Lycoris Recoil is one of those shows where one is unsure if it falls into the form-over-substance category because it was a deliberate choice or failed to dig down into the themes it suggests. There are actually some interesting ideas beneath the veneer of an inherently absurd but visually polished spectacle about schoolgirl government assassins. Usually, most shows make it more or less evident whether they intend to explore the ideas driving their plot and shaping its world or simply just gloss over them for entertainment. But Lycoris Recoil is harder to place since it leaves many conclusions about its themes and message as implicit questions. Usually, a show does this as a demonstration of confidence or even sophistication that not everything needs to be blatantly spelt out for a viewer, or that in the absence of a simple answer, showing instead of telling would be more appropriate. But on the other hand, we have the genre and trappings of Lycoris Recoil and the fact that this would not be the first time A-1 Pictures and Aniplex have chosen to produce a vapid show that poorly masquerades at intellectual self-importance (case in point, GATE).

The stigma against what A-1 Pictures has done in the past aside, Lycoris Recoil's main strengths lie in its presentation and characters. The most obvious thing, from the character designs to the illustrations at the cuts in each episode, is the show exudes style. Combined with the excellent fluid animations for its combat scenes, it produces an extremely eye-catching show that does merit watching it primarily on this basis. The mass appeal of Lycoris Recoil is further enhanced by the strong performances from Anzai Chika and Wakayama Shion as the leads. While Chisato and Takina fall into fairly standard archetypes within both anime and the buddy-cop genre, they are done with an exceptional amount of polish. There are just enough quirks and unique mannerisms to avoid our leads feeling like a flat copy and paste of character stereotypes in so many other anime these days. This draws the audience in since they are familiar with the archetypes the characters fit into, which ultimately has a "fill in the blanks" effect, making them seem unique and accelerating the attachment to them. While the cast in Lycoris Recoil does not break any new ground or do anything particularly deep with their characters, they still ooze charisma. These two elements are probably sufficient to draw in most viewers since it utilises the two most broadly appealing things about entertainment: action spectacle and charismatic character performances.

However, a show must have some plot or, if not at least, premise for its characters to interact within and show off their animation chops. This is doubly true for shows with action or combat as a significant part of their genre or setting. There must be a reason why the characters need to resort to violence when that is a rarity in any typical environment. A drama or comedy in the mundane world does not need to justify its setting since the audience can take it as a given. On the other hand, Lycoris Recoil does need to at least pay lip service to the question of why their version of the contemporary world exists in the first place. While quite a few viewers can probably overlook this entirely since they are sold on the spectacle alone, the show still needs to earn its increased suspension of disbelief from the wider audience. Without the question of why something so obviously cartoonish like an assassin organisation solely made out of high school girls existing being answered, Lycoris Recoil and other shows like it risks devolving into just mindless action with no sense of what drives it. While that may be passable as spectacle entertainment, it is significantly less compelling. When the premise is lacking, it is hard to be captivated by a character or invested in a plot. The author or director's hand becomes more apparent, the characters begin to feel like artificial constructs, the story becomes a means to an end to get to the next spectacle, and the action becomes nothing but cheap violence.

The plot itself is somewhat trite yet also somewhat contrived at the same time. Despite this, it fully serves the purpose of the show as being a coherent vehicle to move between action pieces and further flesh out the characters and ideas. There are some instances where things border on plot contrivances. Still, these are excusable since the show was not established as an intricate mystery or psychological battle between characters. It is mildly jarring when Takina pieces together the motivations and connections of all parties at the show's climax. While the viewer is presented with all this information and can make these conclusions relatively easily, it's a bit of a leap for any of the characters to do so since we are privy to scenes they are not present at or know about. Everything was still appropriately set up, though some of it was a little too transparent to be praiseworthy. Still, it is better to be mildly obvious and achieve clarity than attempt to be complicated and end up as a contrived mess. Some chance events in combat that are necessary for the plot still feel like they show too much of the author/director's hand. But these are partly due to how much attention is placed on them by the shots for the sake of clarity than due to it being beyond the suspension of disbelief.

Lycoris Recoil does make some attempts to answer why the premise for its show exist in the first place. Some of the answers are more obvious hand waves which are largely acceptable. Frankly, why a secret organisation would have a flashy uniform has no reasonable explanation. Neither is why they are all teenage girls. So the stereotypical one-off mentions of solutions are acceptable. The uniform is a form of "urban camouflage" to blend in with real school girls in public. While this is paper thin, at least there is a kind of logic to it, and the show does not do itself a disservice by trying to justify it further. And why they select orphaned girls is for the presumably stereotypical reasons that it would be easier to train and condition them from young and that they would not be seen as inherently threatening, allowing them to blend in.

