Makai Ouji: Devils and Realist – 08-09

…And then mahou shoujo happened. Again.

It feels like forever since I’ve written anything on Makai Ouji, but I guess I only missed about a week of it. I’m back on schedule now though~. Luckily, the plot is still going… somewhere. At least it’s an interesting somewhere.

Episode 8-

BFFs~

Hey, let’s forget all of the drama (and the fact that there are a handful of demons seriously after William’s life) from the last episode, and study for tests! As always, Makai  Ouji throws plot continuity out the window in favour of something completely different. Though it’s keeping up it’s level of intrigue, and the plot no longer feels like filler after filler, so that’s a plus.

It was interesting at the end with Gilles remembering Joan of Arc (or the French “Jeanne d’Arc” here, I guess) as someone who was screwed over by god in the past. It’s twists on history like that which make the personality flips (like with Michael’s character) more interesting. What other famous historical martyrs of god have been led to their doom due to the head angel’s terrible personality/heaven’s brainwashing in this world’s history? …I’m almost more interested in that than the actual plot in Makai Ouji.

Uwah, Kamiyan is playing a ドS character. …Though I should have seen his blatant antagonism coming. This show is called “Devils and Realist“, not “Angels and Realist” (or even “Devils and Angels and Realist“, though if they kept going with the long name, they would totally have a LN title), so the devils (or at least the 3 main ones) would be the ‘good’ guys here. I guess having the image gaps with the angels and demons is an interesting take on things, but I don’t see how any part of Michael’s plan was a good one. Really, I doubt the way to William’s trust (or at least, general obedience) is by framing him, almost ruining the most important thing in his life and then attempting to stab him multiple times in order to make him a mindless puppet. If William’s answer for Michael’s question wasn’t choosing the demons before, it probably is now. Had he appealed to William’s interests without antagonizing him, William might have actually listened for a couple of minutes to what Michael had to say. …Or maybe not, seeing how William treats Dantalion even after the demons have helped William out so much thus far, but now I’d say that Michael now sits well below the demons on William’s list of people he’s willing to hang out with.

Episode 9- 

…And then the next episode, everyone decides that the best course of action is to leave William to fend for himself once again. It actually turned out okay since William’s aversion to anything involving the supernatural actually came in handy for once, but you’d think they would have seen problems coming. Did they all really need to leave? I guess Gilles kind of counts as a guard (…did they even know that he was going to be watching William?), but it’s also kind of shady that he works for Baalberith. You know, the guy trying to kill William and steal his soul a couple of episodes ago.

However, the episode suddenly going into Gilles’ past was the greatest part of the episode. I don’t know what it is about watching desperate people making contracts with demons (or really, people making contracts with anything shady) that I enjoy watching, but that’s one of the main reasons I like the whole supernatural genre. I was really hoping he’d go down to hell to see Jeanne and they’d have a confrontation of sorts, but that disappointingly never happened. I did like how they were playing with morality a bit though, after introducing it to the plot. Gilles was pretty open about wanting to defile Jeanne so she’s cast out of heaven, but is he really the bad guy here? …Er, okay, wanting to defile anyone isn’t exactly praise-worthy, but heaven supposedly brainwashing Jeanne to suit their own needs is pretty bad too. Though we don’t exactly know how much of Jeanne’s situation is due to Ecstasy, Kevin’s reluctance to do the same thing to William (and Michael’s personality in general) seems like a pretty big indicator that Ecstasy isn’t exactly the greatest thing ever to do to someone.

They were talking about Lucifer being on his way out in the last episode, but from this episode, Michael isn’t doing too well either. (Well that, and plot spoilers also informed me on that fact.) Maybe this is why he’s such a massive asshat to absolutely everyone? I don’t know exact plot details on that though, so I wonder if the plot will go into that in the number of episodes this show has left. Though if it could go into the angels in general, that would be nice too. Obviously Uriel/Kevin has some history with both Solomon and William that’s keeping him from blindly following Michael’s orders. Though I’m more curious with Solomon’s case, since we basically know the important parts to William and Kevin’s past. Plus William now has the ring (which is probably important), so maybe he’ll finally get his past life’s memories back.

So I was definitely more interested in pretty much every single character except William in these past two episodes, but at least interesting things are happening still. The pace that picked up in episode 7 is still… up, I guess.  This is definitely a good thing, since I don’t think I could have stood another episode of the characters helping small fairy creatures finding jobs in India. As for the new characters, they’re helping with keeping things interesting as well. Hearing Kamiyan in a sadist role is excellent in itself, but like I said above, the image gap that Michael’s character has is really great. It’s been a while since I’ve heard Fujita Saki (you know, Hatsune Miku’s seiyuu) in anything, so that was nice too. …Only, apparently I HAVE heard her recently, since she’s Ymir in Shingeki no Kyojin. Wow, I didn’t recognize her at all. I’m getting off topic now though. So things are looking up for the plot of Makai Ouji, and I’m actually looking forward to seeing the next couple of episodes. …If only in hope that Gilles and Jeanne meet up sometime.

As for the next episode, this should surprise absolutely no one, but Sytry is in a dress again for some reason.

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.