A Decade Later, Reborn! Still Divides Its Biggest Fans
The retrospective captures the ambivalence many long-time fans feel toward a series that was a Weekly Shonen Jump staple and an early Crunchyroll simulcast, but whose legacy is complicated by its genre identity crisis.
Reporting from 1 sources: Anime News Network.
A new retrospective by Jairus Taylor at Anime News Network revisits Akira Amano's Reborn! manga and anime, examining how the series' tonal shifts and uneven pacing hold up more than a decade after its 2012 conclusion. The piece balances affection for the cast with frustration at the series' structural problems.
Jairus Taylor's retrospective on Reborn! for Anime News Network does not try to settle whether the series is good or bad. Instead, it walks through the experience of a fan who discovered Akira Amano's manga as a teenager and has spent the intervening years watching his enthusiasm cool into something more complicated. Taylor describes burning through the available chapters in a single weekend after being drawn in by the absurd premise of a gun-toting baby mafia tutor, then traces how that initial hook gave way to a growing awareness of the series' structural problems.
The piece notes that Reborn! ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from 2004 to 2012, spanning 42 volumes, and received a 203-episode anime from Studio Artland that aired from 2006 to 2010. Taylor points out that the anime was one of the earliest shows Crunchyroll simulcast as it moved from a pirate site to a legitimate streaming service. But the retrospective's real subject is the tension between the series' memorable cast and its uneven execution. Taylor names the core characters-Tsuna, Gokudera, Yamamoto, Lambo-and the Dying Will Bullet gimmick that drives the early chapters, but he also signals that the series' later shifts in tone and escalation left him feeling ambivalent. The piece is less a verdict than a document of how a once-cherished series can become harder to defend the more you think about it.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.
Sources
- Anime News Network Retrospective: Does the Dying Will of Reborn! Still Burn?