Jörmungandr - the world serpent, Jormungand - a Black Lagoon knock-off? Not quite. The parallels seem all too blatant from the first episode: a female lead, explosions and a fastidious attention to detail when it comes to guns. Black Lagoon though started utterly bonkers and was content to stay there, all the while mediating on the choices its characters make and the nature of its underworld setting. Jormungand tries to be rooted in reality with less boat-jumping and samurai versus shooter nonsense but instead laces every action bubble with endless monologues, rife with inappropriately timed observations and introspections.
That aside, it's closer in spirit to Gunslinger Girl with its insistence on eschewing an overarching story for a mostly episodic and character driven plot. The comparison is also helped along by the child soldier protagonist who is evidently a graduate of the Rei Ayanami school of emotionless. Koko, the leading lady and human descendant of a fennec, is pitched as a shrewd businesswoman but a benevolent leader which wouldn't seem so incongruous were she not a prolific arms dealer.
The first three episodes show her team more as a band of misfits than a battle hardened team of mercenaries. It juxtaposes the murky, morally grey area of gun-running nicely but feels entirely out of place when compared to the otherwise grounded but cosmopolitan plot. For example, the only other woman on the team is a busty lesbian who was supposedly forged in the crucible of warfare given her skill with a blade, but then goes weak at the knees over buying her commander a watch.
Are we, the audience, supposed to empathise or just tolerate this disjoint until their motivations are revealed? It's the question the series as a concept has to answer because if the opening episodes are anything to go by, we're expected to like them because they're not mass-murderering psychopaths like the shark-toothed antagonist from the third episode is, and not a cavalcade of cretins as every other character has been thus far. That doesn't make the current cast likeable by default though and many of the faces in Koko's crew have yet to have more than a moment of screentime.
The series definitely has time and scope to satisfy these flaws, but it could all too easily fall into a pattern of self-contained, mediocre stories which could be summarised as "arms dealers do the craziest things!" Black Lagoon worked because it tempered the madness in its action (maid-fu anyone?) with a very astute look at the effect of violence and the protagonists' place within it; Jormungand would do well to attack some of the thornier issues - arms dealing, their role in conflicts, the effects on society, especially children - if it's to resist the thrall of the first three episodes: entertaining but lacking credibility.