RG Veda

90 minutes
English/Japanese
English Subtitles
Released: 08/14/2001
Reviewed: 09/13/2005

RG Veda does have a deceptively good roster of creative staff. It was released in the early 90s, when OVAs still had a chance at getting a budget larger than the $2.30 I spend on ramen noodles every month. Not only that, but it's the brainchild of those kooky ladies at CLAMP. This is made readily evident by the scores of men whose genders are completely impossible to discern at first glance. The authors at CLAMP treat long hair like some sort of freaky secondary sex characteristic... only prepubescent boys are likely to escape the wrath.

If you're even generally familiar with the anime market then you know who CLAMP is. They're a group of women who write manga and, apparently, have never matured past the age of fourteen. When I was in high school I used to think it was super cool to get crushes on my sexy, older female teachers and dream about them keeping me after class and "tutoring" me in the art of love. Eventually I became a big boy, though, and realized that screaming something like that in the ear of every single person I met probably wasn't as socially acceptable as I might've wanted it to be.

The girls of CLAMP seem to have dodged that state in their development, because every written or animated feature I've seen from them is at least marginally obsessed with screaming about how cool it is for girls to be in love with pretty, strapping, older men. RG Veda appears to be the worst of the bunch, like a slam-bang orgy of preteen crushes. The show wastes no effort with anything as mundane and trivial as a halfway decent story or characters you can empathize with. Every moment you spend on that is time you can't use etching more characters with translucent hair onto celluloid!

RG Veda starts with four seconds of exposition to the tune of "Uh, there's this guy... and he was really bad... and then he cut some other guy's head off and now he's king and here we are!" before it drops us into it's filthy quagmire of steaming man-flesh. I guess there's these six people who are prophesied to defeat the evil head-cutting warlord (who's maybe the most excessively pretty of the entire cast), but they don't really do much except provide various bases of fetishism for the CLAMP authors to bounce things off of. There's the mysterious and stoic warrior, the lighthearted and possibly dangerous trickster, even the impetuous youth! These are all men, of course. If your desires tend more towards the female persuasions then your options are a twelve year old and a lady with a swam permanently attached to her shoulder. I guess that'd be a weird thing to see, if everything else in the show wasn't ten times worse.

So aesthetics is just about all this thing has going for it, and it's not exactly strong enough to keep this ship afloat. About halfway through the first episode you'll come to the realization that this show isn't going to do anything but wax on and on about how much its creators love big, tough men. It's strange that there's no murmurs of dissent when something like this comes around similar to what happens when the most current volume of Preteen Girl Sexpots: Let's Live in a Big House And Be Awkward Together! hits the market.