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#Souso no Frieren
casliveblog · 10 days
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Custom Toonami Block Week 174 Rundown
The Witch from Mercury: So we start with Suletta going to her space school since this is of course a school show and even though she and Eri look identical this doesn’t seem to be a pseudonym since the wikis list them as different people and I don’t think I want to read any more on that for risk of spoilers. Also her last name is Mercury cause she comes from Mercury so I guess my full name is DJ United States so we’re going with the Han Solo logic of making up a last name on your way to someplace I guess. On her way in Suletta finds a girl just kinda freediving into space and of course since again this is a lesbian school show this is Miorine, Suletta’s obligatory reluctant fate-driven deep connection before she even walks in the fucking door. Apparently Miorine is trying to get to Earth which may have to do with the fact she’s being forced to marry the Gundamn equivalent of Gaston who just barges into their class and starts a giant mech fight and apparently there are NO shields up despite them swinging sheets of metal the size of skyscrapers around and firing beam rifiles everywhere because Suletta is almost killed by debris if not for Mio saving her, like seriously even just a mobile suit swinging its weapon is gonna cause a huge draft at least put up some wind barriers or some shit. So after Gaston wrecks Mio’s tomato garden (fucking Big O ass motherfucking reference) Sul challenges him to a duel and they do this thing where it’s actually Mio in Sul’s Aerial but then she gets pissed and takes back over and the duel swaps opponents like three times but somehow that’s still legal and the same duel even though Gaston had Mio dead to rights. And we get to see Aerial’s full powerset, instead of standard weapons it jettisons off parts of its armor to Senbonzakura them around it and make constructs to form shields and blasters out of the parts kinda like the Mercurius (ironically) from Gundam Wing and that’s kinda really cool and demolishes Gaston in seconds. Turns out this is a Yugioh style plot where the main character coming out of nowhere to beat the reigning champ is gonna fuck a lot of political shit up and also it means Sul’s engaged to Mio now so that’s fun, not even trying to hide the lesbian shit right off the bat, gotta admire them not pussyfooting around the core appeal. I also like how Mio seems immediately warmed up to Sul and doesn’t seem to mind being engaged to her despite her being fed up with her fate being decided by outside politics before because after you Senbonzakura a mobile suit to cut a Disney villain to ribbons who wouldn’t be aroused.  
Inuyasha The Final Act: This is Jewel Purification Shenanigans: The Episode, I’ve never been entirely clear on how the jewel being pure/tainted works on a mechanical level so a lot of this comes off as the jewel just doing whatever the plot says the whole time. Naraku abducts Koga and the rest of the group aside from Inuyasha and Kagome who are coming back from getting the bow and remark on Kikyo’s character development which is a funny way of retconning how wildly her character fluctuated in her early appearances but sure, goodness of humanity got to her and made her less of a vengeful jerk or something. Naraku actually gets a 1v1 against Koga which isn’t really something I ever expected but it’s pretty cool to see even if it gets interrupted by Jewel Purification Shenanigans when Koga’s shards are purified and the plan once again becomes to let Naraku absorb Koga’s shards to purify him, but since Naraku can basically read Kikyo’s mind he does a quick little swap and puts the tainted main jewel in her body (which prolly isn’t good for her) while he works on tainting Koga’s shards. Inuyasha shows up and uses the Dragon Scale Tessaiga to do shit all before Naraku does an ‘oh noes, the Dragon Scale Tessaiga opened a hole into my body don’t look at my tainted jewel uwu’ and Koga resolves to use his shards to purify it only for it to be a trap and force Koga to be captured. Miroku does a pretty cool team attack where he uses the Wind Tunnel to ventilate away Naraku’s miasma so Koga can break free with Inuyasha’s help but Kikyo’s still fucking dying (like this is the part that confuses me, you’d think the jewel being inside the holiest woman on Earth would purify it since just being around Kikyo kept Kohaku’s shard pure but instead it just kinda kills her faster I guess) and Kagome has to use her new bow to purify the jewel inside Kikyo before Naraku can grab it again. There’s a cool little fight where Kagome purifies the jewel and Naraku has to hurry and taint it again before it touches him but he’s able to fully corrupt it again and take Koga’s shards for good measure so now Kohaku’s all that’s left which is really funny that the only thing stopping Naraku from already having the full jewel is that he spent a shard months ago to fuck with Sango a little bit like if he hadn’t been so adamant on his errand boy being a kid to fuck with his sixth most important enemy he’d have won by now. Still Kikyo hid a tiny bit of light deep in the corrupt jewel to be used at a later date and Naraku… runs away, like there’s literally nothing the group can do to him at this point why does he keep running? Either way Kikyo gets a good sendoff moment with Kaede because we remembered Kaede exists this time and Inuyasha does give her a heartfelt goodbye as we finally send her off to the afterlife. Like as solid as the scene is it would’ve been a lot more effective if we didn’t have a fakeout Kikyo Grieving Arc at the end of the original series. But still, there is something cathartic about seeing Kikyo go in peace instead of cursing Inuyasha like the first time she died and he gets to be there with her this time after regretting not being there when she died originally. Guess we have to thank random early story character Witch Urasue for crafting one of the greatest barriers to Naraku’s victory.  
Castlevania: The opening is Godbrand having a dream about past exploits killing humans and this brief show of competence combined with the fact that he’s basically been a joke this whole time is a pretty good indication Godbrand isn’t making it to Season 3 bros. Carmilla’s still stirring up shit, this time seemingly convincing Hector that Dracula’s going for genocide instead of containment and Dracula and Isaac have a neat conversation about how that explanation is better to placate Hector since his entire worldview predicates on how pets are to be treated. Meanwhile Trevor’s group is still plunging the depths of the Belmont Museum of Demonic Horrors (which is kinda funny because the Dracula stuff feels like it’s happening over the course of a couple days whereas Trevor’s stuff feel like a day or two max so either Carmilla’s turning everyone traitor at a record pace or Trevor’s group has a really good camping setup in the ol’ Belmont place) they talk about Magic Mirrors and how they’re basically phones and stuff and that somehow connects to Dracula throwing a blanket into the woods but idk how that’s important yet, but more importantly we do get some nice character development from Sypha and Trevor where she explains why she keeps pushing his buttons because while Trevor and Alucard are moody angsty edgelords, Trevor has a bit of levity to him and can still get a reaction while Alucard just kinda lets everything wash over him and absorbs it into his angst-hole. Like it’s interesting that this isn’t something about him being a vampire but just his personality/mental state that he is that far gone that nothing of warmth really reaches him and contrasts that with Trevor who is more outwardly prickly but can be surprisingly warm at times. Meanwhile Godbrand meets with Isaac for Phase 2 of the ‘hey join Team Carmilla we got snacks’ party and it was probably not a great idea to tell his most blindly loyal follower exactly where the plot to overthrow him is gonna take place so yeah Isaac just fucking garrote’s Godbrand and stakes him with surprising efficiency even for someone like Godbrand that’s basically a walking punchline.  
