Hello everyone and welcome The Anime Pulse: First Reaction. We’re going take a look at an anime brought to you from the mind of Jun Maeda.. the man responsible for KEY software and providing such titles as Kanon, Air, Clannad, Angel Beats, Little Busters, and Rewrite. This time, he has an original worked called Charlotte.
General Overview
When kids reach a certain age, they awaken special abilities within them. What they do with these powers is a whole other story all together. Yuu Otosaka uses his powers to give himself a better school life until he is discovered by a girl named Tomori. Their encounter reveals to Yuu that there are others like him in the world.
First Episode Impressions
I really want to like this show. I really do. The first half was AMAZING. I loved the fact that Yuu can control others at the expense of putting himself to sleep for a maximum of five minutes. He uses it to cheat on tests and even to set himself up with a date with the one girl he has a crush on. We actually have a main character with balls the size of Jupiter and I LOVE it.
Then Tomori had to enter the picture and screw all of that up. She has the power to turn invisible to one person only. She still appears visible to everyone else around her. She uses that power to spy on Yuu and ends up forcing him to transfer to their school where it’s filled with others with bizarre powers. The goal is to make him part of the student council and to watch over him, along with the other students, to limit their powers and make sure they don’t use them to harm the general populace.
That plot point scares me because it would have been amazing if it became a cat and mouse game to try and catch Yuu doing this with Yuu just getting darker and darker as the series went on.. . kind of like a Light Yagami from Death Note, but instead, they just go the typical route and I think it’s setting this show up for disappointment. I could be wrong, but it’s just the vibe I’m getting from the first episode.
Yuu had the potential to be an AMAZING main character, but now that they’re putting handcuffs on him by the end of the first episode, I fear he’ll end up going from legit badass to just another humbled trope of a shounen high school character. Again, I hope that I am wrong here. Yuu’s little sister Ayumi is a character that I already find annoying and wish she would die in a fire. Yes, I know she’s a young, impressionable, little kid, but I’ve seen little kids in anime before and only a handful of them come close to Ayumi’s annoyance levels. I really hope there’s not much of her in this show, but I’m afraid there will be. Heck, I will even bet there will be OVAs dedicated to her!
OP & ED Impressions
No opening or ending theme was performed in the first episode
Worth Watching?
MAYBE – Too early to tell here. The first episode seems good, but we’ll see if the series can hold up.
