‘Chivalry’ Anime Needs an ‘Asterisk’
This fall season there are two nearly identical anime shows about a boy in a magical fighting high school who fights with and falls for a gorgeous, powerful girl classmate. But while the similarities make them almost impossible to tell apart, they differ in one vital way — one has a realistic, believable female lead and one has a carbon-copy tsundere.
The shows are The Asterisk War and Chivalry of a Failed Knight. Both have a main male lead who is not very good at the magical part of the fighting the school trains students at, but is a superbly trained martial artist with special physical skills — Amagiri Ayato for Asterisk, and Kurogane Ikki for Chivalry. Both boys encounter a red-haired beautiful princess who is a top student and fighter at the school, both under typically ecchi circumstances — Julis-Alexia van Riessfeld, princess of Lieseltania in Asterisk, and Stella Vermillion, princess of the Vermillion Kingdom for Chivalry.
Both stories are basically typical shounen harem action animes — both boys are surrounded by multiple potential love interests. And both girl leads start out in fairly typical tsundere fashion, at first cold and/or angry toward the boy lead but eventually warming up and becoming the love interest — or main love interest (they are harem animes, after all). But when it comes to Julis and Stella, that is where the similarities end.
Stella stays a stereotypical tsundere character through at least five episodes, even after she and Ikki declare their love for each other and start dating. Her reactions are typically way over the top, driven by stupid misunderstanding, and serve as nothing more than a thin excuse to move the story forward or provide an excuse for something comedic or titillating (both shows do have mild ecchi elements).
By contrast, Julis is a rare thing in a typical boy’s anime — a female character written well, with her own motivations and with reactions that are consistent with those motivations. For example, in Episode 5 of both anime shows, the girl lead gets upset at the boy lead. In Chivalry, it is all based on a misunderstanding, and is all about a kludged-together excuse to get the Stella and Ikki to their first real kiss. In Asterisk, Julis asks Ayato to not do something — a reasonable request that makes sense for both of their goals. He finds himself in a situation where he has to do that thing anyway, and she is understandably upset. But her reaction — as written, as animated, and as acted by voice actress Kakuma Ai — is mostly based on how Ayato’s actions will affect their plans, not on the fact that her boyfriend didn’t do as she asked. While Stella resorts to typical tsundere screaming hyperbolic anger, Julis expresses a realistic anger at the situation Ayato has put them in.
Even when Julis reacts angrily in earlier episodes at Ayato saving her, it has much less of the tsundere elements of a female character secretly wanting to be saved, and much more a sense of a proud fighter in her own right that is upset that someone thinks she needs saving. Yes, Julis does blush when she finds herself in Ayato’s arms being saved, but even that is met in her internal dialogue with realistic disbelief at her own reactions, not the over-the-top shock and horror Stella has in a similar situation.
Both shows are entertaining in their own right, with good animation, solid character design and very exciting action. And both have one good thing in common — both boy leads are earnest, cool-headed characters that, despite being constantly put down never resort to a sense of being a victim, as is too common in much anime. But Chivalry is almost a cookie cutter action harem anime that will make you wonder why things can’t speed past the stupid stuff, while Asterisk won’t make you shake your head at the characters’ actions, and you will be left wondering where the 24 minutes just went.
