Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t hate this episode. In fact, I liked it in a lot of ways. I mean fat Fushi is one of my favorite sights and I want a keychain of him. But when it came time to find a title, the only word that came to mind was: useless.
Also, I didn’t get a lot of screenshots this week and I don’t know why. Nothing stood out to me as I was going through them. Visually, the episode was kind of stagnant.
Of course, Ligand is an owl, why did I think he was a falcon last week. We all knew he was an owl. That’s still a really long-lived owl. Also, I forgot that Fushi didn’t know she was grown-up Tonari which made the first act really confusing for a while there. Not that it matters anymore because no more Tonari.
Really? After all that bluster, 40 years of immunizing yourself to poison and you go down in the first few seconds, on the first hit. I was so interested to see where this character was going and it turns out, she’s going nowhere! On the one hand, it does take some guts to do this. Reintroduce a character in the second season after a time jump as the only potential ally of the protagonist just to kill them off immediately. That’s not a weak-willed narrative and I begrudgingly respect it. But am I the only one who felt the whole thing was a little… anti-climatic? In the end, she couldn’t do a thing against a real nokker, useless.
I did quite enjoy the scene though. There were moments that visually bordered on horror there. Although I know it isn’t the case, part of me thought that the nokker arm dragging Hisame away was an Evil Dead reference. It was to me and that’s what counts!
It also renders moot all the set-up they did in the first episode. Really the season could have easily started here instead without any of the poisoning or Tomari tangents and we wouldn’t have lost much, story-wise. It was sort of useless.
And what was Fushi doing during all this, sleeping! Useless!
Ok, I’ll stop. Instead, let’s talk about the weird little lore additions I noticed. When Fushi turned into Tonari and finally realized who she was, he reproduced that book she carries around. Fair enough, even if he didn’t register it he could have seen it, that’s fine. But the book had writing in it. Can Fushi reproduce things he’s never seen as long as they have a strong connection to the person he’s taking the form of? Did he see inside the book long ago and only the pages he remembers are filled out& Or is it nonesense and every page of that book is like Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, … Personally I hope it’s the last option.
Also, Fushi has been eating nokkers for a while now. I’m not sure if that implies people meat from time to time when they’re possessed. In any case, if the mention of that poison immunization thing wasn’t all for nothing, is there going to be a situation in which Fushi is saved because he’s been eating so many nokkers? Or can a person become impervious to them by eating them? I’m just curious.
The last act of the episode was where things picked up for me. I like the idea of an unending parade of Hayase’s descendants trying to seduce Fushi. I liked the notion that the guardians became so good at their job that Fushi got fat and lazy (and useless). As I said, fat Fushi is my favorite of all the forms. And I also like how the fact that after generations Hayase having a male heir is treated like a huge shakeup. At the very least, it’s going to make it difficult for him to have a baby with Fushi, so they’re going to have to find a new dynamic.
It feels a bit like the season got a false start. hope we’re on a roll now!
Season 1
- To Your Eternity ep. 1 – Forever
- To Your Eternity ep. 2 – Precocious
- To Your Eternity ep. 3 – Manners
- To Your Eternity ep. 4 – Pain
- To Your Eternity ep. 5 – Orphan
- To Your Eternity ep. 6 – Maker
- To Your Eternity ep. 7 – Dreams
- To Your Eternity ep. 8 – Freaks
- To Your Eternity ep. 9 – Home
- To Your Eternity ep. 10 – Flamethrower
- To Your Eternity ep. 11 – Confession
- To Your Eternity ep. 12 – Rebirth
- To Your Eternity ep. 13 – Empathy
- To Your Eternity ep. 14 – Arrow
- To Your Eternity ep. 15 – Return
- To Your Eternity ep. 16 – Freedom
- To Your Eternity ep. 17 – Promises
- To Your Eternity ep. 18 – Mercy
- To Your Eternity ep. 19 – Dato
- To Your Eternity ep. 20 – Happiness
Yeah, nothing in the first episode amounted to much of anything. We did get introduced to factions, so there’s that. I was a little suprised we’d get a time-skip so soon after. In the end, there’s really nothing much to say about this episode.
Yeah second setup. But fat Fushi!