Guilty Crown In Retrospect

Nobody can stop the Shuper Saiyan.

So, Guilty Crown was an experience. For me, it was a mostly fun experience. I ragged on Guilty Crown from week to week, but aside from some questionable elements (i.e. the abundance of rape), I had a ton of fun watching it. Maybe you’d say it was for all the wrong reasons, and you’d probably be right, but if I’m having a good time, then I’m not going to question it much. Well, question much beyond point out all the dumb and/or silly stuff each week, that is.

There was a lot of hype for Guilty Crown beforehand, but even when it proved unable to meet most people’s gargantuan expectations, I couldn’t bring myself to hate it. (Actually, I probably liked it more when it embraced Crazy Trainwreck status than I would have if it turned out to be a competent Code Geass clone or something else along those lines.) For me, hype comes only in rare circumstances. My basic expectation for fiction is for it to be entertaining. I try to leave it up to the work itself to shape my expectations beyond that. So Guilty Crown was basically like, “Yo, I’m just gonna do whatever I want, and you can’t stop me!” and hey, I had enough time available to waste on that sort of nonsense, so I could roll with that. It’s one of the benefits of not hyping it to hell and then dropping it like a grumpy sourpuss.

If anything, that sense of just doing whatever and rolling with it made Guilty Crown at least somewhat unpredictable. That’s probably my favorite aspect of the series, which is why the finale disappointed a bit on the entertainment front. It’s basically the exact finale I expected aside from the ballet of the apocalypse and the epilogue hijinx (I didn’t think the ending would be quite that happy, but I guess the show had to stop crapping on Shoe at least a little bit). Other than that, though? Solid gold. Every so often it’s good to watch something that says, “To hell with consistency!” and goes for straight-up Crazy.

The first thing that will probably pop into my mind when I think of Guilty Crown is that midseason finale when afterward everyone wondered, “Wait, how can they actually continue the show after that??” and the answer was to make Shoe into Hitler. That is Guilty Crown in a nutshell for me. The whole Shugenics arc is the height of Guilty Crown in my eyes. You’ve got the student council being accepted as a legitimate form of government, you have Shoe as Hitler, you have Arisa going off the rails (with the unfortunate side effect of anime fandom’s biggest idiots shouting “OMG HORRIBLE EVIL SLUT” every week), Shoe’s Hitler Youth guard, numerical value assigned to Voids, and on and on and on. What a wonderful arc. I hope I never forget it.

I don’t think much of Guilty Crown as a series, but I’ll likely look back on it fondly when I do bother to think of it at all. If I actually hated it at all, I probably would have dropped it. But, no, there will always be a special place in my heart for Guilty Crown.

P.S. I’m sure you’re all excited about POLLS!!1!1!!1!1! I should probably give some resolution on that front. The battle for dumbest moment in the finale turned out to be a four-way fight, but the ballet of the apocalypse turned out to be the victor. People love Mana’s dance moves! Predictably enough, Shoe and his magical Segway of Doom ripped the championship belt from Mana and her naughty babymaking thoughts.

I’ll likely never make a post to officially declare a victor, because I want this ending to be as disappointing as the actual Guilty Crown ending, but I’ll throw up one last poll for the hell of it.