Dororo #07 — Tangled Webs
February 18th, 2019
I wish every episode was like this.
Impressions:
Where the hell has this been for the whole series? A story with some actual optimism, heart, and not filled with the characters of the week being one-dimensional lunatics. Only a few were. Which isn't to say that there weren't still an uncomfortably large number of headscratching moments where the exposition or direction did not match up at all to what it was trying to sell, but I felt far more for this couple than I did for Miss Made-To-Suffer over her two episodes in the previous arc. Hell, we even learned a valuable lesson at the end of it, giving at least the slight illusion that the characters took something from the experience. Both of them, really. Would that every episode of this show was like this. Still a bleak, ugly, unforgiving world, but not a nonstop unending press of misery and despair.
All that said, it needed a few things to have made it a great episode though. First and foremost, Dororo and Hyakki's side of the story needed to not be both so painfully padded and so ridiculously obvious that the spider wasn't to blame. They get a scene where guards gleefully tell them to look out for a kidnapper, then a scene where they speculate that there might be a reward for catching it, then a scene where they discover that there is a reward, then another scene about how there's a reward but that the villagers outright saying that they hope nobody ever finds the 'kidnapper.' That time would have been much better spent organically showing that it was a slave village rather than it just kind of being something declared partway through. They also should've figured out whether the spider killed people or not. Either way would've been fine, but trying to hew the difference between a monster who always had the soul of a shepherd and one that just now found humanity from Whose-His-Face confuses what we were supposed to take it as. One also has to wonder if we're supposed to take her as just some random monster or Hyakki gave up some piece of himself to allow them life. That's a question worth at least addressing that gets totally ignored.
Still, it remains that this was easily the strongest episode of the show so far, and I really hope it stays in this mode, especially as Hyakkimaru becomes more a person.
Posted in Dororo | 3 Comments »
CM 
Aroduc
This is easily my favorite episode of Dororo. The main problem that i have with this show each story’s narrative often steers itself toward having a somewhat or outright negative outcome despite the efforts of the main characters.
The sword guy back in episode 4. He couldn’t just be possessed by the demon of the sword that made him kill people, he also found himself enjoying killing people even when he was separated from the sword so that he can later find his sister and later go off to get killed in front of her so it can look tragic even though that hurts the narrative of him being controlled by the sword to begin with.
The arc with Mio and the kids. Not only are they poor and Mio has to sell her body to feed them, but it also gets them all killed when the samurai just show up to her house to bluntly declare that basically Mio was selling herself wrong somehow and everyone had to die for it just to make everything sad for Hyakkimaru, who liked Mio. Its just feels piled on and lame.
Thats why I like this episode. It shows that just because the setting is bleak, doesnt mean that everything has to get even worse or have some tragedy for someone. Theres some hope out there that things can get a little bit better. I really thought for a second that the spider and the Man would end up dying together in this episode just cause they wanted to run away together because thats how this show has lead me to think with how about things usually turn out. Glad to see a positive outcome for a change.
Im now worried with how the rest of the show will go now since this episode may have been just an outlier…