Utawarerumono: The False Faces

Episodes 16-17

Technically, this writeup covers two episodes. Technically. But in terms of actual meaningful discussion, it's mostly going to be episode 17. Episode 16, like so many episodes before it, was just a waste of everyone's time, and the less said about it, the better. So let's get that out of the way.

Episode 16 of U2warerumono revolves entirely around Haku attending an all-dude slumber party, so the show could even its ratio of fanservice to manservice and shuttle us away from all that icky conflict we briefly indulged during the Uzuurussha invasion. I thought it was bad enough that the show went through an earth-shaking war subplot without bothering to give Haku any stock in the fallout, so I really wasn't anticipating an entire follow-up episode devoted to making Haku feel better about all the nothing he did and said during that battle. Still, that's what we get, as Haku expresses his (extremely cliche) feelings about the horrors of war based on the time he saw that legendary Pokémon blow up that village and got sad about it. Unlike his predecessor Hakuoro, he doesn't bare his soul to his love interest (the character we're most invested in his relationship with). Instead, he spills his guts to a gathering of all the male party members major and minor, while Maroro molests Kiuru for "laughs" just offscreen.

Don't get me wrong, I think it was important for Haku to confront Ukon about what he saw and how he feels about it, but not like this. Haku talks to the most powerful general in Yamato's army, following a slaughter of thousands of enemies and allies both, as if the guy is totally separate from the horrors of the war he just witnessed. He talks to Ukon as if they're both just unfortunate soldiers forced to protect people they care about at the cost of seeing some ugly things, despite General Oshutoru's place at the head of all this collateral damage. Where's the anger, fear, betrayal, or just plain confusion from Haku at being forced to see his closest friend as a mass murderer, however justified he might have been? To be fair, the show gave Haku an out: Vurai was the one who did the "bad thing" in attacking an unarmed village filled with allies, but this is an extremely childish way to approach the hardships of war, even by the simple standards of the previous Utawarerumono. Even with its clearly delineated good guys and bad guys, the first series explored the wedge that even "justified" violence can drive between brothers-in-arms and couples-in-love much better than anything in this second season.

Wrapping Haku's threadbare angst over the war in a fuzzy blanket of naked manservice doesn't make it easier to swallow, it just makes it less effective. By the time Kuon showed up to confirm that Haku was totally over his war trauma for a full ten seconds before squealing "OH NO, I CAN SEE YOUR PENIS AND MUST THEREFORE HIT YOU OVER THE HEAD," I had already reached a new low of disappointment with the whole series. Then episode 17 came along, and even though it was a much better episode, my disappointment found new lows yet again. This time, it wasn't a matter of weak material being made weaker, but strong material getting totally wasted.

In the span of one episode, we get the full Haku origin story, and boy is it a doozy! It should come as a surprise to no one that Haku was an engineer in the days before the apocalypse, but it's a much bigger shock that the centuries-old emperor of Yamato is actually his older brother! In the days before his amnesia, it was Haku's job to monitor environmental readings on a highly-toxic and rapidly dying Earth, passing the results along to his brother for a more proactive plan to save the human race. It was called the True Human Project, and you can tell it was some real mad science nonsense because Haku's brother literally has a guinea pig in a cage in his room!

Most other scientists were looking to the past to save Earth, scraping samples from ancient fossils and splicing their DNA with animals to create new species that could survive in the altered atmosphere. So even if humanity itself would die out in the generations to come, at least they could leave new creatures behind to care for it. Of course, some scientists had a tangentially related backup plan to prevent their own extinction. Using samples from "The Iceman" (pictured above), who was a fluke fusion of a hapless scientist and the ancient divine fossil of Witsalnamitea that promptly went comatose, the scientists made masks that would not only allow them to survive outside, but even grant them incredible power! (I hope The Iceman never wakes up and disapproves of their actions...) Haku's brother was severely creeped out by this whole plan. He saw the animal-people as "decoys," just a synthetic, soulless, uncanny-valley excuse for true humanity, and he wanted to alter current humans to survive into the future instead. (Look man, just because you don't like pets...) So the True Human Project was born as Haku's brother slaved away to create a serum that would make humans stronger, smarter, and more powerful enough to survive in almost any environment. All he needed now was a test subject.

