FFS, just tell him already.

I have to give Fumetsu no Anata e credit on a couple of different fronts.  First of all, cleverly disguising what actually happened at the end of last week’s episode, right down to a troll next episode preview.  They certainly got me.  And also, for actually managing to get weirder.  It was already pretty damn weird, but every new plot twist seems to take it up a few notches.  There’s a bit of a kitchen sink quality to the story at this point – you don’t get a sense this is a mangaka whose editor has said “no” very often.  But at least it keeps you guessing.

So that false hope owl turned out to be a Chekov’s owl.  Happily for Bon, who’d be quite dead otherwise.  Fushi took matters into his own hands for a change and pre-empted Bon’s little self-sacrifice without even realizing Bon had snowed him.  He put everybody (including Bon) to sleep with one of Tonari’s potions, switched Bon out with one of his custom corpses, and scarpered off back to Uralis.  Which is where Bon wakes up, quite convinced he’s in the afterlife (which is where his family and subjects think he is too).

I’m not totally sure why Fushi chose to spend this whole interlude as Rean (or why Bon kept calling him Joann, though I’m probably forgetting some detail).  But he can’t reveal his own identity, and neither can Bon, on the assumption that if the Bennetts know he’s alive they’ll keep hunting him down or even start a war with Uralis.  So he takes on the identity of “Baron Spring Roll”, cuts his hair and shaves his beard, and tries to blend in.  I can’t imagine that secret will hold for long given all the loose-lipped people who already know, but I suppose it makes sense to try and delay that reckoning for as long as possible.

Then we have the Iris angle and yes, I was correct in assuming that she would have quite the physical transformation.  Iris was also the handkerchief girl from the flashback after all, though the timing there still doesn’t quite make sense to me.  It’s slightly disturbing that Bon felt nothing for Iris when she was fat and now that she’s thin he’s totally into her, and we’re apparently supposed to be fine with that messaging.  But I suppose it’s what she wanted, and in fact Iris and Spring Roll end up effectively adopting Chabo, who seems to have started eating as soon as he woke up in the castle and hasn’t stopped since.  But Spring Roll still doesn’t tell Fushi that he can bring back his friends from the dead.

None of that is even the headline, though.  That has to go to Nokker news, courtesy of the passenger in Kahaku’s forearm.  Kahaku has decided to disband the Guardians what with Fushi being declared a demon and Bon a heretic, and purge the Nokker from his body.  At this point – for some reason, and in a very surrealistic scene – Kahaku’s Nokker starts to communicate in writing.  It’s first words: “please don’t kill me”.  It then goes on to spell out the central conflict of the series – the Nokkers are basically Fye, and thus souls.  They see their attacks on humans as a mission of mercy, freeing them from their fleshy prisons so they can roam free as Fye.  And they especially hate the Man in Black for being the architect of the system, and Fushi for his ability to prolong the prison sentences by keeping people alive.

Yoshitoki-sensei is a fearless writer, that’s for sure.  And this development is audacious, way out there where the buses don’t run.  I’m not sure I remember another premise that has souls literally at war with corporeal beings over the right way to exist.  This, like Fushi’s exploration of his own immortality, is an idea with a lot of potential for fascinating development.  I can’t say I’m fully confident Fumetsu no Anata e will actually realize that potential, being as huggermugger a story as it’s become, but it certainly hangs out there teasing you with the possibilities.