Yuri’s first kiss comes as a surprise. Young Himuro, who was just a friend until a minute ago, turns to her under the blooming cherry blossoms, and she finds herself slowly approaching him too. A rain of shoujo petals frames the moment their lips unite. Later, at dinnertime, her sisters tell her that they already suspected things would go this way. Yuri didn’t! She’s happy, though. But the beginning of a relationship often involves new challenges and tricky problems, and as Yuri takes a bath and reflects on that magical moment, two Monkey D. Luffy-style serpentine arms try to sink her into the water, which has suddenly become a portal. She gets lucky that time, but the next day, as she is on a date with Himuro, she steps in a puddle, and the elastic hands attack again. Yuri ends up in a city made with clay bricks, where the guards of the Queen Consort are after her! As it turns out, the Queen is a witch, and apparently needs the blood of a time-traveling maiden to place a curse on the heirs to the crown. For this is ancient Hattusa, the capital of the Hittite Empire, and Pharaoh Tutankhamun rules neighboring Egypt, which means we are between 1333 and 1324 BC. As Yuri is running from the soldiers, a blond guy who turns out to be the (fictional?) Prince Kail jumps at her like a wild puma and kisses her out of the blue, then covers her with his body and his cape to protect her from persecution. Yuri’s reaction is, hum, a shoujo manga reaction, and it makes me mad. Okay, I’m angry now. Confused, she escapes him, only to be captured by the Queen and tied up in a, hum, interesting way. No thanks.
He’s clearly working on it, Your Majesty.
Red River is clearly a story from another era, and I’m not talking about the Hittites: I mean that it is an adaptation from a beloved manga from the nineties, and man, does it show. From those dramatic gasps framed in bright red or blue that I remember from Rose of Versailles, to angular character faces used mostly in parodies nowadays, to the river of tears flowing from the protagonist’s eyes. But most of all, it shows in the way the bad boy forces himself on the protagonist without as much as saying hello, and in the stylized shoujo reactions she has to it. From there, things keep piling up. When Yuri is tied up, her body is highlighted in an extremely distasteful way. In a symbolic shot that has no reason to exist in the first place, her nudity is obscured by a waterfall of blood. And you can see for yourself how Kai carries her out of the palace. One can gesture towards harsh historical realities all one likes, but framing is everything, and it is not hard to recognize the unhealthy fantasy dressed up in sword-and-sandal trappings. The writing so far is not great either: Yuri has a real knack for saying out loud things that we can see perfectly well. And Kail clearly has a sense for the operatic. He waits until the literal last second and rescues her when the executioner is already bringing down the axe. Well, she’s lucky he didn’t miscalculate. The only redeeming aspect is the setting: Someone clearly read a good book about the Hittite Empire, and the story is popular, so I suspect it may pick up eventually. Even so, I find I cannot put up with another episode of Red River, so I must say my farewell. Hard pass for me.
Red River can be streamed at Crunchyroll.
