.

One of their first functional (and one of their most defining) actions as a group was when they stole a Beacon – one of HIS Beacons. A Beacon he took from the Dynasty and gave to the Assembly in an INCREDIBLY risky gamble, so risky it ultimately plunged the continent into war, because that’s how badly he wanted learn something about it.

And the Mighty Nein, on a fucking whim, vanished it from under their noses. NOT ONLY was Essek deprived of further research, but he couldn’t even smooth over the tensions on either side. Essek was probably the only person alive, besides the Mighty Nein, who could know for a fact that neither the Empire nor the Dynasty had what the war functionally started over. By stealing the Beacon, the Mighty Nein made sure neither side could be happy, and Essek was the one stuck in between.

But then, they returned it to the Bright Queen! Surely that’s good for Essek, right? Except, one, now he gets no more of the research he enabled a war for, and two, it wasn’t even traded as a price to stop the bloodshed, which seems to be something he genuinely wants. So, cool! Beacon #1 is certainly out of his hands, out of the hands of the people who might have told him SOMETHING about it, and it wasn’t even for the sake of the war ending. …Great! Fun. Okay.

But what did the Mighty Nein trade it for? Why, the freedom of Essek’s prisoner, of course! Because surprise! That’s one of their number’s husband. And it’s a complete coincidence.  Were you using one of the poor saps conducting the research as a way to finally learn about said research, Essek? No longer. Yeza’s gone now. Suck it.

So, the Mighty Nein took a Beacon completely out of his hands, made it useless to him in every way possible, and removed his access to his one (1) avenue of information on the Beacon. That’s surely already Fuck These Guys territory for Essek, right?

Well, guess what Essek! YOU have been chosen to be the lucky drow who gets to babysit them! For the entire time! They’re here!

But hey, they’re only visitors, just keep them at arm’s length for a few days and then you’ll never have to see them aga- Oh look, your Den and by extension YOUR MOTHER gave them a house. They live here now.

And Essek just has to sit there like “… :).”

AND ON TOP OF ALL OF THAT, EVERY WEEK OR SO, THEY COME BACK AND SAY:

“Hey Essek! We just thought you should know, we think there’s a traitor in the Dynasty, crazy right?”

“Hey Essek, we think this possible traitor actually GAVE the Empire the Beacons, isn’t that WILD?”

“Hey Essek, did we mention that we have connections not only to the Empire but to the Assembly specifically, AND we have easy access to the Empire in general, so we can totally dig around there AND here as much as we like? Wow, not many people could do that, huh?”

“Hey Essek, did you know our monk is trained to ruthlessly ferret out the truth no matter what, and also she’s super invested in the well being of all these civillians? Boy, she sure seems to want to get to the bottom of things!”

“Hey Essek, did you know that our wizard who knows a lot about the arcane and is super interested in dunamancy and also has a perfect memory was a Scourger in training and speaks Zemnian? He can interrogate another one of your captives for you, wonder if they know anything about traitors or what the Assembly might be up to!”

“Hey Essek, we have a cunning plan to interrogate ANOTHER prisoner of yours! You know, that one who totally sold the Beacons! Aren’t we smart, don’t you like it?”

“Hey Essek! This prisoner seems to be innocent? Like, his memories were planted and he’s almost been… framed, or something? Wild! Let’s go tell the Bright Queen together!!!!”

“HEY ESSEK! Crazy news, we almost single handedly coordinated a peace talks, and we’ll be overseeing all the big interactions on both sides! Wonder what we could learn from those interactions? Anyway, bye!”

IT NEVER ENDS. IT NEVER, EVER ENDS FOR ESSEK. HE LIVES NEXT DOOR. JESTER MESSAGES HIM CONSTANTLY. HIS MUM OWNS THEIR HOUSE. HE’S BORDERLINE AT THEIR BECK AND CALL. 

AND IT’S ALMOST LIKE THEY WERE SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED TO COUNTERACT HIS EVERY MOVE.

WHICH HE HAS TO HEAR ABOUT. CONSTANTLY.

Not only should the Nein by all rights have disliked him, he by all rights should FUCKING HATE the Mighty Nein.

The Mighty Nein were the bane of his existence. He must have laid awake some nights, wondering if they were taunting him. How could they know so much, and yet not realise he’s the last person they should be confiding in? How could he have run into a group with an ex-student of one of the men he’s illegally working with, by accident? HOW could he have kidnapped, out of all the researchers involved with the Beacons, the one married to a Mighty Nein member? Why does the truth-sniffing monk know Undercommon now. WHY is the firblog so fucking perceptive. And please, please, why won’t the tiefling stop messaging him?

Surely, they’re taunting him. They’re his own personal hell.

And they keep inviting him to dinner.

…I think I’ve made the joke several times now that somewhere out there, the big players in the war must fucking hate the Nein, accomplishing so much by accident.

Well I’ve found out who that big player is and his name is Essek. It’s him. Everything the Nein have done of any significance has made specifically his life harder, and on top of all that? 

They don’t even let him hate them properly, like Actual Nemeses™. Instead they gave him a morality crises. 

Because that’s the final, most poetic indignity of them all. 