On the other hand, it does attempt to answer some of the broader questions as to why this Japan needs a secret assassin organisation. And this is where it becomes incredibly messy in its answers. Ostensibly, the Lycoris program is meant to combat a rampant terrorist threat in Japan. Why this comes about is never reasonably explained. While this can be taken at face value, it does make a more skeptical watcher's eye twitch at the potential implications of this show's ideological position. The entire Lycoris program, in short, is essentially a government-sanctioned assassination group that removes "threats" to public order through killing without any due process. These threats are all accessed and selected by a highly advanced AI with seemingly no human input, checks or safeguards. And to top it all off, this is all kept secret to not alarm the public and shatter their idea of peace. Where Lycoris Recoil stands on all its themes is remarkably unclear for a set-up that seems designed for the classic story of a rebel cop saving the day and unearthing the weaknesses in their unethical organisation.

On one level, Chisato and Takina take a stand against the Lycoris program. For Chisato, it is evident since she refuses to kill despite the other Lycoris agents being almost flippant about it. Although describing her as a pacifist would grossly stretch the word's definition. While how her non-lethal ammunition can punch through car doors but not penetrate a person's body is absurd, at the very least, it is still meant to cause some measure of harm to incapacitate a person. And for Takina, her character arc is about learning to follow her own judgement instead of rigid orders, even if there is a price to pay. And it includes the more human element of learning to value her personal connections and loyalty to them over her attachment to abstract ideas and organisations like DA.

By extension, the Lycoris program itself is not shown in an unreservedly heroic light. There is always a subtle sinister tinge to how they are presented. Lycoris agents like Fuki and Sakura are brash and aggressive while coming off subtly as conditioned to view the Lycoris program and DA as an entirely justified ultimate authority. The killing of targets is rampant and emotionless, while the deaths of Lycoris never seem to phase Commander Kusunoki. It is especially in seeing the Lycoris being killed where it feels like the show is actually intelligently leveraging its premise. There is something naturally upsetting about seeing a girl being killed, even if they are meant to be a trained assassin themselves. Though there is never a blatant statement by characters protesting or highlighting any of this, it subtly makes the viewer uncomfortable, breaking up what could have devolved into an endless and mindless action plot with cute girls. To give credit where it is due, it is hard to claim that Lycoris Recoil is blindly siding with its titular organisation and presenting its actions as uncritically beneficial for the nation. It is just that it is never blatantly (and in the cases of most other anime, clumsily) highlighted by the main characters denouncing the Lycoris program in a speech or having a "are we the baddies?" moment.

The conclusion, which has the DA again cover up the plot's climax by essentially hoodwinking the public, is the natural extension of the ideology of the Lycoris program. Simply put, their entire rationale is that the nature of their peace being artificial does not detract from its value. In other words, the ends justify the means, and the value of abstract truth is subordinate to material results. Although the villain, Majima, calling the Lycoris program Machiavellian sounds like nothing more than the show trying to make itself sound smart, it is actually a succinct and appropriate conclusion for once. And despite the absurdity, the public being gullible enough to believe the cover-up after some extremely apparent damage could be a subtle statement. With how ridiculous the lengths of the cover-up reach, attempting to pass off the Lycoris operation as a live-action performance in the prelude to a movie, it is easy to see this as being critical of the public psyche in Japan. They are willing to accept anything, no matter how nonsensical or blatantly false, if it benefits them—in essence, being willingly blind in exchange for simplicity and security. The public is as much to blame for the existence of the Lycoris program as anyone since they are implicitly shown to be willing to pay this insane price for it.

While this all sounds remarkably interesting, subtle and even sophisticated for a show that, on the surface, is just cute girls doing Gun Kata, it is unfortunately not that simple to give Lycoris Recoil all this credit. Where the show falls apart is in its villain, or more accurately, how it tries to provide Majima with a basis for his actions. Again, it would be passable to have the show's villain be a bog-standard anarchist terrorist or psychopath and leave it at that. It's incredibly trite, but it serves the purpose of most action shows. Yet, since Lycoris Recoil is taking a subtle magnifying glass to its enforcers of order, so does it attempt to examine what motivates Majima to destroy this peace. The thing about Majima's motivations is that they are entirely abstract. Not in the sense that he is a political idealist of some sort or is actually an anti-authoritarian rebel. But instead, he is sowing terror and chaos to expose DA and the Lycoris program for being just as unethical as him by forcing a response. In essence, the show attempts to point out that the only difference between the "heroic" Lycoris and the "villainous terrorist" is government fiat. It makes this point somewhat since both organisations are brutal and operate outside the law. Without any legal constraints or the moral high ground of being bound by them, it is possible to argue that Majima has a point and that the Lycoris program is just another organisation using violence to shape the world in its preferred image. The problem is that Majima himself justifies the existence of the Lycoris program because he is apparently violent for the sake of it.