Jujutsu Kaisen: The opening scene is just a runthrough of all the beats of Yuji’s character arc so far and just him reflecting on the idea that if he hadn’t eaten the damn finger to save one guy or if he had let himself be executed, half of Shibuya wouldn’t have died here, and it’s kinda harrowing, like obviously that’s not directly his fault but I can’t say the survivor’s guilt of that isn’t legitimate and his whole narrative throughline is thrown off by his body count skyrocketing through the roof. Next Nanami finds a bunch of Mahito’s transfigured mooks and despite becoming two-face and being half dead just kinda plows right through them despite Mahito getting the jump on him in the end. I like the idea that Nanami’s so crazy strong that Mahito still had to distract and soften him up a bit just in case. Nanami swallows his regrets and urges Yuji to carry on, offering an inherited will instead of a curse as it’s the best he can do right now. The rest of the episode is Mahito versus Yuji and there’s a lot of weird shit that goes on with Mahito’s Junji Ito powers and it’s kinda funny that Mahito’s forced to do ranged fighting because if he tries to transfigure Yuji Sukuna will flip out while usually everyone else has to be careful about getting too close to Mahito. They have this whole extended sequence of Mahito creating a collapsing hallway of flesh that could just crush Yuji but he sends a dodgeable amount of buzzsaws instead and it turns out none of it mattered anyway because Yuji can just fist his way through the meat curtains. Also I’m not sure if Mahito just found two random dudes to play possum while he sucket punches Yuji or if he actively de-transfigured some of his guys and puppeted them around to use as decoys but Mahito always seems to use fists when if he’d just turn into a sword Yuji’d be dead by now. Turns out though we got a Double Mahito situation while the main one’s fighting Yuji he’s got a clone soul guy up top fighting Nobara hoping to break Yuji by murdering his friend in front of him which I don’t fully understand because like he literally just did that with Nanami and it just made him more mad but I guess it hits different if it’s a cute feisty big titty anime girl instead of a world weary mentor figure.
Delicious in Dungeon: The group are still on the forest floor and end up jacking a Basilisk for some chicken and eggs which is always good by me since chicken’s my personal favorite. Nothing too important in this section it’s mostly just the obligatory action section. Next Marcille starts to feel bad when the group doesn’t seem to need her magic for anything despite her supposedly being a Frieren-style OP mage and they even dunk on her methods of harvesting Mandrakes despite it literally being the textbook method. Long story short she tries her own way and fucks it up like the girlfail she is but the group finds there was a reason it was written that way and everyone’s a little right and a little wrong and they all reconcile, it’s a nice moment considering Marcille’s basically the de facto main character at this point. Lastly we find out Chilchuck takes disarming traps VERY seriously and kinda segregates the group based on their specialties and tells everyone to stay in their lane because he doesn’t really work well with others or taking instruction. Still Senshi kind of mixes in cooking stuff with his trap stuff and they end up having a bit of respect for each other and realizing a specialty doesn’t have to be a hard and fast rule and diversifying skillsets can be beneficial for everyone. Like I’mma be honest, this show is kinda really basic thus far and even though I hate the video game fantasy genre the cooking stuff seems to kind of be getting in the way of the pacing since they have to structure each section around a new dish so I’m kinda already ready for something new but I know it smoothens out so I’m gonna bear through it for now.
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End: The demon guy that’s come to kill Frieren basically has the watered down magic version of Doflamingo’s Devil Fruit and Frieren’s able to shield herself from it temporarily and it’s really funny because he’s talking about how she can’t break the strings and she’s just like ‘Oh yes, the string is very strong, but the arms holding them are quite soft’ and fucking cuts off both his arms before nuking him into the floor. Now unfortunately demons disintegrate when they die so now Frieren’s basically a fugitive because he killed a guard on his way in which is kind of funny that his plan works better with him failing than if he succeeded and had to explain why there was a dead guard even though I’m sure that wasn’t intentional on his part since he was sure he’d win. I kinda rolled my eyes at the idea of having a Frieren framed for murder plot and even though she does have to lay low because of it, the Captain isn’t a fucking moron and immediately puts together what happened now that the girl who didn’t nuke the town when she could’ve is gone and one of the sus demons is missing, so good on him, glad we didn’t draw that out. Unfortunately Lugner has Suitengu’s Blood Sephiroth powers and kills everyone except the Captain and is like ‘well guess we’ll just cut out the middle man and bust down your barrier the easy way’ and the funny thing is Aura’s army is like right outside like idk if Lugner just got word to them that the plan was speeding up or the expected the diplomacy plan to have them lower the shield like right now like just ‘oh we’re friends now give me the launch codes’. Frieren goes to confront Aura while Stark and Fern go to fight the remaining two demons despite Stark being concerned that Lugner doesn’t consider them a threat at all and completely failed to acknowledge their existence when they first met. Frieren basically tells him that just because he doesn’t think much of them doesn’t mean they aren’t a threat to him and to have faith which is kind of a cool touch like not every arrogant bad guy is gonna have a perfect scouter on power levels like sometimes if they ignore you they’re just wrong. Stark breaks in to free the captain and he gives a whole ‘go on without me’ speech when Stark can’t cut his bindings but Stark does the smart thing and the thing I was shouting at the screen and just goes to break the chair. Lugner comes in to fight and Stark says fuck you to this arrogant guy ignoring him and inserts himself into his field of view which is a nice show of confidence gained on his part. He fights him for a bit before Fern blasts him out of nowhere with the Demon Genocide Beam which unfortunately doesn’t kill him but they escape into the city while Frieren goes to take down Aura.
Vinland Saga: Canute’s ready to descend on Ketil’s farm like the plague but he hasn’t COMPLETELY gone off the deep end just yet and does want to try and see if he can use scare tactics and overwhelming force to get them to surrender without needlessly spilling blood and the rest of the episode is basically a deconstruction of why that is absolutely not going to work. Ketil comes back and Thorgil’s ready for war while Ketil himself is just kinda comatose and ready to blow off a stress load in the human being he uses like a body pillow. Leif’s also there and though he can’t see Thorfinn since he and Einar are being detained since I guess they caught up to Einar eventually, Pater like a chad asks him to buy up Thorfinn’s new friends so they can be free with him too which if Ketil wasn’t in the process of going off the deep end he could probably have Thorfinn and Einar for free but Arnheid was always going to be the problem. Speaking of which Ketil’s wife tells him all the shit that’s gone down while he’s been gone in the most glibly meltdown-inducing way she can without actually lying to him. Like Ketil’s wife is just the biggest bitch but also I do kinda feel bad for her because you get the feeling that don’t even like each other and she’s just a hollow replacement for that other girl that got murdered when the other farm dude married her. So despite all his talk of hating violence Ketil immediately goes into rage mode and starts beating Arnheid once he finds out, not even believing that her baby is really his at this point. See now this is the difference between a pacifist and a coward, a coward is afraid of getting hit but will always take the chance to hit if they know they can get away with it, Ketil doesn’t hate violence he hates the idea of a fight or of people hating him, once shit stops going his way you see what a pathetic guy he really is. At this point Arnheid’s half dead and is only saved by Snake while Ketil agrees to give Thorfinn and Einar to Leif but vows to keep Arnheid to the bitter end which makes his plans for her really grim. Despite all this Ketil’s ready to just come at the King at this point and is steeling himself for war which I’m fine with, burn the whole place down at this point I’m ready for Daddy Canute’s army to come kick this whiny manchild’s ass and I know that’s not the point of the show but at the same time the hypocrisy in the episode is just really good at getting under your skin like there’s nothing I hate more than someone who talks about peace and then is violent when there’s no consequences to them.
