Tsugumomo – 10

Honoka, Sunao, and Kotetsu

…and so now we begin our final arc of the cour, and the next step in the stories’ evolution.

Bare Naked Antagonism or in a Futon

I rather liked Honoka, I’d like to see more of her in the show

Well, right off the bat Sunao doesn’t really seem like a bad character, does she? She looks very proactive, ready to strike off and make a claim all her own. She looks like she has a decent understanding with Honoka, her particular god of the land, she looks reasonably powerful, and she has the most adorable little tsukigami by her side, Kotetsu. But I think we all know where this is heading, right? You don’t introduce a character this late in the game unless they are going to be a major antagonist, and when that happens, you just have to blow the doors down and let that character get to business. That is just what she does. A show of strength as her introduction. But I’m getting a bit to far ahead.

…but that was a good beat down…

…not a good track record?

Things are not looking very bright for Kazuya. In the process of learning about his responsibilities, he’s become very worried about others, and he’s not confident in his ability to protect them, or in the case of the malison atonements, protect them from themselves; Nanaki being struck mute is a pointed reminder of that. He’s already aware that he attracts the malison in the first place. Dwelling on that, the necessary, but still smaller, defeats are magnified past the much greater, and yet still sharper, successes. Those defeats become deeply personal almost and that makes the dwelling that much harder. In all of that, what makes matter’s worse, he’s still not all that great a fighter or a tsukigami user, and Kiriha’s drilling is taking it’s toll; not what she set out to do, but she has her own frustrations, as the larger story will bear out. There’s no one around him that he feels a peer to, and there doesn’t seem to be any relief in sight. So, now we can get back to Sunao, and the kicking…

Gonna have to take this challenge higher

It’s almost a blessing in disguise, this beat down. So much so that Kukuri even set it up for the most part. That’s one thing to note about her, playing the long game – but much more on that later, heck, it won’t be in this cour, but she’s up to stuff. The duel is necessary in many regards, despite it’s obvious shounen declarations, and it does catch both Kiriha and Kazuya by surprise. It’s also a good wheel for their drama to turn on, rather than the haphazard and harmful malison incidents that have become their spinning wheels, of sorts. But even then, we have to account for this brash person in the first place, don’t we? Sunao is the type of character that can divide a fan-base. She’s direct, to the point of being rude, and she’s obsessed, to the point of being dangerous, and maybe even someone a dumb story element, in some lights. All her decisions are made with these points as the forward face, and that face is pretty much always angry at everyone, save her obvious superiors.

Simpler times with her onii-chan

But in that respect she does carry quite a lot of grief and anger with her. She’s lost her brother at a very young age, and that’s the type of thing that nearly the same type of  drama can be made of, and it’s something of a staple. Something she shares with Kazuya. She wants to do something about this deep lose, not just sit by the sidelines and hope for the best situation to come along and fix it. She wants revenge on the monster that took him, and she’s denied that. Then she sets out to replace the one, Kanaka, that killed the monster in her stead. But she’s too young, and to far away, she needs to stay active, she needs to keep ahead of her grief and use her anger as best she can. She’s not doing so well in that. Sure, she’s harnessed it for her fighting abilities, and that has given her focus. But for anything outside that, it’s made her bitter, a feeling that has only multiplied when she meets Kazuya.

Despite everything, she’s wants it to be a fair fight, so she’s got that going for her…

We see that come out when she catches up with the gang. In that we have Kazuya’s relative weakness to her, the connection he has to Kanaka as her son and inheritor, and his overly-friendly and confused relationship with his tsukigami, and that just boils over. She forces her own and his hand. But we can see the fault. She’s not giving him the opportunity to grow, the same opportunity she was given by Kanaka. Also, there is that tendency to look at both Kiriha and Kotetsu as mere tools, without agency, yet she blames Kotetsu for her brother’s death. She’s almost everything that Kazuya could become, given another set of circumstances. In that we can take to heart Kiriha’s speech. Everyone relies on everyone, something that Sunao might have been denying herself when losing her brother. Kazuya is feeling guilt over his faults, and Sunaa has never let herself slow down to properly grieve. But at least he has Kiriha to NSFW him out of his funk, eh?

One of the big turning points in the whole of the story…

Let’s Get In the Futon!

To save him, Kiriha has to do some NSFW stuff…

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There were a couple of things I found quite interesting while watching this episode, and the ironic fact of the matter is, that I can’t really talk about much of it without spoiling the manga, or especially the next two episodes. Suffice it to say, there are elements here, in the chapters this episode adapts, that are still being worked out during current chapters. They were pretty big elements too, now that I see them from a different light, and they have grown. Sunao’s training is one aspect, the mindset she has fits a value that will be revisited later. The theme of loss is especially worked even more as the manga progresses. Not to mention, shall we call it….futon time. If you want to talk about them in comments, then please remember to use our spoiler tags. So far this was a great setup for the final two episodes.

Hopefully the animation will be better…

About skylion

All around nerd that enjoys just about any anime genre. I love history, politics, public policy, the sciences, literature, arts...pretty much anything can make me geeky...except sports. Follow me @theskylion