天下制覇

Really milking it.

Impressions:

I'm still not feeling this show, and I'll place that entirely on the writing. I don't think the origin story for the shadow blob was needed at all, nor did it reveal anything noteworthy or even interesting about him. Mostly, it just raised the same kinds of questions as last week. Is there seriously a racial genocide going on and everybody's pretty much ambivalent to it? But also they basically come and go as they please? They exist as part of society, and yet nobody takes any precautions against them? Despite the genocide going on? What use does a blob have for a wooden toy horse?

Nor does any of it connect back to how the episode ends, picking up where last week left off 5 minutes from the end of the episode with the sword fight, which also has similar nonsense. You might be able to make a case that only dodging is not meeting your opponent's strength or whatever, but it doesn't take a lot of strength for an actual blade to the face to kill you, plus that's not even the main argument they used. It's that dodging and making his brother look weak and like a flailing child would make people think he was mocking him and would therefore hate him. But it's totally cool the other way. Doing it while grinning madly like a lunatic before going back to his room to talk to a literal devil witch, complete with "all according to plan." It's so comically hypocritical that it's impossible to take seriously, but we're evidently supposed to. And that's all the 'meat' of the episode that there is thanks to two thirds of it being consumed by an unrelated backstory.