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e17omm · 4 months
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Frieren's Zoltraak OST does not need to go as hard as it does.
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chojis · 5 months
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i love souso no frieren, im enjoying it a lot!!! i love frieren and himmel sooooo much
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casliveblog · 17 days
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Custom Toonami Block Week 173 Rundown
The Witch from Mercury: Okay so I have a notoriously hard time of comprehending Gundam plots so if I get anything wrong… that’s just how it’ll have to be. So it’s the old chesnut Gundam franchise have been milking for forty years now… Earth vs Space, like seriously I haven’t even seen all the Gundam serieses and I am SO sick of setup and everyone philosophizing about how going into space gives people superpowers and shit like can Gundam as a series think of anything else to do? But yeah apparently in this verse they originally were making prosthetics for people that had muscle dystrophy and shit from being in space and then as someone always does they went ‘cool but what if we did WAR with it?’ and now regular mobile suits and Gundams are just quietly being built in the background even though no official war is going on and the Gundams make people fucking die from a combination of information overload similar to the Zero System in Wing and that shit in Pacific Rim that made it so you needed two people to coordinate motor functions of a huge robot. Enter Eri, tiny girl with a mysterious connection to the big Barbie Gundam being built by her parents who are definitely not surviving this episode. It’s her birthday because this backstory is REALLY gonna kick her in the metaphorical nuts and the Space People have decided ‘Gundams kill their own guys, I’M supposed to kill their guys, that’s not fair bro’ which, A+ politicianing, no notes, I’m sure that’d go over well with a CEO just shouting about how he wants to kill people on the battlefield before they can nobly sacrifice themselves and that’s why he has to shutdown the big superweapons will go over great, like anime politicians can just get away with saying the wildest shit while real politicians come under fire if you don’t say the word god enough in a speech. But yeah instead of just shutting them down and destroying their research they just fucking come out swinging and do a full Space Colony ARK and murder everyone in the station (I think these guys were Earth-Alligned despite being in a space station idk this is why I have a hard time keeping track of this shit) like I feel like that was overkill and just PR nosedive for no reason but Eri needs a tragic backstory. Like is there functionally any reason they had to go murder everyone instead of just going ‘your shit’s illegal now, hand over your research OR will kill you’ instead of going ‘hand over your shit AND we’ll kill you’? Like I guess they’re doing a scorched earth approach and wanting to make sure and are prolly gonna say the unarmed scientists resisted to a level that required lethal force but that really seemed unnecessary, like you probably could’ve tied that up in courts and had them hand over all their shit instead of murder. While all this is going on Eri’s in the Barbie Gundam and surprise surprise she can get it to work when no one else can, her dad and the random technician lesbian take out the non-Barbie gundams and murder everyone except for the angsty pretty boy in the obligatory regal-looking suit that’s fancier than normal but technically not a gundam to get around plot shit while Eri and her mom get away in the Barbie Gundam which I’m honestly kind of surprised Eri’s mom gets to live I was expecting a full familial wipe from a backstory going this hard on the trauma and eerie innocence of its main character.
Inuyasha The Final Act: After the events with Moryomaru, Koga’s joined the group and Shippo notes how it changes the dynamic now that he’s actively stoking the Inuyasha/Kikyo/Kagome love triangle and Shippo doesn’t like it but I kinda do, it’s kinda funny to have a party member that isn’t super friendly with the others. Meanwhile Naraku reabsorbs Onigumo’s heart, theorizing that if he can’t directly kill Kikyo without it, he can use the overt shittiness of humanity to corrupt the purifying light she puts into Kohaku’s shard to try and purify him. So that gives him the ability to shoot spiderwebs of bad vibes at people to corrupt them mentally since I guess Onigumo’s fine with mindbreaking Kikyo even if he can’t overtly kill her. Kikyo’s absorbed Miroku’s miasma and give her own was never fully healed she’s like 75% poison at this point and basically half dead so she has to ditch Kohaku so he doesn’t get corrupted, luckily Sesshomaru takes over the Kohaku Babysitting duties for the time being. Meanwhile Kagome is once again the only one who can save Kikyo and we have to play the song and dance of ‘does Kagome want Kikyo to literally die for a love triangle?’ again even though we’ve established time and time again the answer is fucking no, though this time we have Naraku actively pumping bad vibes into her to at least give her doubts while she goes to get the only bow that can purify Kikyo. This part’s kinda trippy since we see a bunch of illusions of Kikyo and Inuyasha and they keep going ‘no it’s real this time’ like an episode of Rick and Morty until we show that Kikyo and Inuyasha are still outside the shrine so absolutely none of it was real. Kagome has to AGAIN reject the idea of wanting her romantic rival to literally die though this time coming out on the side of her and Kikyo being equals because she’s sick of feeling like a Johnny come lately trying to vault over the First Girl and has a whole series of character development to relate to Inuyasha with so that’s a nice little moment of her in-universe being sick of the fucking endless tests of her heart, like Kagome’s fundamentally a good girl and yeah constantly getting asked this question has gotta be grating when it’s something she barely ever thought about.
Castlevania: We get Hector’s backstory now so we have all the pieces on the humans Dracula’s recruited while Carmilla’s still stirring the shit trying to get someone to go after the Belmont house and I’m still not entirely sure if she’s the one that will cause infighting that will ruin the bad guys’ plans or if she’s the more dangerous villain ready to take over for the more sympathetic Dracula The Rock style. Meanwhile Trevor’s group do come across the Belmon treasure trove and it is kinda sweet to see him reminisce over his childhood and family legacy despite how much he seemed to disown them in season 1. He gets a cool new weapon and Sypha gets to read books and shit but Alucard’s basically walking through the vampire version of the holocaust museum so he’s more than a little freaked out. Back at Castle Castlevania Godbrand’s a bit concerned that human genocide is kinda like cow genocide in that it makes everything kinda shitty on the food chain and Dracula just wants to be done with humanity. Their interaction cues us that Dracula’s actually kinda pulling a better-explained Raizen from YYH and slowly starving despite still being ridiculously powerful and may be plotting to let vampires die out with humans so everything’s just a quiet empty void (like I think vampires can still survive without humans but it’s a lot less pleasant so idk if a vampire genocide is really in the cards but it’s not something people are clamoring for). Still Carmilla’s just here to play the Starscream and take things over so I guess get ready for Carmillavania in Season 3.  
