Blue Exorcist - An Underrated Show.

What happens when an anime doesn't sell enough or does not cover the whole manga material? What happens when only one season/arc in the series is justified for an anime adaptation? The answer is that this series is Blue Exorcist.

It's a bit strange not to put Blue Exorcist inside the bag of stories clichés or stories that everyone knows by its genre, we are talking about the usual airing manga, One Piece, Bleach, Death Note and everything that startles inside. But what actually happens with Blue Exorcist and why it isn't in the same category as the previous manga? Actually, that's easy to answer...
The difference between Shounen Jump and Jump SQ is too obvious: the first (SJ) gives readers too obvious works with basic reading content, the reader only needs to know that the protagonist has powers and that the story is pretty basic, always about the protagonist; In the second (Jump SQ) the story is more serious and more developed, there are secondary objectives in the story and the protagonist is much less well-known and so ends up being less mainstream than the rest of the characters, we are talking about works like Claymore, AnoHana, Madofuki Park, Rurouni Kenshin: Tokuhitsu-ban, Rengoku no Ashe or even the Blue Exorcist spin-off, Salaryman Exorcist: Okumura Yukio on Aishuu.

I never realized why people give hate to the works of Kazue Kato, the woman works every day to give readers the treasure of her which is exactly this work (or the previous works about it). The problem that the industry puts in these creators is that they work hard and strive to give readers the best they know, but nonetheless, other authors who don't do it by the same way, get the fame all over (I'm sorry but I'm talking about Hiromu Arakawa, for example).

As the synopsis indicates, this is a story about demons and exorcists. The story has two realities: Assiah and Gehenna, the story is initially lived in Assiah but later on, it is so far lived in Gehenna. The protagonist is called Rin Okumura and was educated by Father Fujimoto (whose is a powerful exorcist) but Rin never knew his own father. Rin eventually knows that he has Satan's blood - the Lord of Evil - and so he intends to fight against it but first he has to know how to use the exorcism and it is from here that the story takes a launching ramp with the centralization of it. From here, the story tells the daily life of Rin and, just as in a shounen series, as he defeats villains until potentially encountering Satan.

The story has a huge range of characters, from villains to heroes or even to anti-heroes. We have Rin and his brother Yuki Okumura (Yukio in some languages), Shiemi Moriyama and his mother, Mephisto Feles (the anti-hero of the series), Rin's friends: Ryuji Suguro, Renzo Shima, Konekomaru Miwa and Izumo Kamiki, then we have the sexy character of the story (and my favorite character) Shura Kirigakure and finally we have the villains Amaimon and Saburota Todo (in reality there is a certain villain, what happens is that each arc has a villain but eventually turns out to be an anti- hero of the series as happens with Amaimon and Mephisto Feles).

Let's now go to art, by preference I think the art is a 9/10 overall.
Of course, I've seen better and better manga arts but the art of Kazue Kato for a stand alone artist is quite good (almost excellent). She can make a clean drawing on 2 pages with the same attack and with the same power as the previous page or the pages with lines. In some manga series, the artist draws so much that he ends up not realizing anything or almost nothing of what he created in a chapter or in a whole book, which turns out to be a disappointment. In One Piece, for example, Oda began to create more complex drawings for the human eye, which ends up not being very well understood of what he did and what he could have done, Katou prefers to make a drawing with more spacing between the page just to make it stays white and with the own design, which turns out to be a fantastic choice for her because it results with Blue Exorcist. Once again, the fights are impeccable and I believe that Katou is an inspiration for many people who want to start their life as a professional mangáka.

The first arc of the story (from volumes 1-4 and chapters 1-15) is basically the anime adaptation that was created in 2011: https://myanimelist.net/anime/9919/Ao_no_Exorcist;
The second arc of the story will be the next anime adaptation for January 2017 and will cover the Kyoto Arc (from volumes 5-9 and chapters 16-37): https://myanimelist.net/anime/33506/Ao_no_Exorcist__Kyoto_Fujouou -hen

Of course Blue Exorcist has problems but I believe that it is the manga with more sales of Shonen SQ, one of the problems is for example in the development of the characters and in the creation of maturity for Rin's friends, for example, they gain "airing time" in the manga but it is not anything satisfactory as Rin, for example, has, and the character appears in three or four pages and is already the hero of the day. Rin, unlike the other characters, is what makes the story more interesting and intriguing.
Overall, the manga is not cliché, it's super overrated with no motives or reasons and it's a super interesting manga because it uses religious strands in the story, which is something rare to see in Japanese comics overall, once again.

What can I say more than other people have not?
I like the characters, I like the setting that is used in the story, I like the way the plot is told and to finish, I like the idea of the manga. I do not like the fact that it's not a well-known manga, I do not think it's overrated, I do not think it's worse than FullMetal Alchemist (it's not at all) and I do not believe people that do not take initiative because they think it's "cliché" or "waste of time".
People are ignorant because they want to and not because that is part of them if people are generalizing a genre of fiction, then they will be ignorant forever, Blue Exorcist has too much potential that will potentially be used in the rest of the arcs and later on, in more anime adaptations.

Story: 9 |Art: 9 | Character: 8 | Enjoyment: 9

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