My first thought after this episode, honestly, was that Tsukushi Akihito must have had one heck of a messed-up childhood.  I consider myself a fairly imaginative person and a modestly decent writer, and I’m someone with a relatively dark outlook on life.  But there’s no way I could come up with stuff like this – it would just never happen.  The sheer level of existential despair coupled with the shocking way it manifests itself makes Made in Abyss pretty unique.  The only think I can really compare it to is “Chimera Ant”, but even that’s not really a good comparison.  What Togashi does there is fundamentally different to Tsukushi and MiA.

Not for the first time, I find myself struggling to concretize just how I feel about this series.  I admire it hugely – both the writing and the execution of the adaptation.  I deeply respect any story that can impact me on such a fundamental level.  But do I enjoy it?  Do I like it?  I honestly don’t know the answer.  The way I felt after watching this episode…  I mean, on some level you’d have to be nuts to actively search for things that make you feel that way.  But in the sense that what we crave from fiction is for it to make us feel something – anything – deeply, it’s like a drug.

Irumyuui is the key to everything here, certainly.  She can read the strange glyphs the exiles find in a cave (though I don’t think she understands the words).  As Vueko bonds with Irumyuui more and more to the point of single-mindedness, her recounting of these events turns into a survival story.  Certainly the exiles can’t go back up – even if the “elevator” that brought them here can – but the Shourou Layer is clearly going to be no easy place to settle.  The exiles find three interference unit robots to help them, but there’s only so much they can do.  As is so often the case in the situations, water is the first priority for survival (in a shameless bit of gallows humor, the MiA official twitter posted “It’s hot again tonight, so please drink plenty of water and wait until the broadcast”).

The exiles do everything right (under Belaf’s leadership) in finding water.  They narrow down the options the robots provide them to the one which appears not to be befouled and doesn’t require venturing into dangerous territory.  They boil the water before consuming it, even though it looks and smells pristine.  But it’s this decision which sets the wheels of their fate in motion.  They also have to deal with the creatures of the Abyss – some of which they hunt and some of which hunt them, including the little furry creature that Irumyuui has adopted as a pet.

Irumyuui carries the weight of her expulsion from her village along with her shame over not being able to bear children.  It’s Vueko’s own cruel past that literally and symbolically binds the two of them, and she begins to think of herself as the girl’s mother.  But soon, the children start falling ill – the first symptom being diarrhea (shit is definitely a major Tsukushi fetish) with eggs in it.  And it turns out that the “water” they’ve been drinking is another of the weird and terrifying creatures of the Abyss, and it begins to warp their bodies into strange inanimate forms.  They have no other water, but this water is killing them.

In the throes of desperation Wazukyan finds what looks like a giant golden egg in the knapsack of one of the children that has died (being a prophet allows him to see things, clearly), which the interference units recognize as a “Cradle of Desire” – or a wish-granting egg.  One of them tells Wazukyan that the egg is responsible for what happened, though it’s not clear exactly how.  Adults should steer clear of it, but a child  – especially a fearful one  – may be closer to its visceral wavelength.  Vueko convinces Wazukyan to let Irumyuui convey her wish to the egg, and this is the final fateful fork in the road leading to the present moment.

I think what happens next is pretty obvious.  It’s bad enough that Irumyuui’s fondest desire is warped into this existential despair-producing cycle of dead offspring (which resemble her dead pet).  What happens after, well…  I suppose one can’t judge Wazukyan if they haven’t walked in his shoes, but it’s a deeply shocking turn of events.  As to how it reflects on the present, it seems likely now that Irumyuui isn’t Faputa after all – though with everyone undergoing transformations, I suppose that’s not impossible.  They’re certainly connected – maybe Faputa is an offspring that survived, or came into existence in some other way connected to the Cradle of Desire.

This horrifying turn of evens is surely what drove Vueko to take the actions that got her imprisoned beneath Iruburu for how knows how long (and just how long strikes me as an important question).  Ultimately the main import of this arc strikes me as being Reg’s origin story, but for now the exiles and their story are the emotional center of it.  The Abyss continues to draw humans into it, and seems almost universally to bring them nothing but death and despair.  Yet they’re still drawn to it in spite of themselves – it has a powerful appeal that makes one throw caution to the wind, much as a certain manga about it does.