This Week in Anime

Is Netflix's Dota Show Worth Watching?

Jean-Karlo
Ah yes, another serialized action cartoon animated by Studio Mir where everyone has pointy chins. Forget that Horimiya kid's stuff, this is real "Anime™". Thank you, Netflix, you truly know what the Anime Fan Wants.

...He said, dripping with sarcasm.

If you're gonna make this big parade about your cartoons, at least bother to make sure these cartoons are good, is all I ask. And Dota: Dragon Blood here...oof. I can only wonder how Dota fans feel about this.

For other uninitiated: Dota stands for "Defense of the Ancients", a beloved and popular Warcraft III mod that eventually spun off and became a game all its own. It's the foundation of the MOBA genre, later inspiring other games like League of Legends or Blizzard's own belated Heroes of the Storm. It's long since shed its Warcraft roots, but it's still boilerplate fantasy stuff—and the cartoon doesn't do much to change that.

The show centers around Davion, a Dragon Knight who gets himself tied up in a sweeping adventure after he has a violent run-in with the fire dragon Slyrak (voiced by Tony Todd!). Cursed with the ability to turn into a dragon-person, and fated to totally transform into Slyrak himself, Davion seeks out a sage who can undo his curse.

Davion is travelling with Mirana and her mute assistant Marci. As the deposed Princess of the Moon, Mirana is seeking a number of stolen lotuses that belong to her goddess, Selemene.

It doesn't help that the Sage that Davion and Mirana are looking for is the Invoker, whom the elf Fymryn is also seeking in the hopes that he can use the lotuses to bring back Mene. Fymryn, by the way, is the elf that stole the lotuses from under Mirana's nose.

Meanwhile, the Invoker—who has no name besides "Invoker"—was apparently a wizard who had a kid with Selemene, and he's got a grudge because Selemene let their daughter die. So he crafts a complicated revenge plot involving the lotuses and the dragons that Slyrak is connected to, and hey Terrorblade is also involved.

A quick glance at the wiki illustrates that a lot of this stems from the Dota games themselves, which aren't terribly original. Again, this used to be a Warcraft mod, so basic fast-and-loose lore had to be established for these characters, leading to situations where some characters—like Davion—are better known by their roles ("Dragon Knight", "Crystal Maiden", etc). Or, like Invoker, you seemingly get stuck with names as a joke.
Alas, poor Carl.

See, this makes me appreciate adaptations of gacha games a bit more. Sure, the cast of Granblue Fantasy or Azur Lane aren't that much better than Carl up there, but at least the games do have a wealth of in-jokes and backstory for these characters that could feasibly make for a collection of entertaining scenes. Stuff like Granblue's Durm and Strang bickering, or... I dunno, that one time St. Louis from Azur Lane wore a barely-there dress and drove a concept car? It's at least something. The Dota games don't give the Dota cartoon much to work with, so poor Studio Mir had all this budget but not much more to go off of.

And that's a shame because as low-key resentful I am of Mir for always getting shouted about because of that one wuxia-inspired cartoon they did for Nickelodeon (I get it, the bad boy got a really well-written arc, please watch another show), they do have a very defined and attractive house style—but no writing to back it up. It's like Trigger's contribution to Darling in the Franxx. You can toss all the great animation at the screen that you want, and you will drag some folks in with just eye-candy, but it's not until you back your fancy robots with a deep, hard-hitting story about cutting off toxic influences and addressing your trauma as told by an army of Transformers gijinka that you'll make something truly special. And Studio Mir sadly isn't there yet.

Truly, the most important bit of storytelling in Dota: elves are polyamorous.

"Give us that drussy!", he shouted as his editor sadly shook her head and filled out the pink slip.

Wouldn't you know it, Marci is a cartoon-only character. So the one time Dota manages something undeniably great, it's not even from the games.

Time should also be dedicated to Luna, or as I like to call her, "Korra's P2 Palette". An enforcer of the goddess Selemene, Luna has a bloody history and indulges in her knack for killing once Selemene orders her to march against the elves.

Apparently, she can be too violent for even Selemene's tastes. But I'm with Luna, you don't tell someone "do what you have to to put those people in line" then complain when they just waste 'em.

Between Dota and last week's Pacific Rim: The Black, it feels like Netflix purposefully snips seasons in half to ensure there are two seasons' worth of "content". Dota's first season—sorry, "book", because I'm totally reading this show in print—is only eight episodes long, and ends on what wants to be a cliffhanger but just feels like someone arbitrarily hitting the "stop" button.

You can see this with the elf rebel leader that Luna imprisons. She's captured, locked in prison, escapes and... that's all she wrote?

It's not "foreshadowing" if you only tell half the story.

I feel bad for Studio Mir because there's a lot of effort on the visual side of things. But there's absolutely no reason to give a rip about anything that's happening unless you really, really care about Dota. And sure, Valve really does push Dota hard, but as a person who doesn't care about MOBAs, I have to say that maybe League of Legends would have been a better wagon to hitch up to?

Again, this is what happens when your game treats its characters almost exclusively as functions as opposed to characters. The sad thing is, you could have made at least an entertaining narrative out of all of this. But it's just not there, man. See, this is why I get so mad about the whole "Anime™" thing. To paraphrase Hank Hill, you're not making your cartoon better, you're making an entire medium look worse.

Also—because I really want to get this out—you cast freaking Tony Todd as a freaking dragon and this is the best you can do with him?

This guy's performance reminds me of Chris Latta's classic Starscream (or Cobra Commander, if you're a GI Joe fan). And there are worse things you can do than to emulate the voice behind the biggest 1980s Saturday morning villains.

Noblesse was also a dull, boilerplate show, but that one had astoundingly-good domestic scenes with its cast of self-serious vampires and government agents. Dota is just a dry, pompous, self-serious fantasy with little else to show for it and it's just a shame, considering it gave us Marci.