New Fist of The North Star #3: When a Man Carries a Sorrow ADV 55 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles Released: 12/14/2004 Reviewed: 03/04/2006

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Last week Joel and I took in the marvel that was Desert Punk. You must understand that when I use 'marvel' it's in the rarely invoked pejorative sense. As in "It's a marvel how amazingly crappy something could be and still be allowed to exist" or "it's a marvel that this show wasn't annihilated before it could escape the quality control sessions" or "it's a marvel that I'm still alive after suffering 3rd degree burns over 90% of my body." Sort of a pyrric victory. Would that Desert Punk was killed in QC, but such is not the case, and we're bound not to be that lucky. Shows like Desert Punk just out and out ruin the good faith that the postapocalyptic genre has established. But we're not here to discuss that stain on the good name (yeah right) of anime fandom. Joel and I decided that we would be best served by watching something that takes place in a barren, irradiated future that was actually good. It's not really that hard where guys like us are concerned. As long as there's a giant evil asshole with a god-complex, a horde of poorly trained mercenary soldiers, and a big dude to come around and kill them all and return justice to the wasteland.

And hey, that seems to be just what Fist of the North Star entails! This final episode does not deviate far from the theory. While we get to hear precious little of the popular "HIDEBU!" exclamation and the satisfying head explosion that follows it whenever Kenshiro claims a victim, that's okay. In this "very special" episode of the show we're introduced to another classic of the genre: the shamed badguy, spared his life by the victorious hero. Of course, as is usually the case, the badguy kills himself to avoid suffering the ignominy of defeat. What's even better about the ending is that it follows that old standard of the 'badguy who used to be a really nice guy until the world corrupted him' scheme. It's like they mixed every last hackneyed situation in the books together and decided to just see what would happen!

Let's not waste your time with the nitty gritty, you've already had two other write-ups on this show to get the peculiars of Hokuto no Ken fun. Somebody's bad, and then they get blown up. That's generally how these things work, and that's exactly how we like it. It's not very complicated. In our podcast, even, Joel points out how the show goes out of its way to be predictable. So why should discerning fellows like us like a show like this? It's lacking in complexity, dramatic tension, it doesn't even have good dialogue (at least, in the traditional sense) or logical characters. Fist of the North Star is one of those shows where the girl will stick around the corrupt warlord because she knows deep down inside he's a "really good person". I mean, come on! Is this the kind of drudge that people would pay to see? Why should Joel and I, fans of the upper echelon of anime titles, lower ourselves to the level of this kind of entertainment?

I guess it harkens back to our upbringing. If you were a kid in the 80s you watched shows like Transformers and G.I. Joe, shows where the good guys sorta just won, no questions asked. But they were harmless, helpless little shows where everyone had parachutes and the guns shot lasers that simply stunned badguys for a moment and then gave them ample time to run away. Fist of the North Star combines the "good guys prevail" standard that people like me and Joel were raised with and the graphic ultra-violence that a thousand score of middle aged Christian housewives will have you believe is the end-all-be-all of Japanese cartoons. It's everything we were missing out on wrapped in a convenient package of everything we already knew! It's the perfect show! But I don't know how this picture really fits in...