The big news in Ao no Exorcist this week was that Bunny Shota and Hooded-cloak Guy finally broke out in a big way, and boy was it worth the wait! They- wait…

Oh yeah, that never happened – they’re still furniture. Never mind.

I’m still enjoying this series, though I’ll admit it’s turned out to be way more episodic and humor-driven that I expected. The ongoing saga of Izumo the eyebrows girl and Paku really isn’t all that interesting, but the action sequences remain good, and there’s still a nice chemistry between Rin and Shiemi. And if nothing else, having two characters in almost every scene whose presence hasn’t even been acknowledged by the rest of the cast adds to the air of mystery surrounding events in the series.

As expected, the Eyepatch Sensei was the one behind the ghouls who attacked the students last week. Slightly less expected was the fact that he was apparently working with Yukio all along, in a sort of test of Rin’s strength. Of course Rin appears to be strong enough to kick the ass of anything they can throw at him so far, but is continually hamstrung by the inability to reveal his strength to his fellow students.

This is definitely behaving like a two-cour – and maybe much longer – series. The pacing is extremely deliberate, practically real-time, and by all appearances it’s looking like a school life show for the foreseeable future. That’s certainly fine with me as the writing remains sharp and the execution unassailable – just straight-ahead shounen well-done. I wouldn’t mind an occasional taste of the epic grandeur of scale that we saw in the first couple of episodes, though – perhaps we’ll get one soon.

The six first-year exorcism students.  Oh, wait…