kemurikusa. #7 – After many trials, Wakaba and the sisters find an unbroken, fully functional wall, and beyond it, paradise. In the roots of a giant kemurikusa tree is safety and all the water they could possibly drink. Shame about the neighbors.
The new tidbit about how kemurikusa functions this week is not about different types but modes. When the wall’s alarm is triggered, it releases a gas that alters how the nearby robots behave. This is likely how the red kemurikusa “infects” them. This could also be a path to a solution for cleaning up the infection, if it’s possible for the green kemurikusa to co-opt them as well.
On the other hand, even Wakaba hasn’t really started thinking about the bots as potential allies. Instead, everyone has piled into their travelling home to prepare for an all-out assault on the red tree. Given there are still around four episodes left, I’m expecting that this isn’t going to go well.
Mob Psycho 100 II #8 – Goosed into accelerating his schedule for impressing Tsubomi, Shigeo decides that this is the year he needs to place in the top ten of the school marathon. He dedicates himself to it with such purpose that his whole support network rallies around to help him. Though he fails, he has done his very best, and the episode is squarely aimed at a warm and fuzzy ending right up until the slight tonal shift where Shigeo comes home to find the house in flames and his family apparently burned to death.
Fakery being an ongoing theme of this show, I expect it will turn out that those corpses aren’t real. But we know that Shigeo is very trusting, and him going completely out of control is the predictable result. Claw probably knows that too, which raises the question: What can they hope to gain by doing this? It’s not like it’ll make him easier to defeat.
Right until the bottom drops out of everything, this episode is a great panorama of how many people Shigeo has on his side. Mezato’s plan to get him installed as the Psycho Helmet leader goes nowhere because he has so many friends to keep him on the right track now. He’s obviously going to need them in what comes next.
(Crunchyroll — bilibili — Hami Video — LiTV)
Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka #7 – Having made the decision to enlist with M Squad, Asuka is formally welcomed with a gourmet tasting of field rations and other survival foods. This helps break up the lumps of character and world exposition which are needed for the next phase of the story, and then it’s off to go massacre some Russian mafiosi.
Not much in the way of unexpected twists this week, although it is very odd seeing the major characters getting to wear totally normal JSDF uniforms while the secondary squad members are running around in cool black body armor and tactical fedoras. Once again, one of the other magical girls visits Japan but doesn’t directly cross paths with Asuka, but once again, it’s emphasized that they’re already fighting the same enemy.
We get our first glimpse here of the specific nightmare that haunts Asuka. She accepted the position of leader after Francine’s (apparent) death, but in the run-up to the final battle, the magical girls suffered heavy casualties. Asuka clearly has never stopped blaming herself for it. How long before she finds herself forced into a leadership role again?
(Crunchyroll — AnimeLab — Wakanim — Hami Video — LiTV)
Dororo #8 – Dororo and Hyakkimaru travel to a land of sulfurous hot springs, so that they can dramatize the fact that Hyakkimaru has no sense of smell until he does. There they find a new demon that needs killing and an endearing young wild boy who for once does not suffer a tragic death.
The “beautiful young woman sacrificed to be the ‘bride’ of an angry god” theme is one of those things that will turn up sooner or later in any fantasy show drawing this heavily on Japanese mythology. Usually it involves a lake or river, rather than a mysterious cloud; and almost always it fails to fix the problem, leaving room for the protagonist(s) to step in.
So Dororo and Hyakkimaru do, and develop a new fighting technique, and the monster is duly dispatched. Despite the art keeping its usual polish, a very workmanlike outing overall. It got the job done, but I’m hoping for something more interesting next week.
The Promised Neverland #7 – Sure enough, Krone’s angle is that a prison break would help her depose Isabella and secure her own future. Though mere evidence of a well-developed plot would also work fine, so everyone has to spend about three times as much screentime sorting out how to keep the other parties from double-crossing them as getting new information.
What new information there is, is bleak. Emma may have an opportunity to stay alive within the system, but it would mean absolutely abandoning any chance of escaping. And of course there’s the whole problem of becoming complicit in the farming system. For the boys, no such luck.
Bringing Krone into the plot means a whole heckuva lot of Krone this week, and hoo boy is that character design not improving with time. Some readers of the manga initially reported that Krone’s appearance in the anime had been toned down, but this episode she looks as bad as the screenshots I’ve seen of the manga. Throw in the constant hysterical overacting, and this is a character I will be very glad to see the last of.
(Crunchyroll — Funimation — HIDIVE — AnimeLab — Hulu — Wakanim — VVVVID — Aniplus Asia — bilibili)
