As you van see, Jigokuraku won the patron poll for this season. I was probably leaning towards covering it anyway, but as befits a strong season the overall quality of the bubble series is pretty high. My Home Hero and Ao no Orchestra are still on it, flawed to be sure but with enough going for them to be tough to drop. Of course I’d say very much the same about Hell’s Paradise, which is why it was in there too until now.
About this episode I’d say it was pretty disturbing on multiple levels. Rokurouta was never anything more than a killing machine (as Genji and Eizen would attest) but watching him flail about was strangely unsettling. I guess I should give credit to the seiyuu Tadokoro Hinata for what was essentially a pretty thankless job, because he managed to inject those wordless howls with a certain amount of pathos (it certainly didn’t come from the writing). I felt sorry for the creature more than anything, and that bit with Sagiri at the end rang a little hollow with me for that reason.
Yuzuriha proves no help here (and is easily the most annoying thing about the series at the moment), doing little apart from attaching Senta to a tree, and Rokurouta proves too much for even Gabimaru to handle alone. That forces Sagiri to swallow her fear and self-doubt and join him in battle, though even then the giant proves a formidable foe. Eventually Gabi has to start a fire (which proves irresistible to the local monsters) and bring him down with smoke inhalation. Again, this all had a strangely tragic tone to it.
With that, perhaps the deconstruction of the mythology can truly begin in earnest. Whether Shinsenkyou is really the domain of mystical hermits or not, the Gabimaru group stumbles upon what at least looks like a human settlement. And the Aza brothers, unseen last week, stumble upon a couple of human-looking maidens going at it pretty hard in the forest. Things are getting weirder, if anything, which isn’t such a bad thing (assuming of course it all actually leads somewhere).
Nicc
May 8, 2023 at 2:09 pmCongrats to this show on winning the vote and it’s got potential to be a series that’s worth following. The battle with Rokurouta took up nearly the entire episode as it took a monumental effort to take him down. Genji survived that blow, but he’s mortally wounded. He has a heart-to-heart with Sagiri and finally understands her way of doing things. She then joins Gabimaru in the fight against the giant. We get to see his past and it seems that he’s essentially a man-child. It’s not explained how he got so large or how he managed to get arrested. With so little to go on, it was difficult for me to feel any sympathy for him too.
The battle takes a team effort as it’s clear that a single direct hit will mean death, even for the iron-skinned Gabimaru. None of Gabimaru’s techniques can do any permanent damage and so the only option is a decapitation from Sagiri. Where’s a vorpal blade when you need one? The breathing techniques that Sagiri was using reminded me of “Kimetsu no Yaiba”, but they have to resort to burning down the area. The dying Genji then narrates an impromptu lesson about carbon monoxide poisoning. That wouldn’t have been my choice of last words, but that’s just me…
Rokurouta is felled and the group heads deeper into the forest. There, they discover traces of civilization. The Aza brothers seem to run into some folks, but they don’t seem happy to be interrupted. You’re right this does seem like we’re really getting started when it comes to learning about the island and its secrets.