Recently an anime called Darker Than Black came to our American shores. It was about a world in which some sort of disaster caused strange distortions in space to open up in the world, and that in turn is making all sorts of crazy shit happen. The most notable instance of crazy shit is the existence of “contractors” who are basically people with superpowers and variably bad cases of obsessive compulsive disorder. To use their powers they must pay a “remuneration” in the form of some compulsive behavior, like drinking milk, pulling out your own hair, breaking your thumb, grinding your teeth, eating cigarettes, baking cakes, the list goes on. The night sky has also changed, and instead of having our normal stars and constellations, there is now one star for every contractor, and they fall when they die. There are also dolls, who are emotionless husks of people with strange observation powers, and any number of people who want to profit off of this new world in which strange shit seems to be the order of the day. Long story short, the setting was really strange.

It followed the exploits of Hei and the syndicate, a group of people who fought against other groups of people and contractors. Hate to spoil it for you, but in the end Hei wins, most of the syndicate dies, and the bad guys who were trying to kill all the contractors are foiled again. Darker Than Black was praised for being an anime that really worked the grey lines of morality. You couldn’t tell who was good and who was evil until the very end, and most of the good guys did their do-gooding through some very sketchy means. It was a serious, adult, mind-fuck anime, that had an impressive fan base, myself included, so when I heard that a sequel was being planned, I jumped at the chance to watch it as soon as possible.

Darker Than Black: Gemini of the Meteor has not yet come to America, but I was lucky enough to catch a few episodes of it in the original Japanese. Unfortunately, it seems that Darker Than Black has followed many shows that have come before it in reworking itself to be marketable to girls. You see, somewhere down the line someone realized that long haired pretty boy muscle maniacs make girls gush like crazy. So while Hei, our dark assassin protagonist, was tooled to bring the hardcore action audience into the fold, he succeeded in bringing legions of screaming schoolgirls into the Darker Than Black fanbase. As a result, everything in the sequel is a little bit girlier. Still, this is Darker Than Black we are talking about! To compensate for the girlieness, Darker Than Black: Gemini of the Meteor simply becomes that much more fucked up.

Let’s look at an example shall we? Though Hei, our assassin protagonist from the previous Darker Than Black, is still around, the main character of this series is Suou Pavlichenko, a cute little red haired Russian girl who is on the run from pretty much everyone, due to her involvements in horrible experiments that were done on her brother. Around episode 2, she becomes a contractor with the power to … have an anti-tank rifle. No really, her super power is the ability to summon an anti-tank rifle out of nowhere, complete with six rounds of ammo. Hell, the gun isn’t even a magical gun! It still suffers from wear and tear and she still has to summon it just to perform menial upkeep! This is made even more hilarious due to the fact that she goes through a stereotypical flowery pink anime henshin sequence every time she summons it in which she transforms from a normal little girl, to the same normal little girl, except now she has an anti-tank rifle.

Not enough for you? OK, how about this. The protagonists are followed around by a cute little flying squirrel with a red ribbon around its neck. The squirrel is actually an old assassin who lost his body, and whose memories are stored within a computer chip inside the red ribbon. This squirrel kills people! Still not enough? OK, how about this. The main character has an old friend who also became a contractor and got a job with the Russian government. In episode three she summons locusts to eat her old boyfriend for no particular reason! The list goes on! The guy who has a crush on the main character is the son of a transvestite and a contractor that the main character killed! Hei’s love interest from the previous series is now being used as a human anti-contractor weapon! New characters with new powers are introduced every episode and killed shortly thereafter. For example, a character called “the magician” is introduced, with the power to conjure up any object he wants at will, in exchange for ruining the secrets to magic tricks. He is handsome, he talks with a lyrical tongue, and he dresses in a suave sophisticated manner that makes girls swoon. Later in the episode he was introduced in, Hei electrocutes him in the face … IN THE FACE! Then his ally crushes his skull with a rock, just to drive home the point that “this guy is dead, he is very very dead.”

Japan is only up to episode 8 thus far, so it will be a while before we get an official American release, but I can say that Darker Than Black: Gemini of the Meteor is a series to look forward to. It is a little goofy in the beginning, but once you get back the shrieking schoolgirls and get on to the good old wholesome murder, you will be sucked in. The series has definitely received a shift toward the girly, but honestly, you will rarely notice, and when you do you will be thoroughly amused rather than annoyed. I can’t honestly say I know a whole lot about the plot thus far, but they are slowly working their way back to Japan, where the events of the first Darker Than Black transpired. Overall, Darker Than Black: Gemini of the Meteor looks like a worthy sequel to Darker Than Black, even if it is a bit more pink than your normal anime sequel. Keep your eyes out for this one. You won’t be disappointed.

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