D.Gray-man Hallow Episode 8: [Awakening]

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Alma is awake, everything is destroyed and things aren’t going to get better for the Black Order members.

Tokusa makes a nice little speech reminding Allen that, even if he wants to be the perfect Shounen hero and save everyone there is no such thing as war won without sacrifice and destruction. After all, the purpose of the third exorcists and even ” normal exorcists” is to destroy the Akuma and not to purify or to save them. If you acknowledge that, it is difficult to pretend leading some sort of white war, without doing any sacrifice, which is not what the Black Order is doing anyway.
But before finishing his speech, Tokusa starts becoming a bit bananas and somehow is infected by a giant… thing? With teeth? I don’t really know how to describe it… uummm…  Let’s say it’s an Akuma. But yeah basically, since the third exorcists were made using Alma’s cells, if the latter becomes crazy it somehow has an impact on the third exorcists who will most likely go out of control. And that’s exactly what happens, Tokusa and the rest of the third exorcist gang start to turn into some sort of Akuma and there’s shit everywhere.

Furthermore, since they are now basically Akuma, the exorcists’ innocence is going to react to them and will want to destroy them. That’s apparently the goal of the Noah [or at least what they want everybody to believe], to force the Black Order to destroy itself by having his members killing each other, which is, I’ll admit, a quite economic way to solve your problems… and a sadistic one too.
But there’s more to it, soon the Millennium Earls offers a deal to Allen: if he leaves the order and come with them, he’ll stop Alma and thus stop all this mess. However, like everyone, I guess, the Millennium Earl’s reasons for wanting Allen aka the 14th to come with the Noah are a bit strange. Why would he want to get the 14th by his side since it’s the same guy who killed him before? The Earl replies to this question only with ” because I want to be by his side” with a different voice, the voice of the Earl without his costume whom we saw during episode 6 I think. But that doesn’t explain why he’d want to have the 14th by his side…Of course I know why… but I can’t tell because spoilers but… aaaah… the pain is consuming me.

Alma is angry at Kanda for everything and wants to kill him, same with Kanda, so the two of them fight until the point where Kanda has to use some sort of dangerous technique that put his life on line and changes his hair color [I’m not sure which side effect is the most horrible]. At this point Kanda becomes blinded by his rage and just wants to kill Alma to end everything. He even attacks Allen with his innocence and looks scary… more scary than before, and we all know how scary Kanda looks.
Alma is having some problems with his regenerative capacities while Allen is there trying to protect him against Kanda, acting like a mediator between the two of them, reminding them that they were once friends and everything. But it doesn’t work out very well since he gets attacked by both sides. Kanda now blaming Allen for turning Alma into an Akuma since the Noah did it to get the 14th back and Alma because… heh his reasons are a bit complicated I’ll admit. I guess he’s torn between wanting to kill Kanda, not wanting Allen to interfere and protecting Kanda.

Kanda stabs Allen whose skin turns into the Noah color and collapses on the floor. Somehow it makes Kanda regain his composure just before Alma gives him his final blow. However Allen has now turned completely into the 14th who has awakened. The Millennium Earl then reveals that this was his plan all along, to force Kanda to use his innocence on Allen in order to awake the 14th. By bringing back Alma to life the Earl was expecting Kanda to be devoured by this unstoppable rage and somehow also planned Allen would try to stop Kanda. That’s sick, that’s really Machiavellian and fucked up but it worked so heh…

OOOWWWW SHIIT OWWWW!
OWWWWWWWWWW

He’s HERE!
HE’S HEEEERE! THE GUYYY! NEAAAH!

Now for the episode in itself, it’s a MEH for me. Something did not work out very well. I felt like the animation quality dropped ridiculously. Maybe it’s the last two episode’s fault, where the rhythm and animation was good thus this episode suffers the comparison. Here we don’t really get those two things. Everything is rushed, there’s too many things happening everywhere and the fight animation wasn’t very good at all. And I’m not even talking about the horrible quite frankly unnecessary censorship that left huge black and white marks on the screen for almost no reason. Finally while I’d hoped for dynamic fights all we got was static images which were even more handicapped by the heavy narration going on. With loads of things to explain in such short time and epic fights to provide, I feel like the episode failed to do both things.

So yeah, I’m having mixed feelings about this episode. On one hand the quality literally dropped but on the other hand I just love D.Gray-man and I’m a bit blinded by that love. Furthermore, the 14th just woke up so there’s some sort of atmosphere filled with hype around me. But if they could stop with the censorship… that’ll be great. D gray-man isn’t a really gore show so there’s no reason to censor it that much.