Sometimes you’re upset when a major character in a show dies. Sometimes you’re happy, cheering because they were awful and they deserved the end they got. Other times you vaguely acknowledge that yeah, they deserved that, but you don’t feel happy or sad about it.
That was kind of me with Arthur. Yeah, he’s horrible and he deserved to die but I can’t drum up the energy to be happy about it? Maybe because it’s marred by the separation of Ash and Eiji? The pain of watching Ash get arrested [again], this time with a semi-serious looking stab wound and the pain of Eiji seeing Ash scream that he didn’t want Eiji to see him like this? Yeah, that’s probably why I can’t gain any satisfaction out of this victory on Ash’s part, that and the realization that without Golzine, Arthur was never really a threat.
If anything he’s a giant bitch.
We see the inciting incident that caused him to hate Ash in the first place. The time where his fingers got sliced. In which he loses in a knife fight against Ash for territory and then grabs a gun and tries to snipe him while his back is turned.
First off, he should be thanking his lucky stars that he’s alive.
That kind of behavior in a gang fight? The fact that Ash cut his fingers and made sure that he could never use a gun again is actually a huge mercy.
Second of all, what a little bitch. You’re going to pitch a hissy fight because you lost in a duel and try to shoot a gun with his back turned and THEN whine about your punishment? That’s not how any of this works buddy.
Then again, he really just has no backbone in general. His way of trying to take out Ash in this fight that he set up in the subway lacked any kind of real spine to it as well. It’s honestly a miracle that he made it as far as he did into the world of the mafia with Golzine. It was probably mostly from boot licking.
Apart from Ash shooting down people, fighting with Arthur and giving us some backstory on the relationship of those two. There wasn’t a ton going on, though in a absolutely beautiful flashback we see a special part of Ash and Eiji’s relationship.
Ash mentions that Eiji said he wasn’t like other people, he agrees, in the way that he is different in the fact that he does not fear death. There is a story, about a leopard on a snowy mountain. encased in ice, why is the leopard there? It’s something that Ash thinks about often, he compares himself to the leopard.
Yet Eiji points out that 1. humans can change their lives. they have instincts and freedom of change and thought that leopards could never have. and 2. Ash is not a leopard.
It’s interesting to see the way that Eiji sees Ash. not as a dangerous beast, but a multidimensional person. The way that, that is starting to affect the way other people see Ash as well. The two members of Ash’s gang that were assigned to protect Eiji and take him to the airport and send him back to Japan, when they let it slip to Eiji that Ash is fighting Arthur and let Eiji slip away. They comment that they’ll probably just get bopped on the head.
These same two people that have sat and been amazed by the way that Eiji handles Ash in the previous episodes and shaken in fear of him.
Don’t seem to fear him as much anymore.
Now that Ash has been arrested [again], where will things go from here? Can Max get him off on a self-defense plea? I mean, all of those gang and mob members would of killed Ash given the chance. What about Sing? Eiji?
Arthur is dead, so that’s a blow to Golzine at least on some level. It’s not enough though. We’ll just have to see where things go from here.