So today in history, according to the Appendices of The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf was chasing the Balrog up a mountain.
So there ya go.
It’s been a weird week, but I did a lot of reading and finished The Return of the King so expect that in the Book Diary soon.
Anyway, I don’t know what to write about but this has been in my head for about a week so let’s go with it.
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Onyx Equinox Season 1 Review
For reasons that escape me, I get ads for Crunchyroll on Facebook. I don’t watch a lot of anime, so I don’t know why this would come up--maybe because I watch RWBY, and that’s on Crunchyroll? Whatever. Most of the ads I ignore because they’re for shows that don’t interest me, but this one caught my eye because I’m a sucker for Aztec mythology and an animated series based on it sounded like my jam.
So!
Onyx Equinox is an animated Crunchyroll original show (those are apparently a thing they’re trying out right now) set in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. The god of the underworld, Mictlancuhutli, decides that because there’s a slight shortage of blood sacrifices he’s going to invade the land of the living and start taking that sweet, sweet blood. The other gods aren’t thrilled with this development, as it will lead to less blood sacrifices for them, and divine douchebag Tezcatlipoca goes so far as to suggest destroying humanity (again).
Quetzalcoatl comes up with a different solution: shut all the gates of the underworld, and then the gods of the underworld will be starved of blood sacrifices. The other gods aren’t thrilled with this plan, but since Quetzalcoatl’s twin brother Xolotl is one of the gods of the underworld, they think that if he’s willing to go that far it must be serious. The problem is that the gates are made of obsidian, the one substance the gods cannot touch, so he has to get a human to do it. Quetz makes a bet with Tezcatlipoca--basically, that the human champion, who will be chosen out of the lowest of the low, will be able to close the gates. Tezcatlipoca bets against. Whoever wins gets the other’s blood sacrifices. And to make sure that he doesn’t cheat, Tez sends his most loyal emissary, Yaotl, a giant god jaguar thing, to tag along on the quest.
With me so far?
So Quetz picks Izel, a young slave boy who no one cares about except his older sister, and his older sister is sacrificed in an attempt to placate the god of the underworld. So he goes with this grumpy spirit jaguar and he picks up some friends, and they go around Mesoamerica to Olmec ruins closing the gates of the underworld to stop the world from being destroyed.
Okay you can probably tell that the god stuff is what interested me most.
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This series has been compared to Avatar: The Last Airbender in its animation style, and its mythic quest. But this isn’t a children’s show. There is blood. Oh fudge, there is soooooooo much blood. Buckets of the stuff. Think the animated Castlevania and in you’re in the right ballpark. And of course, being based off of Mexica mythology, that makes sense. I mean, it’s a belief system that says the gods need blood and hearts torn out to function and keep the universe running.
But soooo much guts.
There’s also swearing, and that threw me off a bit, because it only comes about three or four episodes in and feels very modern in a way that I didn’t quite like. It felt so out of place. Considering that the theme song is done in Mayan, I would think the makers of the show had the resources to find Mayan curses instead, or mix the two like what Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey does, switching both modern and ancient Greek curses. You get used to it after a while, but at first it was pretty jarring.
The fight scenes also need a lot of work. There are so many times where it seems like, despite there being several characters and monsters, they’re all so disconnected. What should be massive battles where chaos is going everywhere and instead there are separate little duels happening one at a time.
By far though, the biggest weakness of the series is that it’s lead, Izel, is useless. I’ve seen a lot of defenses for his supposed “whininess,” that he’s a guy who has been through a lot. The only person who cared he existed got sacrificed in front of him and now he’s got to save the world while running from monsters. Cool, fine. I don’t have an issue with that. The problem is that the guy’s useless in all the conflicts that come up until the very end. I’m not saying I want every protagonist to be a hardcore warrior type, but he’s not a strategist, not an inventory, not a trapper, not a hunter, not an agile speedster. He’s just… a kid that (understandably) freaks out when monsters attack, and has to not die while his friends take care of it.
That’s not a great protagonist. Especially when all of his friends are interesting and complex AND good in a fight: the twin athletes Yun and K’in who find themselves dragged on this quest; Zyanya, the warrior who survived her city being destroyed by the forces of the underworld; Xanastaku, the healer girl with wings; and Yaotl, the divine emissary that finds himself questioning the gods as the story goes on. I like where Izel ends up, I just wish he didn’t take so long to get there, or spend the entire time screaming and flailing.
If this show is to survive a second season, it needs to clean up its fight scenes and work on its protagonist.
All of that being said: there are some things that are really cool in this series. The design of the show is straight out of Mesoamerica. As this Tumblr post points out, much of the art and architecture is lifted from archaeological sites and artifacts. I remember being a bit weirded out by the some of the designs of the gods too, and while liberties are taken in a couple of cases, a lot of the details in those characters’ designs are taken identifiable in Mexica art. And given how rare it is to see depictions of Mesoamerican deities on the screen, I thought it was super cool.
The gods also sometimes possess people? And as they do we see some traits come out. When Quetzalcoatl possesses a body, it gets snakelike eyes, and starts being covered in feathers as he remains in the body. Tezcatlipoca gets a stripe under his eyes, smoke from his nostrils, and one of his legs wrecked. And if you know your mythology and Aztec art you know exactly what these traits are referring to!
And I like the depiction of their characters! The series doesn’t exactly have a positive view of the gods, but it does give them complex motivations and relationships, which is more than you usually expect from anything featuring Mesoamerican myth.
Finally, it’s good to see a fantasy story in this setting. The only other one I can think of off the top of my head is Obsidian and Blood (which is very good and you should read it). The aesthetics are completely different. The different kinds of magic are different and cool and I like it a lot?
For instance, Izel has this little dagger with a face on it? And when it gets exposed to blood, it grows into a much longer sword-like blade. You don’t see any swords, but there are a lot of knives, axes, and spears. The twins Yun and K’in are very obviously supposed to bring to mind the Hero Twins of Maya myth. And there’s a teleporting axolotl and it’s adorable?
Basically, it’s not great, it’s got problems, but I’m a sucker for Mesoamerican myth so I enjoyed it very much anyway. I find it sticking in my head for that alone. I realize that’s probably not enough for most people, but it was enough for me.
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