天下制覇

Looking for answers.

Impressions:

Well, the real sad news here is that I’m pretty sure that the next chapter/episode/movie/whatever isn’t due out for at least a couple months. This one focuses on one of Azaka’s (Kokutou’s younger sister) friends. Just as Ryougi and Kokutou became the templates for Shiki Tohno, Azaka is basically Akiha’s template, fiercely protective of her brother and relatively pyrokinetic or more specifically, is good at magically causing explosions, though apparently she hasn’t started her magical studies in this one yet. She’s only in the episode for about 2 minutes anyway, most of which she spends berating Ryougi. 

Anyway, her friend, Fujino (voiced by Mamiko Noto… BOOOOOOOO), has grown up unable to feel pain and seeks it out in herself and others, putting herself in situation where she’ll be attacked and raped and/or telekinetically torturing others to death to find out why or what the meaning for pain is, not always the same people though. In general, Fujino adds a pretty dark element to what’s already a dark series. Hell, the first scene of the movie is her being raped by a gang of thugs while she seems completely emotionally dead. She puts herself in situations like again, and also twists apart a man’s limbs trying to find her answers. Kokutou was apparently one of the few people who has been kind and noticed her injuries, even when nobody else would, and she was looking for that ‘light’ again, which she only found on the brink of death.

After a fight with Ryougi, where Fujino managed to crush Ryougi’s arm and then caused a giant telekinetical storm, Fujino finally felt her pain as she lay dying, while thinking about wanting to see Kokutou one more time and tell him how much it hurts but Ryougi was the one standing over her just befor delivering the final blow. Well, not really. The final blow to save her I suppose. Silly metaphysical versions of her power. Ryougi’s apparently got some sympathy for a fellow lost soul, but she does sit on Fujino and stab downwards and kills something at any rate. We can chalk it up to an "almost kill" in the "death to Noto" column.

Another relatively solid episode, though if I had to pick a weakest of the first three, it’d be this one, and not just because of my personal aversion to rape as a theme in general. I’m actually fine with its use here since it was used to show that Fujino really was crazy above and beyond humans and it gave some depth to her that merely torturing random karaoke workers wouldn’t have, as opposed to say… Prism Ark’s "my boyfriend doesn’t love me so I’m going to get myself raped." That’d just have shown that she was a sadist, but not given the recipricol "I can’t feel pain" side of the story. I suppose slitting her wrist or something similar would have worked, but then you get into life threatening and such. She wasn’t suicidal, just looking for ‘pain.’ Crazy, sure, but at least understandably.

Anyway, I think the drama and thriller aspects of this episode suffered a little bit since everybody knew within the first 5-10 minutes or so that Fujino was the killer and it didn’t take long after to figure out the whole pain deal either. After that, it got a bit more philosophically rambly (is that a word? It should be) than the previous two movies and sort of lost traction for a bit before Fujino’s big fight with Ryougi at the end. It just seemed like we covered quite a bit of ground through the start… and then revisited all of it again for the middle. I did love the imagery in the first Fujino/Ryogi encounter of the blood splitting and avoiding Ryougi as it pooled in her general direction though. Oh well, at least we got some proto-Akiha, even if she didn’t blow anything up… yet.

Preview:

The meaning behind the eyes of death.