Series Warnings: Blood, Mild Gore, Stalking, Implied Necrophilia, Threatened Rape, Sexual Blackmail, Mentions of Genocide, Murder
If you like what you read, like what you’re going to read, or generally want to support, you can always do so via my Ko-Fi. All tips goes to maintaining this blog, including subscription fees, the purchase of review materials, and upgrading this blog so I can do more neat things. Thanks!
When I started this series, I fully anticipated covering a different anime for my first series. But life happened and this project of mine got delayed by a few months due to chronic health issues, but hey: at least I went back to Fall 2020 to watch one of my favorite, most tragic series: Studio Bridge’s supernatural, psychological thriller Talentless Nana.
I watched it because it’s something of a comfort series: having watched it once, I know what’s going to happen, and I know all the plot beats. The joy comes from showing it to someone else who doesn’t and, as a result, recreating that same feeling I felt watching the series on a week to week basis. There’s a lot of joy in sharing a series like this, even if you know where it goes. It’s one of the reasons why I love anime so much.
Which is kind of why it’s a real shame of this series is that it’s just one season.
I say that because Talentless Nana is so freakin’ good and deserves any kind of actual resolution instead of the brutal episode 13 finale. I felt the same back when I wrote my review of the series in 2021, and I still feel the same: Talentless Nana is lost potential, and now in almost Summer 2024, it’s kind of too late despite the manga being ongoing and licensed in English through Square Enix’s MangaUp! App. The first four parts (equalling a full chapter) are available to read: after that, you can either subscribe (I do a monthly subscription) or pay a certain amount of coins to read. It’s not perfect: I’m partial to monthly subscription services only, but at $4.99, I do think it’s worth investing in just for this series. (Well, and all the other ones: there’s a lot of good stuff here!)
Will this one day result in localized tankobon? Well… I’m not a seer: I have no clue if we’ll ever get this series in digital volumes or even in print. Stranger thing s have happened with manga, I say as the editor of Qualia the Purple, a series from 2009 that I professionally edited over a decade later. I hope so, but for now, I’m just glad it’s legally accessible and not on Crunchyroll’s manga reader. (Sorry Crunch, but the manga reader was a bit of a nightmare. Rest in peace.)
The manga itself extends far past the end of Talentless Nana’s single season, growing more complex as Nana continues to helm an ever-twisting story. Seriously, there’s so much that happens that could easily make up a two-cour season 2. But realistically, I don’t see that happening: Talentless Nana’s time has come and gone, and it just doesn’t have the same star power it did in 2020 when we were moving through the early stages of the pandemic.
(Also, just because I love it doesn’t mean it was popular and Talentless Nana was not a fiscal success necessarily.)
Now, ideally, you’d be coming to this review without spoilers, but I realize you may not have seen the show and might want to read about why I want you to watch. That’s why I’ve put a break here. I really want you to go watch this series: it’s thirteen episodes and very easy to get swept in and I think it functions best if you don’t know what you’re getting into.Just know if you don’t choose to watch, know that there’s spoilers below the cut.
Did you make your choice? Too late because we’re gonna get into it.
Talentless Nana focuses on Nakajima Nanao, a young man at an elite school on a remote island for kids with superpowers: powers that make them known as the Talented. They’re there to learn how to fight back against the mysterious monsters simply known as the Enemies of Humanity. There’s just one problem: Nanao doesn’t seem to have much in the way of superpowers, which gets him ridiculed and bullied on a daily basis.
Enter Hiiragi Nana, a girl with telepathic powers who takes a special interest in the seemingly powerless student and seemingly reveals Nanao’s hidden talent: the ability to nullify other talented individuals. It’s powerful and awe-inspiring, except for one fact: he’s a young man capable of ending over ten million lives.
…Or so Nana is told by the military, who’s sent her in as an assassin to murder the true enemies of humanity.
Therein lies the tension in this series: is Nana right to end these superpowered teens who can do a range of things from blasting a fireball to skipping timelines to raising the dead? Or is there more beneath the surface, even when they start to turn on one another?
It’s a complex question that this single season skillfully attacks in a realistic way because honestly, the thought of a teenager being able to freeze a fifteen foot deep lake is downright terrifying because what if they grew skilled enough to turn that power on a human? What if they could freeze every molecule of water in your body?
What if they could do that on a mass scale? Maybe access to water–to safe, potable, unfrozen water–would be gone. Maybe you’d have to feed the ego of a superpowered teen to get your basic needs. Or maybe…maybe they wouldn’t reach that dire of a circumstance. The government never lets Nana question otherwise: it’s kill or be killed and Nana has been primed since childhood to act on the trauma of her parent’s death at the hands of one such enemy of humanity.
Framed around the ethical quandary of “doing the right thing” and how that differs from person to person, Talentless Nana goes beyond good versus bad and instead, asks viewers to consider the moral gray area of “talent” and how we can be affected and informed by trauma. It’s a peek behind the curtain to how a government might use its citizens to a grim end, and ultimately, it’s incredibly satisfying and equally brutal in its execution. Nana can’t help but kill: it’s her duty, and the horrifically clever manipulation of her CPTSD means that she’s the perfect child soldier to do just that.
And it’s really, really good… save for the massive cliffhanger of an ending.
See, the thing about cliffhangers is that they usually lead into something: they’re to get you to the next part, to the next arc. But because of the nature of Talentless Nana, we end on a tragedy, with Nana completely bereft. More importantly, we end with her clinging to her once friend Inukai Michiru, a girl who could heal, having realized her skill’s most ultimate form of revival. We end with Michiru dead, having revived Nana.
Manga readers know that this is the start of Nana’s defection, of her directly confronting her trauma and fighting for the truth, but for anime-only viewers…this is just where the story ends: Nana sobbing as the ED fades out. You don’t even find out who the arc’s murder was, though it becomes pretty clear in the finale. It just never gets resolved within the context of the anime.
Yet that’s not enough for me to say no to this series: it remains an easy recommendation because in the end, Talentless Nana is a spectacular example of a thriller: it’s well worth your time if you’re in the market for a pensive, thoughtful anime that is never as straightforward as it seems. It’s one of the shounen demographic’s best, featuring a female protagonist who will quickly grow on you as you find yourself questioning just what you’d do if you were in her shoes.
Recommended if you like Persona 4/Persona 4 Golden, Akudama Drive, Danganronpa, and Monster High. (Trust me on this last one, the ghoul in you will love it.)
Backlit Pixels 