Dantalian no Shoka – 09

The story of a girl named Ira and the entire town that lacked pupils

I spent a good portion of last week watching Gosick and all I can say is IT IS A GOOD THING Huey isn’t anything like Kujo. Other than that,  I rather enjoyed the anime, so I don’t know why it has so many people complaining about it. Holy crap that ending though. Totally worth watching. Anways, sorry about the abnormally late post. Homework is killing me.

Dantalian does the unexpected again and Huey and Dalian wander around in some kind of ruined place noting that they’re too late. Also, DAT ANIMATION.

So in some other nonruined town, the story focuses in on someone named Ira. She’s the local helpful girl that picks herbs for the townspeople and does other helpful girl things. After picking some herbs for an old man, she blushes when he talks about some guy names Tito. Ira than notices Huey and Dalian outside the window and notes their strange clothing.

After doing other generic helpful girl things like giving herbs to the guards, Ira’s uncle appears and asks to talk to the elder, aka Ira’s grandmother. So they talk to Ira’s grandmother and ask for Elegans to fight the Baziumu (some sort of bug that go around destroying things) because nothing else seems to work against them. Plus they recently destroyed some fortress nearby. However, Ira’s grandmother is pretty against it because she thinks that they’ll use them for war, but agrees after they tell her about the Baziumu and says that she’ll give them Elegans the next day.

So she has Ira run into the forest to gather some sort of flower to make the Elegans. In the forest, she hears some kind of animal nearby, but it’s scared away by the sound of a gunshot. There she meets Huey and Dalian and Dalian calls her ‘eyebrow girl’. They talk for a while and Ira explains that she’s a shaman in training. Ira picks the flowers and goes to leave and Dalian says that the Elegans won’t work against the Baziumu, so if Ira encounters one, she should just run away. They also ask if there is a place around with plenty of books around and leave towards there.

That night, Ira’s grandmother makes the Elegans and Ira takes a bottle of it to town with her because she’s worried about Tito. Just before she gets to town, things start exploding. When she actually arrive in town, the Baziumu have invaded and no one is around. Ira runs to the store she was in at the beginning of the episode, but a Baziumu breaks through the wall right in front of her.

She throws the Elegans at it and it bursts into flame, but then dies out. Taking Dalian’s advice, Ira runs away and is saved by Huey. However, his bullets have no effect either and Dalian asks if he’s set the fumigant up. After he says he has, the Baziumu then start disappearing in flashes of light and smoke. Dalian notes that they were attracted to the cart of books on the street and all three of them run off into the mountains to find the surviving townspeople.

They find the survivors, but apparently a lot of people have died (not that you can tell because everyone important is still alive). Ira’s uncle then goes and blames Ira’s grandmother for all of this because she didn’t give him Elegans the day before. Ira speaks up though saying that they didn’t have them yesterday and that they didn’t work on the Baziumu in the first place. Her uncle then goes and blames the books and Tito (who is still alive by the way) who brought them here.

Dalian and Huey show up and say that it was the books that attracted the bugs. They also say that everyone should stand back, but of course Ira’s uncle has to make a big deal out of them telling the people what to do. However, the Baziumu show up and Dalian lets Huey use her books. Watching the unlocking happen, Ira’s grandmother is amazed because Dalian holds the legendary Dantalian. Huey reads a book and Dalian calls the Baziumu bookworms.

After the townspeople are saved, Huey explains that they’re from a different world and that they saved the people because they had caused some trouble for their world. Since the problem is gone, Huey and Dalian return to their world and Dalian says she’ll see Ira again soon and every time when she reads the book. The two leave and Ira and Tito hold hands while watching the sunrise.

So it turns out that the whole ordeal was caused by an infestation of bookworms due to rainy weather in real life. In the end, Huey has a crap ton of books to repair/fumigate and Dalian blames him that the books are damaged. The episode ends with Dalian reading the book about Ira.

End Thoughts: Holy crap, that animation. It was like something out of a Studio Ghibli film (but at the same time wasn’t anywhere near that kind of quality). I’m having a hard time placing what kind of art style this even was; it was pretty unique. Those diluted colours! Anyways, it was extremely awesome of them to change the style around completely and it makes sense because of course the world in a book would be way different than reality. Being in a book also explains the extremely stereotypical character types too (elderly wise woman, cheery helpful girl, etc). The explanation for why the bugs were attacking and why none of the book characters could do anything about it was well thought out. Of course fire and poison wouldn’t work, because the things doing the damage were outside of their book world. I feel terrible for Huey though with him having all of those books to repair. Hopefully it was only his basement that had the damaged books.

Ahahaha I had to laugh at Huey and Dalian looking for books in a forest. Why would they think there would be books there in the first place? Anyways, this episode gave us an interesting look at their characters from a different point of view. Again, people describing their clothing as ‘something they’ve never seen before’ makes perfect sense because they’re from a different world. Of course they would have never seen clothing like that before. Though I wonder. Do they have to get rid of ALL of the bugs by going into the damaged books? That could take a loooong time. And if not, why go into one in the first place besides giving the animators the chance to change things around completely?

… This episode confused me. First of all, if the bugs were attracted to books and the villagers KNEW that they were attracted to books after being attacked, then why would they bring said books to the mountain with them? Or was that just the uncle being the stereotypical quick to blame others character looking for a scapegoat? Was it a lucky guess? Either way, lol at the grandmother knowing who Dalian was. Even book characters seem to know. Well at least the grandmother was the kind of character you’d expect to know these things, rather than it being random people on the street. I couldn’t figure out what Elegans were either. Dalian said they were poison, but they looked like green flame. Oh well, I don’t think it was that important anyways. Too many questions. I should go finish reading the novels, maybe some of the answers are there.

Preview: Next episode is titled “Fantasie”. Surprisingly, there are no books in the episode name for once.

About Karakuri

University student and the one at Metanorn who's known for wearing glasses. Likes blood, insanity and plot twists, but also plays otome games and adores cute romance anime. It balances out... somehow.