Akatsuki no Yona Episode 9

And so their journey begins.

We open to Yun delivering medicine to a man he knows, with Hak behind him holding a large bag. When they’re away from the man, we now see Yona walking with them. I didn’t think they were going to actually Yona in the bag Yun had brought along, but they did lol. And she didn’t like it one bit. It makes their travel easier for her to not get seen. With such a distinguishing feature such as her hair, she really has to hide it. The people don’t know what Yona looks like, since she never left the castle, but they all know she has red hair because it’s so strange. Yona doesn’t want Hak to carry her for the whole journey because his wounds haven’t healed yet, so she’s going to walk the whole way.

Yun’s having fun seeing the world, and Yona is also seeing new things. Like the people of the land working on their fields to produce food. Food she ate happily in the castle and never gave any thought as to where it came from. Yona prays to them, showing her gratitude.

Basically, the rest of the episode is this. When seeing Fire Tribe soldiers, the group hides somewhere and wait for them to leave. Yona is careful of hiding her face. Yona wants to learn to defend herself, so she takes up the bow. This keeps happening over and over, so this was pretty easy to summarize, also because we got a montage of all those events.

This episode was mainly more character development for Yona. When taking up the bow, Hak keeps telling her if she’s willing to kill someone. Just because she could maybe frighten someone doesn’t mean that they’ll just leave her alone. The intention to kill, it’s something Yona has had on her mind when practicing. She had tried shooting a baby wild boar. She kept thinking it was cute, but she hesitated, and instead left it with a wound. Hak tells Yun to go on ahead, since they’re close to their destination, and he and Yona stay behind for more training. Hak tells Yona to shoot to see her progress, and she’s improved from before. Before she would hardly have any strength to shoot one arrow. When asking Hak for help on what she should do, Hak just said “Shoot” and “Aim”. She didn’t get it, he’s a bad teacher. Which was hilarious because it reminded me from one part in Kuroko no Basket 2 where Kuroko asked Aomine how to shoot a basketball, and Aomine just said to shoot, and also said he was a bad teacher. As the subtitle says, geniuses don’t understand how the incompetent feel.

Before I digress, Hak now makes Yona shoot at him. She needs to practice shooting at a moving target, and also a human. So she tries, but she still kinda sucks. He keeps telling her, imagine people who she would want to kill. She doesn’t have anyone like that. It wasn’t until Hak said to imagine him as Soo-won, that it struck a nerve with Yona and she shot at him, grazing his cheek.

Cute bright shoujo moment happens, and they go after Yun. It’s super foggy, but Yona finds Yun’s belongings on the ground. They hear voices around them, and after Hak swings his weapon to get rid of the fog, they realized they’re surrounded by men with bows. One of them recognizes Yona’s hair and asks her why she’s there, and she mentions she’s looking for the warrior with the dragon blood. The man says they protect him, and that they will show Yona to him.

WE’RE GONNA MEET THE FIRST OF THE DRAGONS NEXT EPISODE, YAY! AND HE’S CUTE AS HELL. I’m just so excited that we’ll finally get to see him, I’ve been waiting for this. The next episode should be exciting.