Mononogatari continues to track upwards, albeit relatively slowly.  Bit by bit this is turning into an interesting story with interesting characters, though the impression I get is that it’s way too involved for a one-cour adaptation to do more than scratch the surface.  It checks a lot of my boxes – Shinto, Kyoto, balanced cast of mostly adults.  It just doesn’t have a “wow” factor to it so far – it’s never less than fine but never really riveting.  There’s not a lot of time for that to change, either, so what we’re getting is pretty much what this show is.

I don’t know if you can fully dump Kadomori-san into the villain category yet, but he’s definitely an antagonist – antagonistic by design, in fact.  I see a lot of arrogance in his attitude towards Hyouma, and not just because he assumes he can beat him easily.  This is the scion of the (apparently) most powerful family in the Saenome game, and Kadomori is skating on pretty thin ice here.  He’s also more extremist where tsukumogami are concerned than Hyouma, which makes him even more likely to be a long-term thorn in Hyouma’s side.

Pulling in Yagen to mess with Hyouma’s head is a cold move, but for a while it seems to be having the desired effect.  In his hands she’s every bit as much of a tool as she was in her “past life”, with the exception that her current master has no affection for her.  Hyouma proves himself to be more than Kadomori reckoned with, though.  He puts himself in harm’s way in order to defeat Yagen by removing the controlling talisman from her face rather than destroying or sealing her.  And when Kadomori tries to use controlling talismans on him, Hyouma shows considerably more restraint than one might have expected.

The wild card here is Tsubaki, who gave hints last time that she was no willing puppet for her father.  She had some past interaction with Hyouma’s older siblings, interestingly, which may or may not make her more sympathetic towards him now.  My sense is that she’s primarily interesting in keeping herself entertained, which rather than any moral stand is why she chose to defy her father and back Hyouma here.  It also might be that she realized Kadomori was digging himself ever deeper and was too stubborn to stop digging unless someone ripped the shovel from his hands.

I was glad Hyouma didn’t turn out to be as gullible as he originally seemed where Kadomori’s explanations were concerned (maybe he needed time to reflect on it).  Gradually he and Botan are certainly drawing closer.  And it was fun, as always, to see anime in my backyard (the stepping stones over the Kamogawa in Demachi).  The first name thing was a bit of a disaster, but the die is pretty much cast. Both in terms of Hyouma’s feelings towards Botan, and towards tsukumogami in general (as witness his empathy for Yagen and her memories of her former master).