumi and Wave, show up in the battlefield. Tatsumi is there only because he's there to guard and pick up a wounded comrade (i.e., if Akame dies, then she's a more-than-wounded comrade; if Akame kills her sister, then she's a worse-than-wounded comrade). Wave, in contrast, shows up to interfere - he himself challenged Akame to fight him instead of Kurome. Again, a quasi-reversal that nonetheless reinforces that point: Wave is an idealist with the mindset of keeping the peace, and therefore siding with the empire - who, at Kurome's death, (the very same thing he's trying to avoid), says two things. He regrets that he can't do anything to prevent Kurome from dying, and Akame says that his showing up is already doing plenty. Next, he wonders what all of them are fighting for. Akame answers that "people who cannot answer that for themselves have no business with a weapon." Those two lines are a brilliant exposition of a single point, the last line I will use first: People who choose to fight a larger, systemic injustice (Night Raid) have a commitment that springs from individual choice; whereas people who work for this system (Jaegers) resort to individual reasons for their commitment. Oh, and not for nothing is the fact that both Tatsumi's and Wave's Teigu are armors and not weapons. (This concept Code Geass at least shows well - a hero has to have a sword, and a shield.)
The second major battle is in Episode 23's what-the-fuck showdown between Tatsumi and the misguided Emperor Koutei, which in many ways is the exemplar of that same non-binary opposition I rambled on about above. Tatsumi hopes of making it big in the capital in order to help his struggling village, and gets embroiled in the Night Raid's cause against it. Wave joins him for this battle against the Emperor's Teigu, Shikoutazer, an anthropomorphic, colossal... er... Colossus... that the Emperor uses to uphold the ideals of what, historically, the Togukawa era - and in another sense, what modern monarchies - stood for. The Emperor's Shikoutazer and Tatsumi's Incursio are armors, so this episode shows us three armors fighting with one another. These being armors is a brilliant way to show the differences in principles - while Shikoutazer is a monolithic thing that shoots shit (and aristocratically obliterates swathes of people because an emperor is supposed to protect his people), Incursio is an evolving armor, and it evolved (again) within this last battle to grow wings and finally punch/drill/magic/who-cares-at-this-point a hole created by Wave's Grand Chariot clean through Shikoutazer. Three ways of being shields: Shikoutazer - to be so big so as to risk killing those that you protect; Incursio - to evolve so as to know that to protect means to adapt to time and that you can only do this if you yourself have a stable oneness to yourself, and Grand Chariot - to keep the peace regardless of which political sides there are. Or if you want a prettier (i.e., more pretentious) way of saying it - three principles of dealing with time: to genealogically long for immortality without evolving; to evolve along with time; or to make it such that some things are timeless. For this last item I will use the first line from Wave in the Episode 22 explanation from above: People who choose to fight against the system from within the system are always going to have to faffle in between the individual and the society and would have to always wrestle with questions that cannot and should not have to deal with time.
However, it's the deaths in this battle that make the most salient point. Tatsumi dies not from the effort of killing Shikoutazer, but from preventing the fall of its huge ass from crushing people (who are stupidly still milling around in this episode). Both the rise and fall of oppressive systems will take human lives, and revolutionaries die all throughout this process: either in fighting against its reign, or in the damage its fall will create, or in rebuilding from the rubble. That is, they die from the last one because by having values that bypass legal norms, they would have to face retribution. For instituting a system that is "more just" means you would have to be illegal twice over: the first from fighting against the system that dictates what it means to be just (because you are by default holding on to a "higher" sense of justice), and the second from the newly instituted "higher" justice's standards, because you would have to die now from having to resort to unjust means then. The movie Serenity shows this quite well - those who work to have a utopia (in this case even on opposing sides) are monsters and therefore don't have a place in that very utopia they helped realize once it is realized. Applying this argument to the topmost political level, the Emperor subjected himself to the guillotine, because at bottom society's butchers cannot be their leaders. If you want to build a kingdom with no bloodshed and shed blood while doing so, then the last blood to be shed should be yours. For history shows us that places where butchers and shepherds are the same people are doomed to nothing but despair. (GG, Mr. President of the Republic of the Philippines.) And complementarily, the people for whose sake revolutionaries are fighting are the same people who will mill around stupidly while you are fighting for them. If there is a definition to "the people," then it is largely that - people who are simply living their lives. Again, no ethics or political theory book I have read could have shown this intricacy as masterfully as this episode did. The thing that comes closest is Pratchett's Night Watch.