It is so well thought out, it doesn’t miss a single beat, and I may never stop laughing.

People keep speculating about how, if things had gone differently, the Mighty Nein would have been Essek’s nemeses. Guys…they were. They were. They just didn’t know it.

They have been working tirelessly against him all this time. They have thwarted him at every possible turn. They have ruined all his plans, uncovered his secrets one by one, posed a serious threat to his life. And they have done it all while telling him how cool he is, giving him cupcakes and parasols and incredibly rare magic items and spells, inviting him into their house and their hot tub and their innermost lives.

This is the story of a man being slowly conquered by his enemies who don’t even don’t even know they’re his enemies. Conquered in every possible way. Because by the time it’s over? He holds allegiance to no one but them. They are the first people he has ever cared about besides himself. He has never regretted anything in his entire life except betraying them before he even met them.

When King Conrad III defeated the Duke of Welf (in the year 1140) and placed Weinsberg under siege, the wives of the besieged castle negotiated a surrender which granted them the right to leave with whatever they could carry on their shoulders. The king allowed them that much. Leaving everything else aside, each woman took her own husband on her shoulders and carried him out. When the king’s people saw what was happening, many of them said that that was not what had been meant and wanted to put a stop to it. But the king laughed and accepted the women’s clever trick. “A king” he said, “should always stand by his word.”

It’s like - we’ve all seen bad shows, probably worse shows than Ex-Arm. We’re familiar with the reasons why: Low budget and no idea how to stretch what little budget they have, incompetence, lack of interest or inspiration from the creative team, executive meddling, what-have-you. It’s old hat by now.

But Ex-Arm is just endlessly interesting to me because it’s an animated series where the director decided he didn’t need any animators. As other people have pointed out, it’s not like Ex-Arm is cheaply made, it’s got what is probably a very impressive budget! And it isn’t like the director is necessarily wholly incompetent, he’s directed several live-action movies and dramas! And Crunchyroll, who deal exclusively in anime, must surely have some idea of what does and does not make a good anime!

And yet, multiple people signed off on this animated series whose staff did not include animators.

If you ever needed a more perfect crystallisation of the idea of high-prestige and low-prestige work in entertainment, and the idea that the industry elevates individuals in managerial positions while devaluing the teams under them, just - just think about that. Think about Yoshimatsu Kimura, who has never directed an animated series before in his entire career, declaring that he was just going to hire his usual live-action team, and multiple producers going “I see no way this could go wrong.”

It sounds absolutely absurd, like a parody of the industry’s devaluation of certain workers, and yet it actually happened, and then Kimura declared that Ex-Arm was going to be the best science fiction anime ever created and make every other work in the genre look like trash.

I don’t understand how anyone could find that less than riveting. 

But it doesn’t even stop there!

So Kimura, the music director, is a guitar teacher and part-time DJ under the name SIGMA X81. He’s never worked on an anime before, and his music is … pretty terrible, to be honest. Not the worst, but, like, if you listen to it, and then you heard ‘And this was composed and played by a middle-aged guitar teacher who is also a small-time DJ,’ you’d go ‘Yeah, no, that tracks.’

Tommy Morton, the writer, is also a first-time writer, and appears to not … actually … speak Japanese? Like, anime adaptations that utilise a Japanese animation team but which are initially written in English and dubbed into Japanese after the fact aren’t uncommon these days, especially on streaming platforms, that’s what the excellent Castlevania was and also what the equivalently terrible Dragon’s Dogma was. But there’s two differences here: Firstly, Ex-Arm is adapted from a manga that hasn’t been localised into English yet, which means that Morton was either translating as well as writing, or that he was working with a translator and writing based on their work, neither of which is ideal. The second difference is that Ex-Arm wasn’t scripted and recorded in English and then dubbed into Japanese, but rather seems to have been translated from the manga, scripted in English, translated back into Japanese, and then recorded in Japanese.

And as you can probably tell by now, Crunchyroll’s seeming intent here was to give first-time directors (for anime, at least), composers, writers etc a platform to get their names out there, which is very admirable. Unfortunately, they picked a director who didn’t think he needed animators, a composer who’s a middling DJ, and – I mean, admittedly, the writing is the most competent part of the whole production here, even if it’s not that great.

Just … fascinating. If we emerged from the hellscape of 2020 for one thing, it was so we could bear witness to Ex-Arm, and I say that without even a hint of irony or sarcasm. They say you learn more from failure than success, and Ex-Arm is a masterclass, far and away the most interesting anime of the decade from a production standpoint.

And there’s my queer ass being like literally none of you get it. this isn’t about power, this is about love and alienation and acceptance. you dumbasses, I’m the monster. this isn’t a metaphor for your shitty boyfriend, this is a metaphor for my own alienation from a society that tells me a the way i am and the way I love are grotesque. this is a fantasy of love free of judgement, separate from societal standards that I’ll never live up to anyway. that ghoul doesn’t care if I’m fat, they think it’s hot that I eat well. that immortal fae creature doesn’t care if the gender on my birth certificate matches the one I use now, they barely have a concept of gender in the first place. that tentacle monster doesn’t care if I shave, they don’t have eyes