Akame ga Kill has become the representation of feelfaggotry. If you are one of those people who expects to get emotional from the very first episode, you will lose your shit with this one because (GASP) it constantly kills its characters and doesn’t resurrect them a few episodes afterwards. This made it super popular while it was airing and eventually got overhyped into the status of a masterpiece, because it deconstructs the clichés of fighting shonen.

And by clichés I mean plot armor and talk no jutsu, elements the shonentards got tired of seeing in Naruto. Everybody were so butthurt by Pein being talked into changing his mind and bringing back to life all those he killed, that the instant they found a show not doing that, they hailed it as mature and serious. Something which is not, since it constantly ruins every dramatic scene with out of place fan service and slapstick comedy. The mood whiplash it creates is immersion breaking, since it can’t maintain a specific emotion for more than a few seconds. Which is why it appeals so much to edgelords.

Speaking of edge, the show is constantly trying to present everything as grey in morality, since most of the heroes are heartless assassins and many of the subordinates of the villains obey them out of duty or some twisted concept of justice. What it’s actually doing is making you think if you mix extreme violence with extreme comic relief, the result will somehow be more grey than if you have clear cut good guys and bad guys. Which is not the case since blurring the lines of good and evil is not the same as making everybody a psychotic mass murderer who loves to torture and rape innocent people. The bad guys are pitch black evil and never show the slightest sign of remorse or questioning their horrible acts. Hell, they don’t even have any motivation for torturing and killing hundreds of people other than “Because we can lol”. Yet none of the emotionalfags seemed to care because it was keeping things on the edge.

The show is also praised for its very fast pacing, instead of spending entire episodes on unimportant stuff such as fleshing out or character development. It’s also adored by many for not having plot armor, since people are constantly dying on both sides of the conflict. Too bad any sense of dramatization is lost when they drop like flies without being given much screen time or any significant characterization. If nothing lasts for long, it comes off as superficial. And yet this is seen as a plus at an age where the average attention span of a viewer is less than 6 seconds. He needs to be constantly stimulated or he’s not going to give a shit.

Without much to care about a character, all you have to look forward to is seeing who gets to die next. Which is exactly what anime fans were doing in the forums. The first couple of deaths were shocking because they were unexpected, but after the 100th time somebody died, all they were doing was guessing who gets killed in the next episode. Nobody cared about the heroes or the villains, who by the way are complete archetypes with nothing special about them. The only thing that was defining them was their death. Which was usually brutal.

Over the top gore and death scenes do not make something mature. They make it extreme. They are just shock effect and have nothing to do with characters, because you only care about the act of bloodshed and mayhem, than about the butchered people in the middle of all that. There is hardly any time invested in most of them, and the show will make sure to make a joke out of their deaths, so you won’t care after they kick the bucket. And even if you do care, there are simply way too many killings close to each other that you are never given time to get over the death of one of them, before a dozen more are thrown at you. You are eventually going to be desensitized no matter how much you try to remain excited.

I could go on nagging about the low budget animation, the retarded script, the amateurish scene transitions, or the rushed ending, but I won’t because the anime would still be bad even if all those things were done right. And no, the manga is not any better despite being very different after a point on. You watch this show as a parody of Naruto, you laugh at it, and then you shake your head upon realizing that this is what modern anime fans like the most.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FP-gUVMG7-4