Review

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Black Clover - Episode 84 [Review]

The most important story conflicts may have been dealt with already, but the Royal Knights exams still have one heck of a climactic battle up their sleeve with the final match, where Team P (Yuno, Noelle, and En) faces off against Team I (Rill Boismortier and two others). With Asta's crew, there was a clear effort to make teamwork a foundational element of the tournament—even if the fights themselves have been oddly bereft of any actual teamwork—but this week throws pretense completely out the window. This is a Yuno vs. Rill fight, no more, no less.

There is a certain thematic alchemy at play, as we've focused on topics like peasantry vs. royalty and characters working hard to fight their way to the top. Now that the relevant characters have burnt themselves out, the spotlight returns to the wunderkinds. Yuno and Rill are natural talents; they're not bad people like Langris, but there's still a melancholy that comes with them getting the coolest, flashiest fight in Asta's absence. This definitely feels like a counterpart to My Hero Academia's Sports Festival arc, where Midoriya's the most sympathetic fighter, yet it's Bakugo and Todoroki in the final round. But at least MHA is good at giving its whiz kids comprehensible faults and emotional issues. Rill's gifted-artist/mama's boy thing is still loopy, and Yuno is a plank of wood.

However, none of this should distract from how absolutely stellar this episode looks. These two are going all out, and so are the animators. It's nearly twenty minutes of straight flexing, as Yuno's wind spells and Rill's art magic go head to head. The animation is similar to the original Demon Asta fight, where the battlefield is abstracted to a much larger size and the two fighters practically surf on each other's attacks with balletic precision, even if the art isn't as deranged or experimental as that episode. It's easily a production value high point for the entire series.

In the end, Yuno claims the victory, but only because Rill got careless and let his magic go so wild that he shattered his own team's crystal by accident. No one truly won or lost this battle, since the two of them proved to be on roughly equal terms, and losing in the tournament doesn't mean you're out of the Royal Knights. The fight itself is a delight to watch, but the episode's final scene is its strongest moment, where the Wizard King meets with Zora and encourages him to join the Magic Knights for real. The Wizard King was on good terms with Zora's dad back in the day, and the Magic Knights' star ranking system was introduced specifically to reward people like him and move the organization away from royalty masturbation. Zora shrugs the kind words off in order to play it cool, but you can tell a heartfelt conversation was had under the surface. There's an emotional finality to this scene that's really nice.

Overall, the Royal Knights exams have been pretty indicative of how I feel about Black Clover in general. I don't think it's particularly well-executed as a shonen battle series, and having a tournament like this really highlights that this show doesn't know what to do with the genre conventions that it apes so freely. The mechanics of the story are so messy and underdeveloped, which occasionally contributes to that earnest heart-on-your-sleeve fervor, but just as often it feels curiously soulless. Regardless, Black Clover does reliably reach its peaks—moments that come close to making the grind feel worth it—and I wouldn't want to deny it that praise.

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One Punch Man Season 2 - Episode 7 [Review]

It feels like things of consequence actually happen in this episode of One Punch Man, which is small praise but a welcome reprieve from the last few weeks of wheel-spinning. The tournament arc finally comes to a head (and a shiny head at that) as we blitz through the final rounds. There are still too many stories happening concurrently for us to connect with any single one of them, and somehow we're introduced to another new subplot this week about Silverfang's friends. Meanwhile, Garou shows up for all of five seconds, and Genos wakes up at the end of the episode in the same crater the big bad monster left him in at the end of last episode. There's no sense of flow to how all this is pieced together. This probably won't be as glaring an issue when the season is digested all at once by later viewers, but the week-long breaks just add to the sense of disjointedness.

This entire arc feels structured like a hedge maze—full of branches but with few leading anywhere. A particularly weird consequence of this is the name of this episode, “The Class S Heroes.” These heroes are present in the episode, but they're nowhere near what I'd consider the most important part of this segment, which is Saitama finishing his tournament. The staff don't even consider them the most important part, because all of the production value they can muster goes towards Saitama's fight with Suiryu. The handful of Class S heroes pretty much show up to introduce themselves to the audience, presumably because they'll be more relevant later on. That's fine for basic storytelling, but they're certainly not a significant enough presence to deserve the episode title. This might seem like a petty complaint—and it is—but it's one of the many consequences of this arc's lack of focus.

At least the Class S showcase gives One Punch Man the opportunity to flex some if its weirdness. Some of the top heroes have predictable powers—Tornado and her telekinesis, Silverfang and his martial arts, Genos being a robot, etc. But some of them are just plain out there. Garou is all too eager to pick a fight with a dude who wears a dog costume and sits sphinx-like in the middle of a public plaza all day. The big poisonous muscular snake lady is defeated by the Pig God swallowing her whole, like he's some kind of snake. It's hard not to make comparisons to My Hero Academia and its variety of Quirks, but One Punch Man's more jokey nature sees it indulge in much more esoteric means of fighting evil. Sometimes the jokes don't land, but I appreciate the willingness to experiment and poke fun at the absurdity of superpowers.

Despite its many divergences, the main thrust of the episode is the conclusion of the tournament Saitama grifted his way into. Naturally, he makes his way to the final bout with little effort, punching out both the boisterous Sourface and the sadistic Choze on the way. Choze unleashes an entire spiel about his inherent genetic superiority guaranteeing him the victory, only to be immediately knocked into the stratosphere. It's a familiar riff on one of ONE's pet themes, which is that people are defined by their own choices and their own actions. Nobody is born with any kind of guarantee, and that sure as hell applies to a eugenicist wannabe-übermensch. It's good to see some people get punched.

