Canaan Review

Week 3 of the ABC Challenge and C is Cookie and that’s good enough for me. Kidding, kidding, some Sesame Street humor there. C is actually for Canaan. I chose Canaan because I’d never seen it but had heard from several people had Liang Qi is one of the most psychotic anime characters of all time and wanted to gauge her insanity myself (more on this later). Looking back that’s a really dumb reason to watch a show, but I did. Honestly, I did not have a very good week this week and I almost cheated and used Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions’ actual title from Japan because I needed a pick-me-up, really bad.  But I decided, since Canaan had been on my list of things to watch for a while anyway, to go ahead and watch it. Spoilers ahead.

Basic Plot

Canaan has an all across the board plot. The basic overall plot though is that Canaan, your titular protagonist, is effectively the world’s greatest mercenary. She literally has the title ‘Iron Army of One’. She also has a very rare ability, synesthesia, that helps her as a mercenary. Synesthesia actually exists in the real world, it’s basically where you stimulate one sense and it leads to involuntary effect on another one. Basically in Canaan’s case she views the world in different colors based upon people’s feelings. Canaan’s also out for revenge against her former mentor’s killer and previous partner named Alphard. Alphard is the head of terrorist organization called Snake. Snake is planning a deadly bio-terrorist attack at an anti-terrorism conference in Shanghai. Their plan was to use a deadly virus called Ua to kill all the world leaders at the conference. Snake also utilizes a group of survivors from their testing of the Ua virus called Borners. Borners each possess unique and sometimes powerful abilities. The main downside of being a Borner and the reason Snake has control of them is if they don’t take a special medicine that Snake has, they die in a matter of days. While there is all of this bigger worldly stuff going on, the real conflict is a personal one between Canaan and Alphard. Which brings me to the commentary.

Commentary

At the beginning, Canaan’s reason for her conflict with Snake is purely based on her desire for revenge against Alphard. Later, this transforms into the desire to protect her good friend, Maria Osawa. I use the term “good friend” loosely as clearly it was much deeper than that. Alphard defeats Canaan several times throughout the series, yet never kills her. She has several chances to kill Maria and until the very end doesn’t try to do so. Alphard finally admits at the end of the series the only reason she was tormenting Canaan as much as she was, was because she wanted Canaan to lose all hope in her life. Which basically was she wanted Canaan to become like her, be a killing machine with no feelings. She wanted to break her former mentor, Siam’s, light which was Canaan and then finally kill her. What’s kind of sad about this is that she really did it because she thought by breaking Canaan she would be rid of the ghostly images of Siam that haunted her. It’s actually pretty sad and really brings a lot of depth to both of their characters and their relationship.

Elephant in the room again. My reason for watching this series was the gauging how insane Liang Qi is. Liang Qi is Alphard’s second-in-command and is also madly in love with Alphard. She’s honestly very psychotic, but not the worst. When it comes to everyone other than Alphard she is a complete sadist who loves watching them in pain. It’s so bad that every Borner is afraid of her, because of how she treated them at the Factory. The Factory being the place where they experimented on the Borners. When it comes to Alphard she just wants Alphard to notice her. This is your definition of a “notice me senpai” character. The other thing is, she also becomes a masochist when it comes to Alphard. She says a line to Alphard like “It hurts, it hurts, make it hurt more sister.” Her obsession with Alphard goes so far that she blames Canaan’s existence for them not being together. This actually leads to her downfall as she asks her assistant, who happens to be madly in love with her, to kill Canaan and she will say she loves him. The Canaan she was referring to was herself because she had taken some experimental pills to give herself synesthesia which caused her to look just like Canaan. Because of his love he killed her and she was happy that Canaan was dead as she’s bleeding out. Now in the realm of psychotic characters is she the worst? No. I gauge my psychotic characters on me saying the “____ is a complete nutbar,” which I did not say for Liang Qi. Also as a note if I happen to curse prior to “nutbar” that’s even better. I would probably not have Liang Qi in my top 5, or maybe even my 10 most psychotic anime characters. And that’s ignoring most of the characters from Tokyo Ghoul which are way more insane in the manga (looking at you, Kaneki).  Is she a psycho? yes, but she’s not really that bad. She’s just madly in love. So much that everything is just for her love and nothing will stand in her way to get it. She’s really a less insane version of Yuno Gasai.  This is not discrediting her as a great character. In fact, she is my personal favorite character on this show. Her personality and characterization is just great. Her gradual descent into complete madness is just fantastic to watch.

This show has a lot of political commentary. Most of it was looking at human experimentation. Basically all of the Borners were just human experiments of the potential positive effects that exposure to the Ua virus could give. Canaan’s village was also a test site for the original Ua Virus. She happened to be the only survivor from that experiment. Basically the political commentary is against both the usage of biological warfare and human testing. It also makes a commentary on how weak our overall bonds between countries really are. Canaan’s informant is basically a Japanese intelligence agent that is playing both the US and China to improve Japan’s political standing. China blames the US for being overzealous when they decided to bomb the anti-terrorist conference to end the spread of the Ua virus. Within the conference itself in the underground bunker basically all the countries’ leaders instead of working together to try to come up with a solution, were just arguing the entire time and blaming each other. Oh and the CIA helped Snake with the testing of the Ua virus on the villagers in order to create super soldiers. As I said before, the plot is all across the board.

Summation

Canaan was a unique for me. I came in with no idea about the plot or anything other than hearing Liang Qi was completely psycho. Overall the plot was a little convoluted and honestly outside of the main two characters, Maria, and Liang Qi the characterizations were kind of weak. However, this series was kind of thought-provoking. It also featured a lot of things that have a huge effect on the world today like terrorist attacks and political unrest. Also the series, had a very personal touch to it in the relationship of Canaan and Alphard. I mean the entire plot line is based on their relationship. Which is odd to say given the huge worldly implications of what was going on, but that’s how it happened. Even with all of its flaws Canaan was a very enjoyable show.