Jujutsu Kaisen: So turns out Megumi’s technique is like Pokemon and you have to fight the big monsters before you get to capture them and send them out for you and getting help means you don’t get the capture but you do get to try again if you need to and there’s a super secret legendary pokemon that no one’s every caught before and actually killed a Gojo-level guy in the past, though it obviously kills the person summoning it first. So much for Megumi being all ‘I’m not throwing my life away’ a few episodes ago because his first response to being attacked by a C-tier asshole is summoning the Ultra Necrozma nuke. I assume this is the technique that he’s been talking about all those times we’ve gone ‘oh he’s gonna do a big attack’ except probably the time against Todo because that wouldn’t make any sense but given the mass carnage here I’m kinda glad he didn’t pull it out until now because it definitely would’ve murdered a fuckton of people in the process. Sukuna steps in because Megumi doesn’t technically die until hand-hold guy dies so as long as he’s able to keep them alive while fighting Ultra Necrozma here everything’s cool. The rest of the episode is basically just a ridiculous slugfest between Sukuna and Ultra Necrozma because this guy’s like Amazo from Justice League and adapts to any and all attacks so the only way to beat it is to obliterate it on an atomic level with something it’s never seen before. Realizing and implying there is something sneaky about his ‘cut anything forever’ attack, Sukuna uses his Domain which is basically like sticking something in a blender combined with that glitch in OoT that’s just infinite sword swings and for good measure hits it with the fire arrow thing from last time to make sure it can’t regenerate. The end result basically turns Shibuya into Made in Abyss with a giant fuckoff hole in the center. He gets Megumi to safety and kills hand-holding guy FINALLY and then he just hands consciousness off back to Yuji who now remembers EVERYTHING from the past three episodes or so all at once and gets flashes of the hundreds of thousands of deaths his body is responsible for. So… yeah, that’s rough buddy.
Delicious in Dungeon: Just getting this out of the way but this is another of those ‘have you ever played an RPG before?’ anime that is ridiculously video gameified and kind of relies on all the tropes you already know about games for its worldbuilding and like luckily it’s charming enough on its own to not have that wreck the show for me but the over-reliance on making every fantasy setting a video game is REALLY a pet peeve of mine. But yeah, this series is rather silly, Laios’s sister Falin gets eaten by a dragon and there’s a medium-level urgency to get her back before she’s digested. Like the stakes are really confusing because several characters make it very clear how important getting her back is but part of the comedy seems to be how they’re not in a huge hurry and stop for food every five minutes, plus it’s not entirely clear if this is one of those video game fantasy settings that has no consequences for dying since they seem kind of chill about finding corpses and Marcille refers to a life-threatening situation being her ‘first time’ dying despite there being graveyards and shit so this is the kind of shit that really bugs me about video game-style fantasy worlds and I assume it’ll get explained later but it gets under my skin. Still the whole thing basically turns into a Food Wars episode as Laios is very passionate about monsters like in a Garou-level sense of just being hyperfixated but also has no idea how to go through the manual skill needed to actually cook them which is strange given he seemed to be kind of looking for an excuse to do this for years. Still, luckily they find Senshi, a guy whose whole deal is having already done this for years and basically treats it like a Martha Stewart show and it’s pretty funny watching them meet halfway between Food Wars and Toriko. Like there’s not much more to it than that, they make some scorpion soup and some vegetable tart and Marcille gets an obligatory tentacle scene though it’s not protracted and doesn’t have any fanservice shots so I get the feeling it was just something to fuel fanart as opposed to actually showing anything which is an interesting way to take things, let the R34 machine run itself without having to dirty their own hands. It’s fun, the setting is one of my least favorite things about modern anime and the tone is kind of confusing but I’m sure that’ll even out with time, I am enjoying it thus far.
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End: The first bit of the episode is a little adventure developing the new group dynamic now that Stark has joined and Fern isn’t really sure what to do with him. Frieren gets to meet some more of the people touched by her adventure and the far-reaching festivals made in honor of their deeds. The real meat of the episode is in the second part though and we get some really good stuff here. The group enters a new town when Frieren senses demons and goes into attack mode, but turns out these demons wear clothes and shit and are all fancy and the like, being ambassadors to try peace talks with the village. Since Frieren just attacked a foreign ambassador they throw her right the fuck in jail and Fern gives her the scoop that one of the Demon King’s generals took over after he died and is now leading the charge but the ambassadors have decided that peace may be an option. Frieren is ridiculously racist against demons but also kinda describes how they kinda deserve it by telling a story of a demon girl that was trusted by a community only to murder more people and only using sympathetic words to save herself from attacks. Or at least that’s how Frieren sees things, the real story is the girl was taken in by the town and still hated for the people she had previously killed so in a truly utilitarian sense she stole a replacement child for the one she’d murdered just to get their racist asses off her backs and the evil Frieren sees in her is an ignorance of emotion, someone that’s not necessarily good or bad and is an alien to human connections acting in ways that appear horrendous to those that have them. Someone just like Fern. That’s kind of the part that gets me, like earlier this same episode we see how foreign basic social skills are to Fern and Frieren herself and granted they’re not murdering people but it’s the same kind of not fully understanding people thing that throws off the ‘measure of a man’ speeches because if you say someone that lacks compassion or social understanding is a monster what happens when a human shares those qualities, someone who’s antisocial or autistic and can’t be bought in by the ‘love makes us human’ answer to the kind of sentient being whose life we should or shouldn’t value, if that’s where we’re going with this I’m really excited. Still for the time being the demons are right dicks and manipulate the guards with all the right words of ‘oh but we’ve suffered too, let’s have peace’ that would absolutely wreck any Naruto-minded Talk no Jutsu protagonist despite demons literally not having families (and this seemingly crucial fact apparently not being widely known). Turns out the ambassadors’ plan is to make peace and then have the town lower its barrier so they can burn it to the ground which… doesn’t make any fucking sense like it’s not like you’re disarming a weapon you’re asking them to take down a purely defensive shield that can’t actually hurt anybody and promising ‘we won’t attack bro’ without giving any sign of good faith on your end, might as well ask them to tear down their walls like that probably protects them from non-demon creatures and judging by last episode is a crucial part of border control, like that’s a dumb plan. It’s frustrating because their emotional manipulation is ridiculously good but their actual plan doesn’t make any sense. Still this complicated situation is about to get a lot simpler because one of the junior ambassadors just fucking barges into the dungeon, kills a guard and is ready to kill Frieren, like these guys are so fucking dumb even if Frieren wasn’t a demi-god how are you going to explain a dead guard outside the cell while the fugitive elf died in the cell like you just blew your whole dumb barrier-lowering plan because you couldn’t think of a diplomatic way to get in to see the prisoner and had to kill her right fucking now.
Vinland Saga: Thorfinn and Snake continue their fight and are surprisingly evenly matched despite Thorfinn just using his fists and not being as small and nimble as he was when he first developed his knife style. Thorfinn isn’t defeated but does lose the battle of the terrain when Snake is able to move over to the cart and get to Gardar. He makes a good point that he can’t justify just letting Gardar go since he really cares about his whole crew and taking anything less than revenge would be an insult. Now obviously this is still wrong but making the ‘an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind’ argument is a little difficult when you’re in Viking times and have like five seconds before this guy stabs him. Snake starts making plans of what to do now that Thorfinn and Arnheid have disobeyed him and Gardar just… pops up out of the cart like a daisy and stopped the sword with his astonishing pecs or some shit because he gets Snake in a sleeper hold and knocks him out. Arnheid talks him down from killing Snake and Gardar’s still gonna die anyway so the rest of the episode is just a big schmaltzy sendoff for Gardar and all the regrets he’s had in his life and it’s a pretty cool sequence for someone whose character development mostly came from other people. Like just saying, Askeladd was basically the main character for a while and all he got was a final speech and Gardar gets a whole dream sequence of finding his obviously dead son. Still now we’re in the weird position of Arnheid being taken by Ketil’s guards and Ketil himself coming home to find his bottom bitch and his favorite slave tried to start a revolt over a guy he’s never heard of while war with the king is looming on the horizon, so… awkward, I guess.
