Blue Eye Samurai is a damn good show.

A damn good show that comes with a couple of warnings.

There’s, uh, there’s a lot of violence. It’s not live action, but that only allows it to be even more graphic. The violence is all beautifully choreographed, stunningly performed, gorgeously animated… just hold on to your teeth (and read this article about Jane Wu’s role in making the show) and you should be fine.

There’s also a lot going on here, gender- and sexuality-wise.

You might have picked up this show because you saw a story about a woman passing as a man and enacting violent revenge. But if you’re looking for explicitly queer empowerment you’ll need to hunt for it. This show ties non-straight sexuality to villainy, at least in part. Further, while the show does have female empowerment, it mostly comes at the cost of operating within the patriarchal system and suborning that system for one’s own use rather than dismantling it.

Thus, despite having a female main character passing as a man for (more or less) the entire show, the show doesn’t feel like it’s queering the setting’s gender dynamics much. The kinds of power—and the social roles—available to masculine or feminine people feel rigidly defined. They aren’t something that any character is able to queer or transgress without significant and dramatic pushback… yet some do this anyway.

This portrayal may be historically accurate. I don’t know. Based on the production team’s attention to detail elsewhere, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were. But while I appreciated the accuracy that I did recognize, I didn’t need this story to be utterly historical. Much as I concluded with Overlord back in 2018, if I’m not watching something that’s explicitly very historical fiction I’m okay with more slippage around the edges.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you, like my spouse, saw trailers for this and were first drawn in by the idea that the story might be fundamentally about queer- or female-empowerment. If that was the biggest part of this story that excited you, Blue Eye Samurai might not give you what you’re looking for.

If you’re losing interest immediately, please wait!

It’s true. This show doesn’t dismantle the patriarchy.

On the other hand if you want a badass warrior woman hellbent on revenge, living and passing as a man, this is the show for you.

If you want women striving to cut their own paths through the barbed thickets of their society, this is the show for you.

If you want beautifully choreographed and performed fight scenes, animated with loving attention to visceral detail, this is the show for you.

If you want character arcs that feel nuanced and meaningful, that reveal growth both in the ways characters change and in the ways they dig ever deeper into their ruts, this is the show for you.

If you want gorgeous animation and settings that make you pause just to savor the art, or if you want to experience an ever-broadening array of well-realized intimately personal story arcs that will tug your heartstrings, or if you want to enjoy bloody fight scenes and treacherous political intrigue… this is the show for you.

It’s a good show, is what I’m trying to say. A damn good show.

There’s obviously meant to be another season. There’s enough resolution at the end of the first season, with enough character arcs culminating (beautifully, painfully, messily), that I don’t feel robbed by the obvious open path to a new season. I am still hungry for the next season though.

Honestly, I’m probably going to rewatch this whole show. I admire the ways in which Blue Eye Samurai plays out its character development for our main character Mizu. Her story, the way in which her history is peeled back in layer after heartwarming and heartrending layer, is such a good slow reveal. Time and again Blue Eye Samurai lays out action and context hand in hand; I’m picky about flashbacks, but this show uses them masterfully.

Blue Eye Samurai feels like it understands the cost of making a gruff, self-isolating revenge-seeker your main character. And instead of embracing classic genre tropes, simply showing our stoic hero’s taciturn choices and expecting us to thrill to her misanthropy, we are drip-fed backstory that builds our understanding and appreciation of Mizu’s perspective one brick at a time. Many of those bricks hurt—I think that’s the point, really.

It’s not just Mizu either. I don’t want to spoil it for you if you haven’t seen the show yet, but there’re a few stunning frames in the final episode that perfectly encapsulate the total transformation of another character (another two characters?) that I utterly love. I don’t just want a second season for more Mizu. I want it for the others, characters I’ve come to love and appreciate even if I also detest them at times.

All of this is a long way to say: I recommend this show. I recommend it strongly.

If you can’t stomach violence, you might need to watch it while ready to cover your eyes.

If you need more convincing, and don’t mind a few mostly-not-spoilers, check out this video Behind the Animation, or this video Making of a Warrior about how they achieved their stunning choreography and animation of their fight scenes, or this video which is the whole first episode.

Also, Jane Wu (the supervising director and producer, who also has a deep background in martial arts) mentions in the Making of a Warrior video that some of the stylings of Blue Eye Samurai are an homage to both old samurai films and the Spaghetti Westerns with Clint Eastwood, and I just love that. Sergio Leone’s first Spaghetti Westerns were themselves remaking Akira Kurosawa’s samurai movies, starting with Yojimbo recreated in A Fistful of Dollars. The circle is complete—from samurai movie to Western to animated samurai miniseries.