Instead of giving Majima some political or even ideological motivation, for instance: having a loved one be an arbitrary target of the Lycoris, believing that the extent of power the Lycoris program wields to be a latent threat, or at the very least just believing an illusory peace is wrong because it is not real, they just make it such that he is encouraging violence of the sake of it. Of course, some lip service is being paid to the idea that the security brought about by Lycoris is immoral because it is founded on an illusion. But it unwittingly promotes the conclusion that the drastic powers of the Lycoris program are necessary. Lycoris Recoil portrays the public as constantly on the precipice of a descent into violence. There is a comical number of foiled "terrorist" or other violent attacks on display in the initial episodes to demonstrate the skills of the Lycoris agents and the DA's all-reaching power. This is where the failure to answer why there is an upswing in terrorism comes back to bite the show since it now implicitly states that it is just the natural course of development society takes. It misses the opportunity to examine the motivations or causes of the upswing in violence as being due to some kind of societal pressure, alienation or even political dissatisfaction. But this point of humans being naturally inclined to violence is hammered home with the inclusion of the enigmatic Alan Foundation, whose goal is to promote natural genius, which by cliched and hackneyed extension, includes genius for violence. This all suggests that the natural state of humanity, society, or somesuch is not only chaos but brutal violence. Ironically, this justifies the necessity of the DA and Lycoris program since it seems they are the only thing keeping them in check. If the illusion of peace were to break down, it would lead to a cascading collapse into violence, at least according to the logic presented by the show.

This confuses the conclusion that Lycoris Recoil is making on one level since it is critical of the DA. It is tempting to try and give the show even more credit by seeing this as a nuanced conclusion about how using violence for control ultimately promotes violence as a response. And that excessive control will eventually breed resentment and then resistance to itself. But the problem is that the inclusion of the Alan Institute angle that indicates that all of this is "natural" genius and means Lycoris Recoil, on another level, suggests that society needs to be controlled. This entirely changes the tone of the show to having the Lycoris program being, at worse, a necessary evil. Finally, the genre and presentation of Lycoris Recoil comes back to haunt it as all of this is subtext or below the surface. Following the tone of the show's conclusion, it shows the cover-up as being positively received by everyone, with all the main Lycoris being happy and still somewhat naive yet desensitised regarding the mass violence they have perpetrated. In essence, the lighthearted tone, necessitated by its cute girls do Gun Kata premise, undermines any of the more interesting things of substance it was trying to do under the surface and promotes its sinister conclusion as being benign and justified.

I know nothing about the writer of this show, who goes by the pen name of Asaura. So it is hard to make any conclusions about his authorial intent based on knowledge of the provenance. Still, I will admit that I was initially suspect of Lycoris Recoil of having some deeply unsavoury ideological leanings hiding under its exterior. In a way, it is preferable to find the show contradicting itself so thoroughly since it feels more like an oversight than an attempt to push some ultra-authoritarian philosophy and then fail at it miserably, like in GATE. And despite the premise having all the potential to be vapid, I was pleasantly surprised to find some substance underneath. Though, because of the veneer of the show and how subtle it is at times, it is apt to question if it is giving the show too much credit or if it is a genuine example of including political themes without being blatant and intrusive. And at the same time, because of how confused its conclusion about its themes and ideas are, it is hard to rate the show highly. It can only go so far on style alone. Despite my personal bias in favour of any performance by Anzai Chika, my overall preference still places greater importance on a show's intellectual and thematic bite. And it is impossible for Lycoris Recoil to evade this expectation given the themes and questions it has voluntarily raised in its premise and attempted to answer. Unfortunately, the expectations cannot go back to simply being a cute action show.

Overall, Lycoris Recoil is exceedingly charismatic, an achievement in its own right. It also successfully integrates its themes and ideological problems into the show without appearing dry, convoluted, or disruptive to other elements like character or pacing. However, because it is so contradictory in its conclusions, despite its subtlety at presenting its thematic problems tacitly, its potential is far from realised. Ironically, even in its themes and ideas category, it again scores points for its execution instead of on substance. Despite its flashy charisma, it is hard to give Lycoris Recoil more than a 7 out of 10, given its glaring weaknesses. Perhaps it could go up to an eight on the style and entertainment factor alone. Still, given my preferences, it is hard not to penalise it for such great missed potential and confusion in its exploration of ideas.

That said, Lycoris Recoil has set itself up for a sequel. While it is demanding to fully explore its weighty ideas in just 13 episodes, it is possible to dig into them in subsequent seasons with more finesse. Though it cannot undo the contradictory nature of this season's plot, it can springboard off it to be something truly exceptional, that rare show with both an abundance of style and substance. But regardless of if that comes to fruition or not, that will be the merit of its sequel, and it is hard to award points to a first season, even if it is necessary to set that up.