User blog:TonyMutu/Thoughts on Ao no Exorcist Anime

Well, i just finished watching the Ao no Exorcist anime adaptation and i would like to share some of my thoughts. As far as technical matters go, the anime was top notch, as it excells in animation (especially battle sequences) and soundtrack choices (this includes the two opening songs which were very uplifting and introduced you very well into the world of Ao no Exorcist). Now, about the story: it was pretty standard. The character of Rin is pretty predictable and bares resemblance to a lot of fellow shounen anime characters who have the urge to act first and then think about the consequencies (it reminds me a lot of Naruto, who also had a 'demonic' power inside him that he had to learn how to control). The supporting cast, with the exception of Mephisto and maybe Father Fujimoto, was rather uninteresting and they were just there. The world of Ao no Exorcist, on the other hand, was very promising (it was like a mixture of Supernatural and Harry Potter) and really has a lot of potential and i suspect that the manga meets that potential more than the anime does. I found the ending of the anime very dull and really unresolving, which is kind of the point because they tried to leave everything open, in case they wanted to continue from where they left off. But that really left the storyline of this adaptation in the air and doesn't give me the satisfaction of closure that an ending of a series should give. The fact that they introduced the concept of demons not being so bad after all (even Satan himself had a human side) and that what Satan and Yuri wanted was to unite the two worlds of Asiah and Gehenna, only to have Rin and Yukio just stop that dream, even though they weren't really against it (especially Rin), was baffling. I also really hated the last scene (this is not a cool scene to end an anime). The direction the anime took aside, the storyline and the characters still didn't quite hook me, although at times were pretty entertaining. And that's the reason i probably won't try to read the manga. It's not the not-so-original plot or the classic shounen characters that i have already seen more than once. All of that would be erased, or be of little importance if i was actually invested by the end of the anime. But unfortunately i wasn't.