Mashle Episode 11

This week’s Mashle episode showed an example that not all kindness will be repaid by kindness in return. Whether we like it or not, there exists people in this world who only care for themselves and either took advantage of the kindness extended to them for their own self-interest and then betrayed it. Abel’s mother, was unfortunately, a victim of one of such despicable people.

Although a noble by birth, Abel’s mother was a humble woman. She didn’t gloat her superiority in status and believed that the privilege she had was something she gained only by a chance. She had no prejudice against the people of lower status and believed in the good of others. Her gentle nature urged her to help those in need. Unfortunately, during one of her volunteer activities, she was killed by A greedy commoners whom she tried to help, and to my utter disgust, the guy justified his killing as her receiving comeuppance for being lucky to be born more fortunate than him. Though it was never shown what happened afterwards, I hope the killer was punished for his crime.

Now, we finally understood why Abel was so obsessed in noble bloodline. After what happened to his mother, it’s not strange that he came to believe that nobles and commoners lives in different world and impossible to coexist while considering the commoners to be nothing more than dregs. He didn’t deny that there are evil exists within nobility as well, but emphasized that the majority of those evil people were from the bottom class, so he made it his mission to destroy that class to first lessen the evil from the majority before purging the rest. It must’ve left a great scar of betrayal for having his mother taken away from him when she genuinely tried to give a helping hand.

However, despite his view, I am as relieved as Mash that Abel wasn’t completely ruthless. He accepted his defeat with dignity and willingly released Lemon and Finn. Also, Mash, the one who defeated him, was actually magic-less without his knowing, someone whom he always considered to be beneath him.

Again, I am satisfied with how the fight was in this episode. Usually, the standard shonen fight tended to get dragged for several episodes more than necessary that it could be tiring, but Mashle managed to start and end the fight only in one episode without sacrificing the pacing or the quality of the animation. The only gripe I have, I guess, was how Abel did the usual villain narration like they have all the time in the world when he and Mash were supposed to have a death match. The previous episode was still more acceptable because: For Wirth, it was a proper “show don’t tell” without a long-winded words to words narration. For Abyss, he had to explain to Mash because the latter didn’t know anything about his left eye so it was natural to give an explanation to make him understand, and his past was explained only after he was defeated by Mash instead during the middle of their battle.

Having succeeded in his mission on rescuing his friends, Mash’s group celebrated their supposed victory, but I figured this won’t be long because of a new enemy working under the criminal Innocent Zero, was making his way to Abel with the intention to silence him. Knowing Mash, no way he’s going to stand by and let whoever this new enemy kill Abel in front of him. Since he was said to be on the same level of Divine Visionary, that must mean he’s as strong as or perhaps even above Rayne.