Gosick – elementary, my dear Kujo

“Ho ho ho…”

Underage smoking - clearly a great message for young viewers XP

Imagine Aisaka Taiga and Sherlock Holmes. That’s essentially what Victorique de Blois is, the gothic-costumed loli detective star of this show. Gosick is showing itself to be relatively solid entertainment, but I would hardly classify this as a must-watch of the season.

This is why you knock before opening a door.

Plot summary from AniDB: “Gosick takes place in 1924 in a small, made-up European country of Sauville. The story centres on Kujou Kazuya the third son of a Japanese Imperial soldier, who is a transfer student to St. Marguerite Academy, where urban legends and horror stories are all the rage. There he meets Victorique, a mysterious yet beautiful and brilliant girl who never comes to class and spends her days reading the entire content of the library or solving mysteries that even detectives can’t solve. The series mostly focuses on Kazuya and Victorique getting involved in different mystery cases and their struggle to solve them, at the same time forming important bonds with different people.”

The architect who designed this mess should be shot.

It’s not that the show is bad. The way the mystery hooks you is great. The unknown past of Victorique is also intriguing. However the way that this genius detective ends up with her conclusions is pretty suspect. Rather than going through a list of possibilities and ruling each one out, Victorique essentially states her deduction hastily, 100% correct 100% of the time, and everyone accepts her word as some sort of gold standard. She’s a kid: why don’t the adults question her?

Awwwwww

Another rather annoying aspect is the male lead Kajou. While he does have some amusing and strong moments, a lot of the time he’s complaining and bitching about something or rather. To me, he’s also not that interesting either. Fortunately he’s actually useful in a fight!

Stuffing food in

On the plus side, as expected from Bones, the animation is nice to watch, especially regarding Victorique (and her hair). The humour in this show isn’t over-used, nor is it over-the-top. Victorique’s laugh was priceless.

Don't blame Grevil - he was rejected at an audition for Grease.

Gosick isn’t a bad show. I just find it rather unstimulating for a genre that I’m generally thrilled by. However the show does have its merits, such as an interesting female lead and a decent mystery yarn.

OP: generic song. Some interesting art and ideas.

ED: not a bad song. Fairly standard ideas.

I am unamused...