Oh, how my little history-luvin’ heart doth weep.
My bestest buddy is a total Anime Freak ™ and, against my better judgment, I’ve allowed her to introduce me to a sampling of Japanese animation. Some is great (Hiyao Miyazaki), some is good (Inuyasha) and some, to put it kindly, just blows chunks (Reign: the Conqueror).
Reign, for the lucky bastards who haven’t seen it, is the scifi “retelling” of the story of Alexander the Great, done by the same folks who made Mtv’s Aeon Flux. I should’ve known from the start that something was terribly wrong when Alexander donned bondage gear and set out to conquer the world with giant robots.
First, the title. Reign: the Conqueror has to be the stupidest title imaginable. It’s damn confusing, for one thing, since it sounds like “Reign” is the conqueror, not Alexander. Of course, since it’s Alexander’s reign, shouldn’t it be Reign of the Conqueror or something similar? Nevermind, that would make too much sense.
Secondly, the character designs are all funky. Everyone is drawn out of proportion, so all the bodies have insanely long legs and no butts, not to mention the women’s rock-hard breasts. What are those things made out of, concrete? The 3-D animation appears to be there mostly because they couldn’t spend the budget on useless stuff like good writing, so they decided to blow it on really obvious computer effects.
Half the time I can’t tell one character from another – Eurydice and Roxanne looked so much alike I originally thought they were the same character. The only way I can distinguish the males is by the colors of their jockstraps. Alexander has one – count 'em, one – facial expression. Poor Philotas has a constantly surprised look on his face, as though he can’t believe he’s trapped in a show so horrible. I had a bet going with another friend that Hephaistion was the black-haired dude we had affectionately nicknamed “Nipples”. I was heartbroken to discover he was the lyre-playing blue-haired fellow with the green scrunchie. I mean, at least Nipples could color-coordinate. A green scrunchie in blue hair? Ick!
For some god-forsaken reason, Cassander has been changed into a girl, Cassandra. I suppose this was done to fulfil the ‘busty ass-kicking scantily-clad babe’ quota. I can just imagine Reign’s creators sitting around, saying, “You know, this guy Cassander is kinda redundant. Let’s make him a girl.” “That’s a brilliant idea! Let’s give him huge boobies!” “Yes, let’s!”
The Persian princess Roxanne looks like Hitler’s Aryan wet dream. She’s also ditzy as hell, nothing at all like the vicious bitch she was historically. In one episode, she’s climbing out of her bath when Alexander jumps on top of her. I don’t know about you, but if I was coming out of my bath and some strange half-naked man in a jockstrap jumped on top of me and started writhing around, I’d be screaming my head off. But Roxanne justs tells him her name and then says, “His skin smells so sweet!” Yeah, his scent is really what would be going through any rational person’s mind at that moment.
I still can’t believe Olympias has the horrible cliche evil villain laugh.
The timeline is all messed up, but I didn’t really expect them to try to keep that consistant. Ptolemy acts like a nutcase and Alexander just rides around moping. In another episode he falls off the edge of the world and talks to Pythagoras. Why? For some ham-handed attempt at philosophy, I guess. Then he invades Athens so he can talk to a dude who lives in a barrell that turns out to be a gateway to another dimension. Riiiight.
Reign is a bit overly impressed with it’s own intelligence. There’s some nonsense about Alexander being a king of destruction and creation, and a prophecy of him destroying the world, over which Olympias bwa-hah-hahs her way through a few episodes.
Forget the meaning of life, the real mystery of Reign is why Darius wears a sweater with a jockstrap. One half of him is either going to be very hot, or very cold.
In the first episode I ever saw, Ptolemy was planning to stab (!!!) Alexander, and this was his entire rationalization for why he wanted to kill Alex: “Hephaistion has died, so Alexander will want to kill me, so I had best kill Alexander first!”
I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Ptolemy, you’ve just gone from point A to point C with no point B inbetween. Why would Alex want to kill you because Heph is dead? Unless you killed Heph, that is?’ I guess I missed the episode where Ptolemy, for no reason whatsoever, shoves an entire live badger down Hephaistion’s throat, or however the hell they decided to kill him.
Alexander has to be the least interesting character of all time. My theory is that he’s on that famous Persian hallucinogenic honey all the time, thusly explaining his spacey behavior and his tendancy to hallucinate for entire episodes. He’s high! All together now!
“I was gonna conquer you, but then I got high,
I was gonna be a god too, but then I got high,
Now I’m dying at age 32, and I know why!
Because I got high, because I got high, because I got high!”
And that, in summation is why I really don’t like Reign.
P.S. What IS that stuff on Ptolemy’s face? Makeup? Tattoos? A skin disease? What?