Thought your bullets were clever? Fuck you.

This is entirely predictable if you know me pretty well.  I fucking love thief stories; heists, medieval cat burglars, I love it all.  Thief 3 is one of my favorite video games, and Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastard books are like porn for me (there’s a weekend in February, by the way, during which time I’ll likely be useless to everyone — fair warning).  So of course I loved The Daughter of Twenty Faces.  I have yet to finish the entire thing, and the show does eventually transform into something more than a caper anime, but damn was it cool while it lasted.  I’ve decided, Frank N. Furter style, to turn this moment over to pure pleasure.  Because Twenty Faces is a thief with a fucking zeppelin.

The first episode, specifically, is what I’m thinking of here.  Conflict drives story, but every so often it is enormously cathartic to see the protagonist fuck over a dill weed in good, royal order, and that’s how this show starts — Twenty Faces poses as a police guard, waits around in the mansion with all the other people — who are only there because he sent a warning that he’d rob the rich bastard du jour.  Then smoke billows into the room, he grabs the box, the roof comes off (zeppelin), and he levitates out of the room (mother-fucking zeppelin!).  Then we switch to Chizuko, an orphan living with her greedy aunt, who’s trying to kill her niece to inherit all the money.  Oh wait, who’s robbing them?  Wee!

From there the show gets kind of nuts, with a short section of Chizuko’s rearing among the thieves, and a protracted section where she tries to track down Twenty Faces afterwards.  I’m not sure how much attention this show got, I’m under the impression the answer is “very little.”  That’s sad, everyone should check this out.  

But back to the “moment” reflection stuff.  In every person, even the saddest, crankiest MFA professor obsessed with “real” literature, there’s still the excited part that sees certain things and says, “Yes, mother-fucker, yes!”  That part of me is fully engaged by The Daughter of Twenty Faces.  

I really wish I weren’t sick, so I could write more on these.  It feels like they’ve gotten progressively shorter as time’s gone by.  Oh well.  Just remember:  cool people robbing assholes?  Cuchlann approves.  

[Oh, and the music's great, even if you'll know all the leitmotifs by the second episode.]

YES

Tags: daughter of twenty faces, nijuu mensou no musume, zeppelins

Thus spake Cuchlann on Tuesday, 23 December 2008 at 2:47 am, and Anime expanded tenfold. Become privy to further discussion on the matter via RSS 2.0. You might grace us with a brilliant comment, or trackback from a distant podium.