anime: Gungrave eps 1-9

[meganbmoore]

Started Gungrave on a whim after my long anime/manga post the other day.  Gungrave is about Brandon Heat, a mobster who died around fifteen or twenty years ago(as of the first episode) who’s resurrected, bulletproof and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound while carrying a damsel in distress, to fight giant bald white(as in albino) skinned monsters. 

At least, that’s the first episode. 

After that we backtrack to when Brandon was a street hood and he and his friend Harry are part of a small gang.  The gang pretty much survives by virtue of Brandon’s fists and Harry’s mouth, up until Harry sleeps with the wrong girl, setting off a chain of events that leaves the rest of the gang dead.  At about the same time, the uncle of Maria, the girl Brandon loves, died(in Brandon’s arms, of course) and she’s taken in by an old friend of her uncle’s, not realizing that he’s “Big Daddy,” the head of Millenion, the largest mob family around.  After one of Big Daddy’s men saves the boys for Maria, Harry decides to join up and climb the corporate ladder, and Brandon joins with him to be close to Maria and to stay with Harry(yeah, he’s one of those “my friends are my life” guys.)

I like Brandon quite a bit.  He’s a pretty simple and straightforward guy and utterly loyal.  He goes into the mob with his eyes wide open about what he’s getting himself into, but he doesn’t particularly care about that, he just wants to be able to stay with Harry and be close to Maria, even though she is, technically, “untouchable” now, and has no idea, even a good 6 or so years after moving in with him, that her nice guardian runs the mob, or that the same mob is the company her old friends Brandon and Harry work for(to be fair, they all make sure she doesn’t find out.)  He also wants to redefine “the strong silent type”…man says more than 5 words in a row and I kind of go into shock.  In the first episode, I figured it was the whole resurrection thing that had him saying one word the entire episode but nope, that’s just Brandon.  He said about as much in the second episode, but he’s up to about 15 or so words an episode now(not counting narration.)  Personally, I think he became friends with Harry because Harry talks so much that people just wouldn’t notice how little Brandon talks(I love the one mob guy who’s driven nuts by Brandon’s silence.)  Brandon doesn’t join the mob and magically avoid stuff…he becomes one of their hitmen, and one of the best.  When a hitman who’s killed around 300 hundred people(that anyone knows about) meets Brandon, his character assessment is that Brandon is one scary guy, to which Harry replies “he’s also very reliable”(or dependable…typing this up at work so I can’t check which.)

The jury’s still out of Harry…yeah, he has the “nice friendly talkative” guy routine down pat, but is far too ambitious for anyone’s own good, and I’m pretty sure he’s the on we saw running Millenion in the first episode, and the one responsible for Brandon’s “dead” status.

Now, while I’m enjoying Brandon and Harry’s rising up in the ranks of Millenion and all the side characters, I signed up for a monster killing undead mobster…I am not getting what I signed up for right now.  However, as of the end of ep 9, it looks like it’s going to start wrapping up the backstory and move on to the undead monster killing. *I sign up for certain things, I expect to get them, and I get snippy if I don’t*

Comments

[crumpeteer.livejournal.com]

Gungrave is sort of the Godfather of anime. Bad people doing bad things, yet we still like some of them because they're human.

I personally like Brandon (he actually ends up talking to Maria's daughter as BTG more than he does in the rest of the series). He's not good. He's a killer and he never really seems to bothered by that part. What he is bothered by is realizing the people around him are using him. It's Harry's betrayal of him that's the center point, not the fact that Brandon is sorry he was a sweeper. I think he'd willingly do it again to protect Maria.

The series is also interesting in Brandon's looks change drastically (goes from street look to sweeper look to long hair sweeper look to clean cut with glasses look to BTG). I also love BTG, as he's Brandon but he's not and just like Maria fell in love with Brandon, her daughter falls in love with BTG, not so much because there's any real chemistry, but because they're both women's white knights. Neither Maria nor her daughter really understand Brandon or BTG, but they love him because he's their chivalrous protector who expects nothing in return. He's THE model of medieval chivalry; love and protection from afar with no physical hope of a future.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

i finished it today *will do a writeup in a few*

I didn't care a lot for Brandon's businessman look...it just felt so very un-Brandon. I loved it when Mika was yelling at Grave for not talking very much, when he talks more to her than anyone else(I maintain that he became friends with Harry so no one would notice that he didn't talk much)

ITA about pretty much everything you said.