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Custom Toonami Block Week 171 Rundown
Inuyasha The Final Act: Moryomaru’s on his shit again running around absorbing random demons and… he’s after the snake demons from Yashahime? Honestly I completely forgot they were in the original series and apparently for good reason because the FUCKING DIE, like for all its faults usually Yashahime was pretty good about the connective tissue between the original and itself but I guess these guys just aren’t dead anymore by the time of the series. It is kinda dumb that Moryomaru just kinda wants them because ‘they’re snake brothers that hate each other so if I eat them I can fuse stuff to other stuff’ but his arc’s getting ready to end anyway so who cares. Meanwhile Inuyasha’s consulting Totosai about why his new Tessaiga upgrade doesn’t work the diagnosis is basically ‘sword’s fine, you’re just a lil bitch’ basically the same principle that turns Inuyasha into a full demon if the Tessaiga’s not protecting him, he can’t just absorb demonic energy as a half demon or else he’ll go crazy (did anyone ever tell Towa this? Feel like that was literally never a problem for her) but yeah Inuyasha has to run through a demonic obstacle course and learn how to see swirls of demonic energy which… he could already do with the Wind Scar but I guess this is different. Long story short, he gains the power to cut open wells of demonic energy instead of absorbing them, I think this is used like twice before the Meidou Zangetsuha comes by and eats its lunch which is really funny because they already allude to Meidou Zangetsuha being Tessaiga’s Final Form (which you’d think he could just keep absorbing new powers forever idk) so even on release Dragon Scale Tessaiga is already power crept.
Castlevania: We get an extended scene of how Lisa was captured by the church for… having glass and gears I guess, most of it is stuff we already knew though the thing that sticks out to me is she didn’t use a fake last name, like she goes by Lisa Tepes, good for her being proud of her husband and all but don’t people know Dracula’s name is Vlad Tepes? I think I heard someone mention it before so you’re not really helping your case of not being a hellspawn when you literally have Dracula’s last name, it’s a Ben Kenobi situation all over again. Either way, Dracula calls all his boys up to be like ‘yo, we gonna fuck shit up’ and he’s hired two anime misanthropes with suitably tragic backstories for why humans are awful, to do the planning because if you can’t think on a human level you’re gonna fuck shit up. Though even the resident bloodthirsty fight dude Godbrand is like ‘wait we have a plan? I thought we were just sacking villages all over and summoning as much hellspawn as we could’ which is kind of the plan at this point. I do like how Dracula’s rage is personalized by an exhausted finality instead of a howling rage, like everyone seems to be on the same page of ‘look we don’t like genocide, but this humanity thing has had a good run and needs to stop’ which is kind of worse, like there’s only so much talk no jutsu you can do with someone who’s done talking. Meanwhile Trevor, Sypha and Alucard get their initial brooding about their new journey out of the way (Also how old is Alucard? Like he looks in his twenties, but Lisa doesn’t look that much older than when she met Dracula, maybe she just aged like a fine wine or maybe vampire aging is different and you just pop out a twenty year old classy man but it feels like that did not seem to be a twenty year gap). And now Dracula has moved the castle with the big 3D object thing that’s like the only thing I remember from Symphony of the Night.
Jujutsu Kaisen: Megudad is on the rampage and is ready to Rock Lee all over Cthulu and it’s honestly just fantastic to see like after all the complex bullshit with Domains and Animation jargon last episode it’s satisfying to just watch Dadgumi punch the absolute shit out of this guy. They establish he barely has sentience at this point and is basically acting like a heat seeking missile on the largest mass of cursed energy in the area but once he’s done stabbing Cthulu with nunchaku he takes Megumi outside so idk if he does have a shard of sentience in there and just wants to see his son for a sec or if Megumi’s vaguely defined secret superpowers just make him next on Dadgumi’s heat seeking missile radar. Meanwhile Jogo shows up and Cracatoa’s the remaining three guys in like two seconds and I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be an ‘oh shit he’s strong’ moment or an ‘oh shit those guys were really worn out’ moment. Meanwhile meanwhile, the high school girls are sticking fingers down Yuji’s throat because he apparently has no gag reflex and swallows whatever you put in his mouth when he’s unconscious. Only for Jogo to come out and feed him MORE fingers, like half of them right here which they acknowledge they have to do a bunch at once so Sukuna can take over temporarily before Yuji’s body can adapt. I had a feeling JJK wasn’t going to stick to a Shikon Jewel Shard narrative style of collecting the fingers one at a time but this is still a little more than I expected since he’s basically 75% done and got more fingers in him than a Battle Royale Chinese Finger Trap. So yeah Sukuna’s awake but unfortunately for these guys he want to the Muzan Kibutsuchi school of ‘if you’re not immediately subservient and stroking my ego you’re just dead’ and the high school girls get offed for asking him to save Geto even though he asked them what they wanted, like why’s he even asking if he has no intention of doing anything for anybody. I don’t really like this style of villainy like I tend to go more for people that are reasonable to at least not murder their subordinates instantly since it always makes the villains look egotistical and insecure if they can’t handle five seconds of someone not licking their boots but I suppose it is an effective way to show how powerful they are. Meanwhile Jogo goes over the plan to make sure Sukuna stays in control of Yuji’s body and Sukuna’s just like ‘bro I did that a season and a half ago’ but he gives him the same ultimatum he gave Yuji at that point, land one hit and he’ll do them a favor. Idk if Sukuna even intends to make good on any of these I think he just likes flexing on people cause he offers these a lot.
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End: As a prelude to their journey to go meet with real ghosts, Frieren and Fern have a classic ‘can you shoot a ghost if it looks like someone you love’ mini-adventure, it’s pretty simple but it works for what it has to in order to solidify both of their resolve to go take care of their unfinished business. And then the girls take turns taking pot shots at a dragon and decide they could really use a tank, luckily Eisen was training a tank named Stark in the nearby village so they’re just gonna go pick him up, get the x-ray specs Frieren wants from the dragon and save the village in the meanwhile if they have time. Now Stark is kinda interesting because he’s like a combo of Zenitsu from Demon Slayer and King from One Punch Man in that he’s a weird coward and a fraud but also genuinely ridiculously strong, he just has no real combat experience and thus is terrified of actual monsters. This may also be in part due to him being the only survivor of his home village which he booked it out of when he was a kid, Eisen wanted to train that out of him which I feel like is a little harsh to beat up a kid about running from a horde of monsters, like that’s not cowardice that’s just being fucking nine. But he seems to have internalized some of that and never really gotten over seeing himself as a coward combined with his lack of experience so despite being able to chop a mountain in half like that story of the guy making a path to the hospital, he’s gonna need some help popping his Monster Cherry.
