3 Episode Taste Test: Seikon no Qwaser (The Qwaser of Stigmata)

When one’s premise is a magical fuel present only in breast milk and requires young chil­dren to extract this via the most obvi­ous method avail­able, hav­ing an cen­sored ver­sion avail­able on all but the most lib­eral of tele­vi­sion chan­nels seems counter-productive. The uncensored ver­sion fills in a lot of the gaps that the other egre­giously includes, obtuse close ups of faces and innoc­u­ous body parts only go so far before hard static cuts are made to con­ceal raunchy or reveal­ing motions; unfa­mili­ar­ity with the concept of Seikon no Qwaser would cause sig­ni­fic­ant dif­fi­cultly in under­stand­ing what the altern­at­ing moans of pleas­ure and pain were in ref­er­ence to. The volume and abject lewd­ness of these scenes is quite stag­ger­ing and it is no under­state­ment to call the open­ing epis­odes of the series a panoply of por­no­graphy that don’t attempt to mask their intentions.

“a dis­gust­ing and rep­re­hens­ible atti­tude that is only bolstered by the viol­ence and bor­der­line sadism”

At St. Mikhailov Academy, someone is mur­der­ing local girls; the incid­ents began shortly after the dean of school dis­ap­peared, leav­ing only a cryptic note to his bio­lo­gical daugh­ter Tomo and adopt­ive daugh­ter Mafuyu. Tomo is a sickly girl who is often absent from school which, now with her father miss­ing, causes both her and her self-styled pro­tector Mafuyu to be bul­lied by some of her class­mates. After a chance meet­ing with a silver-haired Rus­sian boy, Mafuyu is attacked by a masked psy­cho­path and is drawn into the world of the Qwaser — alchem­ists with an affin­ity for cer­tain ele­ments and the need for soma, found only in selec­ted girl’s breast milk. The young boy, Alex­an­der, is the Qwaser of iron and after join­ing the school and mov­ing into the local dorm­it­ory, he vows to pro­tect Tomo against all aggressors.

Describ­ing Seikon no Qwaser is akin to explain­ing the plot of an adult movie: the story is incon­sequen­tial next to the amount of flesh and devi­ant acts con­tained within. The first epis­ode wastes no time in its pre­cip­it­ous dive into per­ver­sion with clothes cut­ting, breast milk­ing, under­wear fond­ling and the all import­ant breast jiggle. The remainder of the epis­ode and the two after are a ludicrous ven­er­a­tion of female mam­mar­ies and under­gar­ments; no debauch­ery is too extreme in its attempt to obscure what is, at its heart, stand­ard fare with tropes such as an obstin­ate but chased for­eigner, a softly-spoken air­head and a pro­tec­tion­ist lead. The bawd­i­ness how­ever is intrins­ic­ally bound to the plot; no longer is it an amus­ing sideshow of occa­sional bath scenes or torn cloth­ing dur­ing com­bat — although these are of course present — but core to the view­ing exper­i­ence which crosses the line from lam­ent­able tit­il­la­tion to obscene misogyny.

The act of breast feed­ing is trans­formed from an oth­er­wise pure act — some­thing the series acknow­ledges with its reli­gious icon­o­graphy — into some­thing per­verse and laced with fury. Even in the open­ing three epis­odes, all of the female char­ac­ters are shown as either weak, in need of near con­stant care, emo­tion­less, catty and arrog­ant or oth­er­wise irre­press­ibly insane. What few males there are how­ever are shown as strong, smart and con­fid­ent, able to fondle, dis­robe and pleas­ure any woman within reach and then cal­lously dis­card them like spent cigar­ettes without con­sequence. It’s a dis­gust­ing and rep­re­hens­ible atti­tude that is only bolstered by the viol­ence and bor­der­line sad­ism that under­pins a lot of the conflict.

Many series fail for crip­pling mediocrity and though the may not eli­cit any feel­ings of adu­la­tion, they are at least incap­able of pro­vok­ing any darker emo­tions. Seikon no Qwaser would be obnox­ious without it’s lech­er­ous approach to females, how­ever its unflinch­ingly derog­at­ory treat­ment of them speaks of deeply embed­ded resent­ment. Given the pro­duc­tion team behind this which includes the dir­ector whose pre­vi­ous works encom­pass Eiken and Panty Flash Teacher, a series com­poser who also worked on School Days and a screen­writer who had sim­ilar duties on Line­barrels of Iron, as well as a stu­dio whose only other work is the inces­tu­ous OVA Aki Sora, the approach isn’t entirely sur­pris­ing. The prot­ag­on­ist may share a great deal with My-HiME’s Mai — a sim­il­arly fiery hair col­our, an affin­ity for cook­ing and the guard­i­an­ship of an infirmed fam­ily mem­ber — through series com­poser Hiroy­uki Yoshino, how­ever it shares none of its charm or cheeky humour. Dense with jar­gon and replete with viol­ence, the open­ing epis­odes por­tray a series that is repuls­ive and mer­it­less; it is dif­fi­cult to spec­u­late whether any good what­so­ever could ever come from it. ¶