It’s only recently that I’ve started to believe that “cour” is in fact a word and not just a misspelling of “cur” (as in “that cur of a cour”). As it’s entered into the lexicon of anime over the past couple of years (AnimeNano puts its first use in English around 2011) it has become an easy shorthand for how long an anime series will run for. That word “series” ends up being problematic because - for me at least - it can now mean a whole multitude of things, thanks primarily to the introduction of “split cours”.
oh good another princess and the resurrection of characters who should be dead
As Wikipedia informs me, referring to a television broadcast (internet streaming simulcast etc.) as a “series” is a chiefly British use of the term, and in North America the more common term is “season”. “Season” works better when referring to something like anime because apart from a select few (One Piece et. al.), they can be measured in seasons i.e. winter, summer etc. and substituting “season” for “cour” isn’t exactly complex. However, semantically a problem arises when, as is becoming increasingly common, an anime runs for one season, lies fallow, and then finishes in another. The split cour.
A review of the Hitsugi no Chaika: Avenging Battle anime series
The second season of Hitsugi no Chaika (Chaika the Coffin Princess), subtitled Avenging Battle, may become a bullet point in the argument against the practice of a splitting a broadcast in two. The first season didn’t exactly shake the earth but was supremely enjoyable and didn’t have any disagreeable sharp edges to it. The second season continues Chaika’s story of collecting the remains of her father, the infamous Emperor Gaz, along with her saboteur companions Toru and Akari.
For a while at least it seems to be business as usual: locate hero, procure gruesomely severed body parts, find out more about Gaz and the history behind Chaika. Then suspicion creeps in that this story train is heading full speed for a finale, and it’s not stopping at any stations.
There aren’t many ways of describing Hitsugi no Chaika (Chaika the Coffin Princess) that don’t boil down to it being “solid”. It starts pleasingly enough pitching a late medieval fantasy world where unicorns aren’t brushed snow stallions but grotesque slathering monsters, then proceeds to flesh out its trio, then quartet, of main characters before concluding with a satisfying end. A second season (or continuation of this season depending on your point of view of staggered broadcasts) has been announced which is unsurprising given that the series has been well received and has enough mileage in its premise to carry it through another dozen or so episodes.
The titular Chaika is an amnesiac goth loli with apple cheeks and a clipped, almost breathless cadence to her speech who is looking for the remains of her father, Emperor Gaz. Enlisting the help of the mercenaries, or “saboteurs” in the series’ lingo, Toru and Akari, the group set off to help Chaika in putting her father to rest. The issue being of course that Gaz was killed because of the war he started that lasted two hundred years, and his remains were separated so that his immense magical powers would not allow him to reform, T-1000 style, and start up hostilities all over again. Nothing is ever easy.
