天下制覇

"Well, I guess we'll just stay here and die."

Impressions:

Not that I expected anything different, but this was another utterly baffling episode. Hyakki beats Taho, but was never going to kill him because he doesn't kill humans. So then Taho gouges the demon eyes out, which makes the final ultra demon appear… which is just I guess some blob that does absolutely nothing and is immediately killed. Then Hyakki's adoptive dad appears out of nowhere with his mom and they both go "Eh, whatever. Guess we'll just stay here and die. That'll wrap things up." And also surrogate-dad told Hyakki that he should have never given him the tools to make him a full person, kill all manner of monsters terrorizing the countryside, and bring an end to a lunatic murdering warlord engaging in human sacrifice and partnering with demons, but should've given him a pretty statue instead? Uh, you sure about that, dude? Really? Really?

So then epilogue then is Hyakki confronting Daigo but just going "Yeah, whatever. Peace out. Later, skater." And that's apparently the end of… whatever the hell was going on with Daigo. I can't even fathom what Dororo's contribution to the finale was supposed to be, to say nothing of Biyamaru's. Major characters? Pfft.

Final Thoughts

The setup here of Hyakkimaru trying to regain his humanity, physically and mentally, in a world of nothing but monsters, should have been a complete no-brainer on the dramatic angle, and lord knows that they made overtures about Hyakki becoming more monster than man through the whole second half. The problem is that virtually every human they encountered was a serial killing member of a death cult, and not once did Hyakki even approach the line, let alone cross it. I still can't get over the moth village arc. The villagers murdered an entire orphanage and every traveler they could get their hands on, and Hyakki ended up killing the mom moth a few miles away after they tried to feed him to it too. The babies got freaked out by Dororo setting stuff on fire after also being fed to them and ruined the village. The lesson we were supposed to take from that was not "You reap moth apocalypse from being part of a moth death cult," but "Ruin follows everywhere we go. Maybe we're just as bad." No! No it wasn't!

I suppose it makes a nice comparison to the other two shows I managed to fully suffer through this season, in that it didn't have their production issues and pretended like it was having at least one character arc (although not so much an overall story arc), it just flubbed it mystifyingly badly. Dororo could've symbolically been the heart of the show and/or Hyakkimaru, but instead, like most of the characters in the last episode, ends up just being a hanger-on, whose role was I guess just to say mystifying things that have little to no connection with the events that actually unfolded. The antagonists somehow fared even worse, especially that poor blob that they spent episode upon episode building up as the super duper final demon that was left behind. The one episode with the vampire demon trying not to kill people was the only one that showed the nuance that the rest of the series was in desperate need of. But it was just one episode in an ocean of bewildering nonsense.