etsunosuke Ichimura is 15 years old, but due to his very short stature and shrill, obnoxious, childish personality, most people assume he's much younger. When he begins the first episode of Peacemaker by trying to join the Shinsengumi—an elite force of warriors dedicated to protecting Japan's emperor and its capital, Kyoto—he's mocked and told to come back in five years. But Tetsu's meek, apologetic older brother, Tatsu, has already joined the Shinsengumi as a bureaucrat, and Tetsu is determined to enlist as well. After all, the Shinsengumi are at war with the rebellious Choshu faction, and members of that clan murdered Tetsu and Tatsu's parents. By joining the Shinsengumi, Tetsunosuke believes he can become a strong enough fighter to avenge his family.
Tetsunosuke turns out to be completely overmatched as a fighter, but his determination and spirit make an impression, and soon he's invited into the Shinsengumi as a page to the fearful Vice Commander Hijikata. Hijikata warns him that all the Shinsengumi can teach him is how to be a demon, but Tetsu seems all too willing to bargain away his humanity in exchange for revenge, even after watching Hijikata slaughter not only a band of assassins but the woman they used as bait. Still, Tetsu's impatience repeatedly gets the better of him, and he keeps breaking both the Shinsengumi codes and basic rules of discipline and obedience as he pushes to be taught faster and tries to learn more about what's going on in his new world.
Meanwhile, all around him, intrigues and plots are falling into place, as the Choshu move new recruits into Kyoto, a Shinsengumi spy alternates between strolling the streets in drag and hopping across rooftops at night, traps are set and sprung, and a sorcerer brings dark powers to bear on the equation. Peacemaker mostly plays out like a part-serious, part-comic historical samurai story—at least until a Shinsengumi agent is attacked by demon-possessed men who get up to attack again even after he hacks them apart.
Akin to Kenshin, only shriller
Peacemaker is far from the first anime series to center on an irritating young punk who quickly becomes the least interesting thing about the story, but it's a particularly egregious example of the type. Many of Peacemaker's characters are based on real historical members of the Shinsengumi circa the mid-1800s, and while they're caricatures and familiar anime types as much as characters, figures like Hijikata, effeminate captain Soji Okita, creepy spiritualist Hajime Saito and friendly cutups Shinpachi and Sanosuke are all well-characterized, multifaceted individuals who embody the contrasts inherent in people who must use extreme violence to maintain peace. Tetsu, by contrast, is a bellowing, brainless, inconsistent ninny who would, in any remotely truthful story, have been executed for treason by the end of Episode 2.
Whenever he drops to the background, though—or at least gets cowed and shuts up for a few scenes—the series becomes a highly textured, detailed and beautifully rendered semi-historical drama, very much in the spirit of Rurouni Kenshin. Peacemaker shares Kenshin's complex historical background, its large and colorful cast, and its dedication to terrific-looking, creatively designed fight scenes. Peacemaker is bloodier than the Kenshin TV series; it more closely resembles the gory, stylized Kenshin OVAs. But its bright, accessible, startlingly pretty animation and its occasional mild twitches into silly comedy recall Kenshin as well. And in fact, Tetsu, with his bright red hair and spiky ponytail, even looks like a junior version of Kenshin himself.
The difference between them is that while Kenshin is the sympathetic glue that holds the diverging elements of his series together, Tetsu is a shrill annoyance who pushes everything in his series apart. He's probably meant as a sympathetic point-of-view character, the hopeful kid with average skills who becomes an audience avatar as viewers put themselves in his place. But who would want to picture themselves as such an incompetent little nit? Even with Tetsu in place, Peacemaker is visually terrific and textually fascinating. But it's easy to imagine how much better it could have been without him.
I was temporarily thrown by the number of character names that Peacemaker and Kenshin have in common. Turns out they both just borrowed from history. Which is, incidentally, a good thing to study in order to follow the plots of both series, which ground a lot of action in actual events.
— Tasha
Back to the top.