Vinland Saga: So Arnheid’s plan was a little different than I thought, she’s not sneaking in to see Gardar she’s just kinda… asking to come in and because Wolf left and can’t tell her to gfto she gets the one guy that will let her in, I like how she doesn’t even flirt to do it like she’s not a femme fatale she just shows up and looks pretty and the guy is just there for it. So yeah while they’re talking about a metaphorical storm it literally starts raining because Vinland Saga god has a sense of humor and Gardar pulls a Rick Grimes to bite the guard’s neck out and slaughters everyone when Arnheid cuts him free in a split second panic. Like honestly she was kinda against a wall here like ignoring the fact that it was a coin flip split second decision for her husband, even if she didn’t help him the guards are still gonna assume the guy with a chunk out of his neck had more to do with her than the guy that’s all tied up so she didn’t have much choice. Meanwhile back with Thorfinn and Einar, Thorfinn outlines his philosophy of dismantling the toxic masculinity of Norse culture and how defying cultural norms is better than just fucking murdering people that are mildly rude to you. Still he theorizes that if they can stop the root of endless wars they can kill two birds with one pacifist stone and end a large portion of the slave trade. Given slavery and human trafficking are STILL a thing we know this doesn’t quite work out but at least it’s not as normalized and prone to vast swaths of ‘we killed your guys that were good at killing so you belong to us now’ so uhhh… baby steps? Baby, thousand year long steps… Meanwhile the guards are searching their barn for Gardar and Arnheid which tips Thorfinn and Einar off that they’ve escaped and now they’ve got a decision to make about who to help with that.   
Was gonna add the two new shows this week but couldn't find some of them and ran out of time so I'll think more on what I want to watch this coming week and try to get some new additions for next weekend.
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Custom Toonami Block Week 172 Rundown
Inuyasha The Final Act: So we’ve got another demon of the week but this time Naraku’s the one absorbing it instead of Moryomaru because even Sasuke looks at this guy and goes ‘damn he’s stealing a lot of other people’s powers’. Meanwhile Kikyo asks Koga to just give her his jewel shards because Midoriko’s soul is actively stunlocking him to try and get all the jewel shards in one place and she’d rather him not die from getting killed by Naraku or Moryomaru and Koga admittedly makes a good point that even aside from his vendetta he can’t be at peace if he just sits out the whole final battle after everything Naraku has done. Moryomaru swings by and all hell breaks loose as he absorbs Naraku (Koga even admits he doesn’t really expect that to stick) and Inuyasha and Koga team up on him and do a pretty cool combo attack since Moryomaru’s demonic energy is still hidden by the Fuyoheki Inuyasha instead absorbs the power from Koga’s Goraishi to basically do a small scale melee version of the Backlash Wave and since Moryomaru’s currently in the process of eating Koga there’s a direct train to his insides. Meanwhile while Moryomaru’s licking his wounds from that, Naraku pops in to tell him he hasn’t been absorbed and still has full control of all the jewel shards and is now using the tree’s power he just absorbed to re-absorb the baby because this whole time he just wanted them to run around absorbing demonic powers to try and overpower him so he could re-absorb them and get stronger like a demonic stock investor. This is really funny to me personally because I wrote an Inuyasha fanfic that had him absorbing a demonic tree way before I knew that was an actual plot point AND this whole ‘absorbing the guy that absorbed you’ thing is exactly what he does in the video game Secret of the Cursed Mask and in the second movie, like Naraku’s so predictable several source of media did it without even trying. Kagome manages to help Koga use his one get out of jail free card that comes with the Goraishi so Narkau doesn’t get his jewel shards or him but he still has the baby. The baby’s fucking petty as shit and is willing to jump out in front of Inuyasha’s adamant barrage just to spite Naraku but Naraku turns into Super Naked Diamond Naraku to absorb him. However Miroku remembers he has an OTK technique and the only reason to use it is right in front of him so he tries to just suck up Naraku which is a nice character moment because he’s literally willing to die to end this fight even though his original motivation was to save his own life, now he’ll sacrifice himself just to avoid Kohaku needing to give up his shard so Sango can be happy… as happy as she can with a living brother and a dead boyfriend I guess. Still everyone’s quick to tell him it’s not worth it even though Naraku says it definitely would’ve worked (though he is a spiteful dickbag so he may just be saying that to taunt him) so Miroku gets poisoned and all he has to show for it is destroying the Fuyoheki in the process, which I mean that’s not nothing, Naraku not having a demonic stealth device is definitely a big help but now we’re in “Miroku’s been poisoned so he has to learn not to use the Wind Tunnel too much” Arc #3.
Castlevania: We pick up around where we left off last episode with the Trio and since Castlevania is a literal moving fortress that can just yeet itself elsewhere whenever someone gets too close, the only thing Trevor can think of is going to the old Belmont house to see if all the magical shit they have can be of any use since he now has two party members that aren’t magically illiterate like him. Meanwhile Carmilla arrives for Dracula’s war meeting and immediately stirs the pot like she makes it clear she has no particular loyalty and is going to play anyone she can against each other and use politics and push peoples’ buttons to worm her way up the ladder. The hero trio fight a bunch of mook demons and the only real takeaway from this is Sypha is basically the Avatar because not only can she make spells to cast elements she can also control existing elements so anyone that has a basic elemental attack lets her be free game to throw it back which is pretty cool. We get Issac’s backstory and it’s suitably sad and fucked up and makes him whip himself like a priest which is ironic given the circumstances. Now the war council is torn between taking the strategic cities or going straight for Alucard’s party now that Carmilla is onto their plan to raid the Belmont house for cool magical shit, so yeah while they’re looking for a way to bring the fight to them, the fight is coming to them so that solves that I guess.
Jujutsu Kaisen: We get a brief glimpse of Jogo’s fight with Sukuna and it’s… not going well for him. Meanwhile Megumi gets to fight his dad for a while which is more cool Megudad shenanigans but ultimately it’s clear he can’t win so he’s just trying to not die while getting to the healing spot and doesn’t even really succeed at that because all his trap does is let Dadgumi get a look at his face which breaks the Edo Tensei spell on hm I guess and lets him stab himself with his own spear to die in piece knowing his son isn’t a pawn of the Zenin clan even though he was willing to sell him out while he was alive he’s at least glad that if he’s dead anyway Megumi doesn’t have to deal with their shit. It’s a really nice moment and almost makes me feel better about the fact that we were cheated out of Curse User Rock Lee just so he doesn’t kill Megumi. That being sad Hand-holding Sword Guy just cuts Megumi down after the fact because kicking people while they’re down is his self-proclaimed specialty. Panda and Looker from pokemon encounter some more of Geto’s goons who are more on the side of inheriting his dream than reviving Geto himself but none of that shit matters right now because Jogo is erupting several buildings like volcanos all around Shibuya at the moment. Sukuna’s having loads of fun dodging volcanoes and chopping up ol’ Krakatoa and makes Looker’s group play chicken with a meteor for the fun of it. He even beats him in a literal firefight, somehow contacting his soul on the verge of death as the remaining OG Cursed Spirits place all their faith in Mahito and he just interrupts their speech to be like ‘well that’s kind of a shitty plan, ever try just destroying shit? Always worked for me’ and gives Jogo the Stand Proud, You’re Strong meme after fucking melting his body out. So yeah, Sukuna gets contacted somehow by one of his actual retainers and hand-holding guy is attacked by a giant spirit while Megumi just kinda lays down dying.
