‘Clevatess’ series review: A brutal anthropological meditation that bites

The first thing Clevatess does is kill its heroes. Thirteen champions brutally dispatched before the story has even begun. If that weren’t enough, the titular demon king razes an entire kingdom for this slight. And yet, amid the smouldering ruins, he pauses to grant a dying boy’s plea: he will take in a human infant.

The trick is quite disarming. We’ve seen monsters hold kingdoms hostage, gods banish mortals to shadow, but seldom a demon king blinking in confusion at a wailing infant. Clevatess, the horned foxlike beast of terrifying power, with the voice of Yuichi Nakamura, is not softened by the task; rather treats it like a thought experiment. He soon resurrects Alicia Glenfall — the lone woman among the fallen heroes — simply because someone must feed the child. His ignorance of human life is so total that he imagines she might lactate on command.

A still from ‘Clevatess’
| Photo Credit:
Crunchyroll

The show is adapted from Yuji Iwahara’s manga, and Lay-duce animates it with a kind of vintage austerity that recalls the grainy nostalgia of Oriental Light and Magic’s Berserk. Fights come in bloody, deliberate and unflinching bursts, but much of the series is content with conversation and contemplation.

The relationship between Clevatess and Alicia carries the show. She carries the scars of countless cross-shaped wounds, an eyepatch, and the weight of resurrection — and yet she remains stubborn, unwilling to surrender her sense of right and wrong even as her master dismisses morality as a human fallacy. Their jagged exchanges are often laced with exasperation, channelling the brittle Beckettian rhythms of a pair locked in dependence, circling the question of why one obeys and the other commands. The baby Luna (who happens to be the heir to the fallen kingdom’s throne) is the catalyst, forcing the two to linger together and scrape some form of cooperation from the ashes of self-wrought annihilation.

Fantasy has long used the “stranger in a strange land” to mirror back our own society. Here, the outsider’s contempt for human behaviour is matched only by his curiosity about it. If humans want to enslave, torture, rape and kill each other, he observes without sentiment. By contrast, Alicia feels every loss and every betrayal at a physical, emotional and psychological level. Clevatess finds poignancy in the collision between these two perspectives.

One of the series’ most surprising strengths is its women. Alicia, resurrected against her will, might easily have been reduced to a foil or a victim, yet she emerges as the series’ emotional register. A former hero who once dreamed of adventure, she is forced to reckon with the rot beneath her kingdom’s traditions. Haruka Shiraishi voices her with steely vulnerability, as a woman stuck between grief and duty, unwilling to surrender her moral compass even when it’s repeatedly bent, broken or dismembered. Scarred, stubborn, and stripped of the heroism that once defined her, she still insists on charting her own path.

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Nelluru, a former slave who becomes Luna’s caretaker, embodies an even stronger resilience. Having been abused and assaulted as a slave since childhood, her dignity and liberation are hard-won. Even the dowager Princess T’ala, glimpsed much later, resists the role of grieving mother and steps into the chaos as a strategist and protector of her kingdom. Together, these women form a counterweight to the demon king’s insouciant cruelty, and the show’s narrative energy often belongs more to their choices than to his.

Clevatess also thrives on its negotiation with the high fantasy tradition. Where Tolkien framed The Lord of the Rings around the sanctity of fellowship and destiny, the “fellowship” here is fractured at the start, and destiny is exposed as fabrication. Berserk supplies the closest tonal neighbour, with its fixation on the aftermath of slaughter and the corruption of power, yet Clevatess lingers longer on intimacy than spectacle. Compared with its contemporary Frieren, which treats the absence of the demon lord as occasion for elegy, Clevatess explores how the narrative warps when the supposed villain survives.

A still from ‘Clevatess’
| Photo Credit:
Crunchyroll

The show is not gentle. Certain subplots about slavery and abuse push into bleakness, closer to the brutality of Goblin Slayer than the meditative melancholy of Frieren. Beneath all the violence are questions about how power operates — who enforces it, who suffers under it, and who pretends it is in their destiny. The kingdom’s forge, revealed late in the season as a mechanism for manufacturing kings and heroes, is a pointed allegory for myths of legitimacy built on sacrifice and secrecy.

What makes the series so compelling, finally, is its perspective. Clevatess may be overpowered, but more importantly, he is over-perceptive. Unencumbered by human custom, he observes with clinical indifference the hypocrisies of their self-serving mortal lives. Where a typical hero might moralise, he catalogues. Where a villain might gloat, he shrugs. It is this anthropological gaze that gives the series its peculiar intensity — a study of human intention seen through the eyes of something just outside it, powerful enough not to need us, and yet bound, by accident, to care for one of our own.

The intimacy of it all has a remarkable staying power. For all the bloodletting, Clevatess is about the awkward miracle of coexistence. Fantasy often asks how evil might be defeated, but here the question seems more curious: what if evil lived on to study what it means to care?

Clevatess is currently streaming on Crunchyroll

Published – October 03, 2025 02:40 pm IST