Dantalian No Shoka episode 11: Aces High

We take a look at the past to understand the life of Huey before he met Dalian.

This episode was something else, it was really confusing and interesting, I like that. To be honest what confused me most was that everyone had blond hair and blue eyes and the same hair cut. I understand for the german to have Blue eyes and blond hair, but they were supposed to be french and english, it was against the stereotypes, it confused me.

What was even more confusing during the episode was how the lieutenant was suddenly in a german plane. It was impossible to understand what happened until everything was explained at the end, but even then, why would he switch side even if he was brought back from the dead? There were just so many weird stuff going on that I lost track of some stuff in the story I’m sure. From what I understood, the Lieutenant died at some point during a ground bombardment, he came back to life to create a phantom book and kill people, but in the end he crashed when he was defeated by Huey. Huey had the key to open Dalian even though he only received the letter informing him of his uncle death some times later. I believed that in the first episode he said that the key came with the letter, I must have remembered something wrong I guess.

What was kind of cool with this episode was that for once it told us some kind of continuity in the story, or more like a background to the story. We now know what Huey did before coming to the mansion and meeting Dalian.  We also learn that he was already a good reader and that he was able to use uncompleted phantom book even at the time. It is no wonder that he was chosen to be the next keykeeper.

Another awesome thing in this episode was that we met another bibliotheca. This one has her lock in her eyes and she looks quite the vile creature. She seems to be motivated by the creation of phantom books. She went to great length to resurrect the Lieutenant for him to complete his book. But Huey ruined everything, without even knowing most likely. But now we know how phantom books are created, they made of the despair and hatred of man. But for some reason I doubt that every book are made that way, there must be a few that have been made out of wisdom and love. We witnessed a couple of books that had positive effects on the world around them, maybe we will have the chance to witness the creation of one of those books one day too.

Overall I was really impressed with the episode of Dantalian No Shoka this week, it was refreshing and entertaining to watch. I feel like I was finally able to learn more about the universe of the phantom book and we got to see Huey doing something else than being Dalian’s slave. He was actually really awesome when he was flying.

ZeroG signing off