You can see where this is going.

Haku knew his brother had a loving wife and daughter (which he also seemed to be jealous of), while he was naught but a lonely nerd with nothing else to live for. He offered himself up as patient zero for the True Human Project, going into cryogenic sleep for the treatment. But he didn't wake up on schedule, because someone else woke up first: The Iceman, our first season protagonist, Hakuoro. The vengeful god inside of him was enraged at the abuse of his powers, and Hakuoro himself was distraught at the loss of his kemonomimi wife, who was dissected for samples. In a fit of madness and cruelty, this creator-god-turned-human altered the human genome itself, melting all of humanity into immortal formless blobs. And so, the emperor explains to his long-lost brother Haku, the "creators" that the kemonomimi speak of in legend and the "curse" blobs they fear most are actually one and the same! Haku and the emperor are the only remaining humans because they underwent the True Human Project treatment, which also explains why the emperor is hundreds of years old.

Oh, that's right. All of this information is presented to Haku apropos of nothing, during one of his routine teatimes with the emperor, just because his brother decided it was finally time to spill the beans. There's no emotional catharsis between them, nothing Haku discovered on his own that forces the explanation, it's just "time to move the plot forward," I guess. To make matters worse, the entire flashback is peppered with terrible on-the-nose dialogue like "as you know, you are my uncle!" from proto-Anju in lieu of any poignant exploration of Haku's past. I'm honestly not sure they could have found a lazier and less involving way to do this big reveal. It was all the crazy twists I wanted and more, but I felt nothing. It makes you feel like the people working on the show don't really care about this story, and it's such a waste of potential.

To wrap things up, after surviving the Blobcalypse of humanity by applying his True Human treatments to himself but unable to find Haku alive anywhere, Haku's brother decided it was better to compromise his plan than live the rest of his life alone. He resumed work on kemonomimi humans instead, modeling the high priestess Honoka and princess Anju after his lost wife and daughter, which also explains why they were vaguely familiar to Haku. (I made the mistake of thinking Honoka, Uruuru, and Saraana were human at first, but upon closer inspection, they have little horns on their otherwise normal heads. Thought those were headresses at first. Whoops.) He also gathered the remains of the Witsalnamitea masks from an abandoned lab and gave them to his own specially chosen warriors in the process of building his empire. In his defense, he doesn't know what caused the Blobcalypse, and I wouldn't have guessed "Iceman woke up and got pissed about the masks" either if I hadn't been there. In his not-defense, the emperor has apparently sent generals to passive-aggressively threaten Tusukuru for the location of Hakuoro's remains a few times, so he does know something about the Iceman. (We get to see Urutori again! And King Oboro! He has a mustache now!) Now the emperor rules the nation with an iron fist to protect the not-humans he made himself from all other not-humans, and he intends to use his potentially even-more-immortal brother Haku to bring his rule to new heights somehow.

After this revolutionary (yet blandly presented) twist-dump lands in Haku's lap, he goes home to Kuon and asks her what she thinks family means. So even though it hasn't been built up very well, we have a new conflict for U2warerumono's endgame: biological family vs. adopted family, and "true" humanity vs. "created" humanity. The emperor only sees the kemonomimi as comforting but unsettling fakes, and he will probably want to use Haku in some way to promote the revival of "true humans." Haku has come to live among them as the only family he's ever known, seeing all species and tribes as equal in their right to life. It's a great loaded theme for a fantasy series to adopt, pitting brother against brother over the question of what makes us human, but U2warerumono just hasn't done a good job of telling it.

I'm more excited to see the show reach its conclusion now that I finally understand where it's headed (especially if we get to see more of the Tusukuru characters!), but after seeing this series finally pull out its biggest turning point with no emotional resonance whatsoever, I have to accept that U2warerumono will never be worth its own runtime. At this point, the best I can hope is that it will be a better waste of time in its final stretch than it was in its first two-thirds.

Episode 16 Rating: D

Episode 17 Rating: C+

Utawarerumono: The False Faces is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Hope has been an anime fan since childhood, and likes to chat about cartoons, pop culture, and visual novel dev on Twitter.