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End: It’s time to resolve Stark’s character arc, his Character Stark. He gets a quick pep talk from Fern and one from Frieren about how now that he knows and cares about the safety of the village so much he can be brave and how even Eisen was scared of giant monsters but his fear only helped him survive and get stronger. Also we get a little story about how Eisen saw Stark was so strong he just fucking decked him out of sheer survival instinct and through a combination of thinking Eisen was mad at him and Eisen being so ashamed from hitting him the two never spoke again. Still while I don’t think we get to see Stark’s full capabilities he does take care of the dragon and officially joins the party because Eisen said journeying with Frieren was a silly little time and that sounds fun. Also Stark canonically has a small penis. Next is a journey to the town that gatekeeps the north and it’s basically a wall town that’s like ‘fuck that demon shit we’re keeping all that demon shit in the north’ so they have to figure out how to get through the barrier. Fern and Stark galavant around and it’s kinda funny that Fern is just so amazed to have someone that actually wants to do things and be an active participant instead of grinding in a forest for six months for a single fucking flower and meanwhile she’s still socially inept enough that Stark has no way to read her emotional state, it’s pretty funny. I get the feeling Stark’s introduction is paving the way for a comedic focus since he seems to be the party’s butt monkey and idk how I feel about that I was really enjoying the laid-back vibe and quiet reflection but we’ll see how it goes. Stark reveals his real goal is to go on a grand adventure so he can come back before Eisen dies and give him a great story like all the ones he told him and prove he was worthy of his time and care, and that’s nice, that’s a nice goal. Meanwhile they just kinda solve the problem with everyone figuring out who Frieren is and letting her through because they assume she’s gonna go kill the Demon King’s First Order style remnant and she’s just like ‘yeah… sure, that’s what we’re doing alright’ even though they’re going for completely selfish reasons.  
Vinland Saga: So like I said last time, now that Einar and Thorfinn know Gardar’s escaped they have to decide which side of the conflict to be on. Turns out it’s not hard to find Arnheid because she’s with Snake who’s just having her do chores out in the open to lure Gardar in. Though apparently Sverkel has a hidy hole in his house and stashed Gardar in there so he’s literally right under their noses not making any noise despite being on the verge of death and Snake being this top notch guard… I kinda have some problems with this but okay. Arnheid spills her guts to the boys and Einar tells her that if she’s ready to share Gardar’s fate live or die then he will do anything he can to help her. By some act of divine providence the guy listening in on their plan is fucking asleep at the wheel and Sverkel is busy asking Snake if he would just give up fighting if given the chance to be independently wealthy, musing that slaves and warriors are just different sides of a dice roll, some real Diogenes shit and it gets to Snake for a sec but he admits he has too much pride to give up and fighting’s all he’s ever known. Meanwhile Einar puts on a hood and pretends to be Gardar like the start of the Alabasta fight in One Piece, leading off the guards but running a bit too well for a guy that’s supposed to be half dead so Snake gets suspicious and gets back in time to see Thorfinn and Arnheid loading Sverkel and Gardar into a cart to run away. Thorfinn has no choice but to break the oath of pacifism he made like two days ago in-universe and fight Snake, resolving not to kill him but Askaladd’s ghost tells him it’s not like fighting for a good reason isn’t cheating since everyone thinks their reason is good enough and the end justifies the means is a slippery slope but at the same time dude’s literally running at you with a sword and I don’t think pacifism would get very far if the answer is ‘just get stabbed bro idk’ so he takes up his classic dagger stance and prepares to fight bare-handed to risk his own freedom to defend the lives of two slaves he doesn’t know too well and help his friend.
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Custom Toonami Block Week 170 Rundown
Inuyasha The Final Act: We get another one of those episodes where several plots that clearly happened in different orders are kinda happening all at once, so I’ll tackle them in the order they’re resolved rather than the order they show up in. Sesshomaru is still dicking around in the background trying to master the Meido Zangetsuha because it can already kill everything in one hit but really mastering it means a slightly bigger AOE of killing everything in one hit. Meanwhile Inuyasha’s actually kind of proactive in searching out his next upgrade like ‘you know I’m just gonna steal the arc villain’s powers anyway so might as well just hunt him down’ and luckily they find Dakki just as it’s being perfected, like minutes after, it’s crazy. Inuyasha kills the dragon demon that gave the scales for it with a classic game of demonic energy tennis and then the human that forged it pulls a Kaijinbo and decides to start wielding Dakki anyway despite the corrupting influence it has on his body. Another game of demonic energy tennis ensues and Tessaiga loses all its power but manages to crack Dakki and get it scared enough that it just starts pumping energy into its human wielder who just fucking explodes from it, so yeah Tessaiga has its second most useless upgrade now. Like I feel like since it gets Meidou Zangetsuha right after this and it’s very situational and hurts the user at first, Dragon Scale Tessaiga never really gets the chance to shine. Like it ‘absorbs demonic energy’ but that doesn’t really amount to much given Inuyasha doesn’t do anything with that energy, it’s basically a switch that turns off Naraku’s auto-healing. Energy absorption is really weird for a heroic power and Yashahime did a lot of weird shit with Towa using it too but at least with her it made her attacks stronger. Meanwhile Koga gets set up to be attacked by a baby wolf demon kid whose brother is being held ransom by Naraku’s newest incarnation once he realized ‘oh shit Kagura did all my grunt work what do I do now’, Byakuya. I don’t really get what the plan was, like this kid was never going to kill Koga and leading him back to them was kind of a whim that basically amounted to Byakuya getting to see the Goraishi in action. But Moryomaru does come around and Inuyasha gets to save Koga from having his shards taken for like the tenth time (though this time it’s because of bs conveinient Midoriko shenanigans so I guess the good luck cancels out the bad) and they do get to do a cool team attack now that Koga has an energy blast like the rest of the big boys. Also like, they gave the wolf demon kid a jewel shard? Naraku has almost the whole jewel completed at this point, we’ve seen it, so is he like… breaking off new shards? That seems like a bad idea given the only shards besides Koga’s and Moryomaru’s is the one you gave to a random kid to fuck with Sango and it’s currently Naraku’s biggest obstacle, like you’d think he’d stop giving out jewel shards and risking losing them. But yeah, turns out Dragon Scale Tessaiga is too much for Inuyasha to handle rn so he has an upgrade but he really doesn’t so now it’s time for second upgrade.  