Esdeath, defeated because she froze space-time, confessed that she didn't understand why people could mean so much so as to evoke personal responsibility. However, we see in Esdeath a compassion for her subordinates and a love for Tatsumi that seemingly contradict her destructiveness. And we also see in Akame a coldness that seemingly contradict her sense of accountability. These seeming contradictions cannot but seem and cannot but be necessary - again, the contaminatory oppositions of things which are never selfsame. And in being non-simple, both Esdeath and Akame hence necessarily and ironically represent opposite purities: the purity of intention and the purity of consequence. And from my rambling above, the purity of intention is derived from having no regard for consequence (and thereby embodying simple destruction); whereas the purity of consequence can only be derived along with being accountable (and thereby embodying absolute sorrow). Lethally wounded, Esdeath walks over to Tatsumi's corpse, and then freezes and pulverizes both their corpses. "That which you feel for Tatsumi is exactly the thing you said you don't understand," Akame says. If you're a cynic, please go ahead and say, "Yeah, yeah, love story, whatever." If you find this inexplicably elegant, then have a beer with me. We can moe our way to fucking Jupiter and would have been better persons for it.
Interspersed with all that are other parallels that are polarities: the equivalent of the gluttonous, evil grand vizier being killed by the equivalent of the hardened slum-dweller; said brawny slum-dweller at first fighting against an academic who wanted to change the system from the inside but later on working together with him to save said people stupidly milling around; unbalanced zealot who fights for "justice" against unbalanced token pink-haired girl who has the most psychological stability because of passion. (Protip: Watch Episode 19 in its original with English dub. Pay attention to how perfection is achieved in the minute around Seryu's shout: "Justice is served!")
What the anime cannot have a polarity for in two characters or things, it made into single character's contrasts within themselves: underrated cleverness (one of the things he said made me curse out loud for a full half minute: "There is no way to train your heart to be invulnerable." Goddamnit.), poignant irony, less poignant irony, and more poignant irony. Ironies all around. And barring that, Derrida all around. This anime problematizes simple oppositions within identity (that characters have Teigu is the most immediate example), and between right and wrong, and only thinly (which is the most just way of doing so) manages to give us a sense of which side is right. (It comes a close second to how Princess Mononoke does exactly that.) Beyond politics and ethics, it very thinly gives us a sense of what is just and what is not just because of how it presented its metaphysics. (Protip: Look at how justice in its Latin root iustus simultaneously contains what is proper, right, equitable, and things belonging to their place because they are in accordance to their nature. Which of course is problematized by having had Derrida'd this whole fucking thing.) (Another protip: Remember that whenever you work with anything of Derrida's, you will and should spawn countless ouroboroi that not only devour themselves but also one another.)
If all this complexity isn't enough, there's a character that seems most like an adorable cow half the brain of whom is devoted to fighting and the other half to chores. He might be the most overpowered of all supporting characters, being an organic Teigu (which is another counterpoint, to that of the zealot's organic Teigu, which is a dog. Which eats people. And regurgitates weapons. A basic exploration as to the contaminatory opposition between what makes a man a man and an animal an animal.) And he's anal-retentive, distracted by misaligned or disproportionate things even in battle (again as opposed to the dog, which is all battle, because it's a goddamned armory.) But anyway. Susanoo, the human imperial arm.
Fucking look at this character, man. I don't even know how that round thing's attached to his whatever. For all my shit in here the explanation may be that it's attached because gravity doesn't require physical contact since he looks like a cow and cows are worshiped in India and India is somewhat close to Japan and therefore it all makes sense. So yeah. I have now ran out of brain cells.
Image credits to:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/LCoE2VL8pgw/maxresdefault.jpg
http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/topstrongest/images/a/aa/Susanoo-cheto.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20160929030250
http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/akamegakill/images/f/ff/Esdeath_vs_Akame_Anime_Exclusive.png/revision/latest?cb=20141214201144
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