Would you like an imouto?
Impression
Wow, that got rather lewd. And because it was lewd, it felt like a real cop-out to see that even the slightest hint of ecchi was censored – if Shinmaou is willing to white out something as trivial as Basara’s hand touching Mio’s boobs, it might not even be worth watching the wilder scenes that start to border on hentai. The point is that whoever’s making these production decisions should know perfectly well that this is one of those erotic, lewd battle-fantasy harem shows with fanservice all over the place – it’d be defeating a large part of its purpose if anything even remotely ecchi was censored without a second thought. At the very least, I think they do try to compensate for it in other ways, like that one scene where Maria’s just calmly mopping up… something off the floor after Mio had finished ‘calming down’ from the aphrodisiac. I was right about looking forward to Maria, by the way – I’ve begun to understand that a lot of what she does is for her own viewing enjoyment, and that’s great because that translates to my viewing enjoyment, too.
Plot-wise, it seems that Basara has officially adopted two new imoutos, and will be living with them for the time being until new developments happen. I felt that the strong Basara from last week’s episode slightly faltered here – I understand he’s a good person and all, but I didn’t quite buy his reasoning, and neither did Mio. ‘Protecting his two imoutos’ is a rather vague notion, and even then it feels like he’s unsure as to whether he can protect them in the first place. Why was negating Maria’s magic a fluke? Can he not pull out his sword easily? The last harem member has also been revealed to be Nonaka Yuki, a childhood friend of Basara’s who was presumably part of the hero village as well as a result, if she knew him as a child. I think I’d root for her, given that my opinion of Mio has stagnated to thinking she’s cute a couple of times throughout the episode – assuming that Yuki will be Mio’s main love rival, that is. Maria sounds like she’d be okay with grabbing some popcorn and watching. Yuki probably knows what’s going on, but is refraining from doing anything until she’s heard Basara’s side of the story – to uphold the tendency that the plots in this genre are all rather similar, I’m going to guess that she ends up clashing with him, before eventually losing and joining the harem for real.
Give Mio some time. She’d just almost died, and was explicitly shaken up about it. She went from there to thinking about her family, whose fate was clearly not child-safe and has left her throughly traumatized. And immediately after that she was forced to be molested and “rendered unsuitable for marriage” by her new adopted brother. None of that stuff is the sort of thing one gets over quickly, and I think all of it is influencing her current behavior.
Yuki’s sudden displays of affection probably helped to further worsen her mood somewhere along the line. It’s just that she’s taken to things rather differently to Maria (albeit Maria never got the short end of the stick), and the genuine concerns she may be having are blurring together with her standard tsundere role, which isn’t doing her many favours.