“Could you hold on a minute before you continue?”
CONTENT WARNING: This post contains descriptions of scenes that portray sensitive topics including internal depictions of the slavery trade and death (I think??). Reader discretion is advised.
Yeah, just expect every single episode writeup of Clevatess I do to have a content warning of some kind, if these first three episodes are teaching us anything. I still stand by what I said in episode one: this series is not for the weak at heart. That should’ve been obvious from the key art, as a wholesome series would not use key art that’s as serious as the one used for Clevatess.
And while I would’ve loved to go into as much detail about this episode and the previous episode as I did with episode one, there have been some scenes in this series that, while I didn’t need to pause the episode, caused myself to pause and be like “damn, they’re really willing to go that far”.
This series does an excellent job at portraying the situation that Alicia and Clevatess find themselves in through a way that, at least based on what I know of how stuff like this works, does not try to romanticize it. We see the actual nitty gritty bleakness in the situation.
Now you may be thinking about the second part of my content warning, where I seem uncertain about why it should even be there. “Sara, aren’t you talking about Alicia in the beginning of the episode? You know she can’t die due to the ichor in her!” you might be about to tell me.
And to that, I say: that’s not the death I’m talking about. I knew that because of Clevatess’s ichor, Alicia was going to bounce back. The death I was talking about is Nell.
During the episode, she gets eaten, but then Clevatess’s dark beast strength causes her to get spit out, and then Clevatess sends Luna to make Nell’s last moments better and sends them off. Like, I think that means that Nell is gonna die, but the reason why I added the “I think??” part is because there’s still the chance this could be turned around in the next episode.
But if Nell does actually die: damn Clevatess, couldn’t you have kissed the brick and tied it up in a pretty little bow before tossing it in my direction?
However, three episodes in, it should be obvious that series is gonna be dark, gritty, bloody, and not sunshine and lollipops. While I think nobody went into this series expecting that, this is clearly a series on the darker side of things.
I still remember the intro post I made for my personal account (aka: not an account specifically branded like this site) on ✨the fediverse✨, I had a scale of anime I watched with two specific anime on two very different ends of the spectrum: Chi’s Sweet Home on the wholesome end and I believe Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood on the more serious end.
However, if I was rewriting that scale today, while I’d most likely keep Chi’s Sweet Home on its side, but replace Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood with Clevatess just due to the fact that there’s less buffer time between the lols and the serious in Clevatess.
But genuinely fuck the bandits (except for Nell, Nell is/was the only good one), and go go Alicia, Clevatess, and Luna!
Regarding this series, I will continue to follow it as a simulcast, and I’ll still do my writeups for it, as it’s not getting into territory that I didn’t expect and doesn’t seem to be doing that just for shock value. To be honest, I highly doubt that I’ll end up dropping this show, as I expected dark fantasy, and so far I’m getting dark fantasy.
ADDITIONAL POSTS ABOUT CLEVATESS:
Sara Talks Anime 
Leave a comment