Knights of the Zodiac 20

Masami Kurumada – Viz – 2007 – 28 volumes

I always forget how much I love this series after I’ve let it lapse awhile. In my head, I can never figure out why I would want to read something where a bunch of boys fight each other, constantly break the story’s own logic, and are always trumping each other with a way stronger move they’ve somehow failed to mention before all their other strongest moves. Then I read it, and I remember.

I’m having a little trouble with these volumes, since none of the main characters are currently involved in the fight. The main event is being handled by side characters, but unfortunately they are fighting side characters that appeared in the story at the same time but died, so I can never remember who’s fighting for what and who survived the earlier battle, et cetera. But it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is the size of your cosmo, of course.

Literally, it doesn’t matter. They are constantly killing each other, coming back to life, then killing each other again. Usually one of them will yell something about Athena, or Hades, and then the sides will be clear, but it doesn’t matter.

What does matter are these… these fights. One of the Hades warriors starts out as a blob of goo, turns into a caterpillar, then a cocoon, then into a man wearing a proper Surplice armor. He is Hades’ Butterfly, the Celestial Faerie Star, and he gives Mu a run for his money even in his goo phase. Rhadamanthys, the leader of the Hades army, tells us that only Butterfly will be needed to wipe out every single one of the Knights of Athena. This fight is great because Mu constantly acts beaten, and may die twice, then somehow pulls off two of the ultimate moves that kill Butterfly twice. Mu seems like the underdog the whole time, what with the Faerie Throng attack that transports you, body and soul, to the underworld via a cloud of relentless butterflies. And they have psychic battles. With their mind. They’re both pretty strong when it comes to this. But ultimately, I guess Mu’s cosmo is just a little bigger. Unless Butterfly isn’t really dead. But for someone strong enough to wipe out all the Knights of Athena, I’m sure there’ll be about a dozen people who are ten times stronger than him in the pipeline.

I know my description sounds sarcastic, and it is, a little. But that’s because there’s not a good way of putting into words what makes this series so fun to read. It’s exactly because it makes so little sense, and makes things up as it goes along, and is somehow really awesome at doing so. I know there will be a hundred battles in the coming volumes that will be way better than this one with the Celestial Faerie Star, and right now I can’t even begin to comprehend how that’s possible. But I trust Saint Seiya to pull that off, because it is forever hardcore.

I mean, reading this, it makes you wonder how anybody could ever write a boring shounen fight scene, because this does it extremely well without even trying to make sense.