As he finally squares off against Suiryu, the fight actually manages to craft some tension in an amusingly absurd way. Saitama is never in any danger of losing the match, but he is in danger of losing his toupee thanks to the sheer force of Suiryu's blows. It's difficult to make any battle with Saitama interesting, so I'm glad for this outside-the-box thinking. Along the same lines as Choze, Suiryu postures himself as one of the chosen, whose strength alone is more than enough to elevate him above the masses. To him, being strong is fun because it lets him do whatever he wants. Saitama, of course, is the complete opposite. Becoming strong has sapped all of the fun he once had from his life, because there's nothing to struggle against except his own ennui. Saitama is a thoughtful and humble guy when it comes down to it, and Suiryu is too shortsighted and intoxicated with himself to actually reflect on what he could do with his strength beyond proving its potency. His fate is the same as all the others who meet the business end of Saitama's fist—only in this case, it's Saitama's butt, which is even more poetic.

Saitama is still disqualified because his non-Charanko identity is discovered, but the damage to Suiryu's inflated self-esteem is done nonetheless. And the story isn't over, because monsters are still overwhelming the city, and a particularly bad one seems to be headed the tournament's way. This episode also makes sure we know that people can ingest monster cells to become monsters themselves. Silverfang has already cautioned that Garou might be going down that road, and it's possible Suiryu might succumb to that temptation as well in his pursuit of unmatchable strength. Either way, with one of its biggest subplots concluded, the end of this mess of an arc should hopefully be in sight.

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Bungo Stray Dogs - Episode 32 [Review]

The Great Gatsby fans, this one's for you. After the crash of the Moby Dick at the end of last season, many of the remaining Guild members were left unaccounted for. (And no, I'm not talking about Lovecraft's walk into the sea/journey home.) We know where a few of them are, perhaps most importantly that Nathaniel Hawthorn joined up with Dostoyevsky, and as of recently we learned that Lucy Maud Montgomery has cleaned up her act and now works at the café on the ground floor of the Agency's building. But the most important member of the Guild was missing: leader F. Scott Fitzgerald himself.

Well, wonder no more, because after what we can assume to be months of diligent searching undeterred by the assumption of his death, Louisa May Alcott has found him. As the Moby Dick went down, Fitzgerald unconsciously used his Ability to cash in the last precious thing he had on him – his wedding ring – and save himself, but broken by his defeat and his lack of funds (which equates to lack of power given his skill), he's been living in those same slums that Chuuya started out in. When Louisa finds him, he's a broken man, convinced of his own worthlessness.

Before we get into the fun Gatsby references, however, I'm not sure I'm thrilled with how Louisa May Alcott's being portrayed. Alcott, like many of her heroines, wasn't exactly a wilting lily of a woman, although she may come off that way today if you don't take into account the time she lived in. Her most famous heroine, Jo March, is famously strong, and even her less overtly rebellious creations, like An Old-Fashioned Girl's Polly, show a strength of mind and character that stands out among contemporary children's books. (For comparison, look at the heroine of Kate Douglass Wiggins' The Birds' Christmas Carol.) So why, then, is Louisa so completely reliant upon Fitzgerald? Her one wish when she finds him again is to have him “give her orders,” something not even saintly Beth March necessarily desired. While none of the characters in the show are meant to be taken as exact representations of the authors or their works, Louisa still stands out as feeling very off when many of the other characters have at least a trait or two that is in line with either their source or their bibliography. Perhaps Alcott's books come across differently in Japanese translation.

In any event, Fitzgerald certainly needs Louisa's devotion in order to come back to himself. Whether you read that as her being the Daisy to his Gatsby or not, he certainly doesn't waste any time returning to his old, confident self. Even before we start to get into the Gatsby references, this makes for some fun scenes, not the least of which is him discovering the wonders of bargain shopping, although him just walking into some guy's apartment and sitting down to watch TV is pretty great too. But the real meat of the episode is when he confronts T.J. Eckleberg, a character from his novel. Eckleberg in the book is an oculist, or what today we'd call an ophthalmologist, and in the show he's the developer of a facial recognition software, which seems like a reasonable update. He's also accused of having killed George Wilson, the man who in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel murders Jay Gatsby. (In the book it's Wilson's wife who dies.) More interesting for fans of the author, the actual killer is Thomas Buchanan, whom Fitzgerald based on William Mitchell, a man he actively resented. Getting to ruin Buchanan in the episode can be seen as wish-fulfillment for Bungo Stray Dogs' Fitzgerald and an example of how the little details can really show the research that went into this.

In terms of the overall plot, we now know that Dostoyevsky has been sitting in a basement slowly filling a vessel with his blood, which can't possibly be good. Fitzgerald is still after the book he initially came to Yokohama for, and with Louisa and now Eckleberg, he's ready to get the Guild going again and resume the hunt. Lucy's friendship with Atsushi also may be a portent of warmer relations between Guild and Agency, because Edgar Allen Poe (and his rabies-bearing friend) and Ranpo clearly still have an amicable relationship, and Louisa does specifically send Poe to Ranpo when they need to solve Wilson's murder. Like the Mafia and the Agency banded together to fight the Guild, perhaps the Guild will now team up with the other two to fight the Rats in the House of the Dead. If Dostoyevsky is as bad as he seems, that may be the only hope any of them have.

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