Castlevania: So yeah we get the fabulous scene of the demons murdering Frollo which I think is the most popular scene in the series with good reason. Meanwhile Trevo gets help from Sypha doing crowd control and it’s really funny how he’s like ‘damn priest you almost made murderers out of these people’ only for the people to fucking murder the priest, like they switched fucking fast, guess a little ‘ ‘ey isn’t this guy an asshole?’ is all it takes to overcome years of Catholic guilt because all Trevor really does is say ‘they’re lying’, offer no evidence and everyone’s willing to just jump the priest over it, like he’s telling the truth but I feel like the villagers are just a bit too ready to believe him right away. The two of them manage to Seven Samurai their way into teaching the people how to fight demons just in time to have a really long scene of falling into Alucard’s daddy booboo room. Alucard and Trevor have a really cool fight because it’s like Sonic Adventure 2 you’re more likely to believe there’s one supernatural vampire/hedgehog that looks slightly different than you expected than the more unbelievable option that there’s actually two supernatural vampires/hedgehogs. But yeah they get all their flamboyant male showboating out of the way and agree to go kill Dracula because they’re all getting kinda sick of this whole demon horde genocide thing.
Jujutsu Kaisen: I don’t know who’s in charge of directing Meimei’s scenes but they always do it like it’s some kind of survival horror and it’s a special treat. Meimei defeats smallbox with the powers of birds and death which is definitely a sentence I never thought I’d say. Meanwhile Maki, Nanami, and Papa Zenin encounter that lil baby Cthulu thing who’s just digivolved into Perfect Cell Cthulu thing and he and Papa Zenin have a weird meta discussion about animation and HD while Cthulu’s just like ‘my friends are dead and I’m mad’ like I legit thought with how hyped up this tentacle guy was in the first OP and just kinda hanging around in the background of Kujaku’s hiding place he’d be some key figure but apparently he’s just some guy they pal around with, it’s like that bit in the Simpsons where the small yakuza guy does nothing and you’re waiting for him to do something cool and this is cool but it’s not exactly what I was expecting. Papa Zenin’s technique is pretty cool too like a weaponized form of windows movie maker and if you don’t make a full AMV in half a second you get stunlocked but of course since he uses his fists and not like a sword or something he doesn’t have a really good finishing blow so it takes a while to beat the shit out of someone, like that that point learn how to use a sword so you can cut someone’s head off while they’re stunlocked instead of beating them around for ten minutes. Anyway Cthulu Expansions his Domain which is just Super Mario Sunshine with angry murder fish and Papa Zenin does the move which is different from the other move that cancels domain shit and it’s really poorly explained it’s basically just ‘nuh-uh’ to the Domain shit by doing a frame perfect input cancel. And like they always seem to get the guys that don’t have Domains to fight the villains that do because I’m guessing if Papa Zenin could do Doamin stuff he’d have done it by now. Still, the guys hold up as long as they can against fish that can literally just teleport into already biting a chunk out of them and Megumi comes out of nowhere to give Maki her nunchaku back and use his Domain he learned like a couple weeks ago to at least de-power Cthulu’s domain from an insta-kill to like an 80% kill which is enough to actually fight at least but Megumi’s not doing so hot trying to drag Super Mario Sunshine into his Shikamaru Shadow World so he just plans to rip a hole in the edge of the domain for everyone to get out of because it’s one of those once a day things so if you just like move out of the way they can’t spam it. Papa Zenin’s missing an arm and Nanami’s missing an eye so yeah they’re ready to get the fuck out of dodge but Dadgumi pops out of the hole of all people, like father like son I guess just popping in to Super Mario Sunshine to fuck shit up.
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End: I really like how despite the episodes being two separate vignettes likely derived from manga chapters being shorter than anime episodes, the two halves usually lead into each other in some way and carry a certain theme, it’s a good touch I didn’t see in something like Spy X Family that tends to go for mostly unconnected stories or full story arcs. Frieren and Fern are cleaning up a beach in exchange for a counterfeit book supposedly written by Flamme, who we find out in the second half is Frieren’s Master from a thousand years ago and famously didn’t write shit down so a bunch of people wrote shit down to say it was her. The running gag for this half is Frieren sleeps like a college student, up all night reading and then sleeping till noon, which means she won’t be able to see the sun rise on the festival when the beach is finally clean, but Fern Mama Bear’s up and knows it’s important to Frieren to see it and gets them out the door to watch it. Frieren contemplates why Himmel was so insistent on her seeing it back when they were in town and sees it as nothing special until she sees Fern smiling at it and realizes the real sunset was the friends she made along the way. The second half is the group visiting Eisen as the last other surviving member of the Himmel Troupe and Frieren’s like ‘bro I don’t wanna feel bad when you die too so lemme know any unfinished business shit you gotta deal with’ and sweetly enough, Eisen’s unfinished business is having Frieren deal with her unfinished business and getting her to voice her regrets to Himmel’s spirit in the afterlife. This is really kind of a setup for another ‘the way to solve your own problems is to help someone else’ kind of deal but I feel like this series has earned that kind of trite thing at this point and I’d honestly kinda prefer that to a magical ‘oh, heaven’s real and death has fewer consequences because of it’ twist. But yeah, they do find Flamme claims to have talked to the dead in the spot where the Demon King’s Castle was but she also was a notorious troll and may just be fucking with Frieren to get her to work her own shit out but either way Frieren was looking for a sidequest anyway so they might as well go on a NG+ adventure to the Demon King’s Castle to go talk to ghosts or whatever.
Vinland Saga: So yeah Gardar’s here to take Arnheid and their definitely alive and with her son but Wolf ain’t having that and Einar’s kinda slowly coming to the realization that just because they’re good to them doesn’t mean the guys that literally enslave people are the good guys. Thorfinn manages to talk him down and Wolf beats the shit out of Gardar so they can drag him off for questioning. The rest of the episode is kind of an awkward ‘what now?’ conversation between a couple of parties. Arnheid tells Einar about how Gardar left for war based of an unnecessary and vague idea of keeping his family safe and protecting them and ironically all the men running off to war for what amounts to the viking equivalent of fighting for oil is what opened up her village to being ransacked and her son dying (they don’t show them murdering a one year old obviously but I checked the wiki and apparently he was killed because you get more for female slaves that don’t have kids) and her getting sold as a slave. And now worst of all she sees the kind of monstrous murderer Gardar has become and is afraid of him so she’s ready to leave him to his fate and protect her own now that, get this, she’s fucking pregnant with Ketil’s kid (I’d fucking laugh if this story were different and she carried to term and the Ketil welcomes the kid and it comes out with Einar’s bright red hair that’d be fucking hilarious). But yeah, except all of that or at least part of it was a fucking lie because after everyone goes to bed Arnheid’s gonna sneak out and see him anyway. Sverkel tells her a contrasting story about how not going to war caused him and Ketil to lose everything they were avoiding fighting for in the first place, so moral of the story is fight or don’t, world’s fucked up and everyone ends up broken in the end so you gotta pick the kind of brokenness you can live with. And that seems to finalize Arnheid’s decision as she walks into the night in a way dramatic enough to ensure me she is definitely not coming back.
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e17omm · 4 months
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Giving Fu Hua a splash of Frieren, like just a tiny bit, is probably the easiest way for me to write the Fu part in FuKi.
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