Swordgai

So I've been watching this Netflix anime called "Sword Guy".. er, "Sword Gai".

The show itself is basically "Weapons: Not Even Once" screamed with the maturity and nuance of Catholic school nun holding an "Abstinece Only" assembly with a megaphone and STD slideshow. The premise: Weapons are inherently evil, and if a person picks one up they're transformed into a mindless murderer, no exception. Two things are explicitely stated about such people: Their actions aren't their fault or responsibility, and their soul is damned.

The show follows a very simple formula:

 Ichigo? | Dub it as "Itchy Joe" and repeat it until the audience itself feels violent rage. (I couldn't get through this show without having something else to distract me so I couldn't use subtitles as normal.)

### Summary

The main character's name is Guy-.. er, "Gai", but I like to call him Generic McEdgerson Shadowblood. Generic is special because his pregnant mom stopped a serial killer's rampage, but since she used a weapon she and her baby got corrupted, so the first voice Gai ever heard was the weapon whispering "kill... kill... kill..." over and over. After giving birth in the woods the mom killed herself so she wouldn't murder the baby (because murderers are only murderers and nothing else, no other personality whatsoever). The baby would have died of exposure/starvation, but clung to the fallen weapon whose magic edginess kept him alive. Now he's the super-double-corrupted antichrist of violence who can't shut up about how the darkness is inescapable and the impulse to kill overwhelming.

His stepsister falls in love with his vacant expressions, empty stare, and unresponsive demeanor as he goes about his oh-so-dark-and-tormented life of having touched a weapon as a baby. Eventually, she touches the same weapon and instantly becomes a murderer, cutting off McEdgerson's arm. However, she's not cool enough to be a main character, so afterwards she drops the blade and isn't affected anymore forever. Nevermind that one of the show's major plot points is that a massive organization has been researching a cure to Murderer-idis for decades and have found zero instances of the process being reversed in ten thousand years of recorded human history; she's too busy sitting around being sad for 80% of the show.

Shadowblood's adoptive father, a swordsmith working at a temple dedicated to sealing away weapons so people don't catch the Violence, then makes a decision as sensible as his job description: With Generic's arm missing, the obvious course of action is to melt down the cursed evil sword of shadow-bad and forge it into a prosthetic limb, hoping the sword loves him enough to not do the murder thing anymore. After McEdgerson spends the rest of the season being even sadder than his usual depression coma, he cuts off his arm (not the prosthetic, the remaining arm it's attached to) and jumps off a city skyscraper in the middle of the night with no one around... except his stepsister who usually lives at the temple but felt like being at the bottom of that exact skyscraper for no real reason beyond "Is this show tragic enough yet? Is it??"

However, falling twenty stories onto concrete and turning your brain into curb-paste isn't enough to thwart plot armor, as we later find out one of the innumerable secret organizations dedicated to purging Murder-idis victims and locking swords away was following him closely (like, ten steps behind closely), and instead of preventing his suicide just poked him back to life using literal magic. Turns out there's this once-in-three-centuries priestess who attained true enlightenment as a child and lived her life completely devoid of emotion, so she's immune to Murderer-idis which relies on having a personality. However, she quickly falls in love with the self-loathing mannaquin who she objectively proved to be the superest mega-evil-bad-meanie that ever lived because his possessed body mercy-killed a rampaging monster. Having been taught to love by the person filled with the least love on the planet, she immediately dies because she wasn't pure anymore.

Meanwhile, McEdgerson's stepsister thinks he's dead, so she immediately clings to the next-edgiest guy she can find, Mr Rich And Good at Everything But Also Infinitely Tortured, or Rage Bait for short. After someone with Murderer-idis killed Rage Bait's mother in front of him and hospitalized his sister in perpetuity, he used his still-living father's money to become a well-read philanthropist/artist that every girl wants to be with and every guy is jealous of. The father, meanwhile, decided Murderer-idis was a good thing and sought to turn his children into homicidal self-destructive maniacs all while funding the very organization that seeks to cure Murderer-idis. For his daughter, he had scientists torture her while injecting her with Weapons-R-Bad Juice harvested from metal blades (somehow). For his son, he left a sword in his house. Their transformations were inevitable.

The two Lords of Edge, who happen to be spiritual twins because ancient fable nonsense, both stab their sisters through the heart. Both sisters live; Shadowblood's because Rage Bait gives her a blood transfusion, and Rage Bait's because her fusion with the essence of destruction gave her miraculous regenerative powers.

blah blah violence sadness darkness edge, battle for the fate of the world, an actual evil antagonist, and too many side characters to ever become invested in any of them. The Generic and Rage fight while Circuitous Scytheman declares that one killing the other will form a new variant of Murder-idis that can survive without a human host, and slits the stepsister's throat with a 20-foot blade (which she survives) because they aren't fighting hard enough. They kill Scytheman and fight harder like he wanted. Generic McEdgerson Shadowblood kills Rage Bait, but somehow doesn't spawn the variant because the writers know anyone still around is too braindead to care.

Everyone lives happily ever after, except normal Murder-idis is still around, all the organizations dedicated to stopping it have crumbled, several cities have been burned down and/or infected, and basically every non-wincestuous character is dead.

### Top Quotes

Rage Bait walks into the children's hospital where his sister is supposedly recovering, sees that the place is a bloodbath with children's throats ripped out and all the doctors dead, and says "Oh my god, not again!"

After Generic commited suicide, got resurrected, got possessed by his weapon, stabbed his stepsister through the heart, got stabbed by his stepsister who survived (and is still too boring to catch Murder-idis), stopped being possessed because getting stabbed hurts, and returned to the temple, his stepsister greets him warmly. Their mutual father, the swordsmith who keeps using sword metaphors and referring to McEdgerson as a katana, says about their reunion "Every sword needs a sheath." Right to their faces, as they embrace. This series is a neverending bloodbath and that's the most explicit line of dialogue in there.

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