Shadow is feeling a little under so I’ll be doing one more post for her this week!
With two Archbishops (supposedly) down, we move back to the fights we left behind before and get a little taste of them again. I’ll be completely honest, I’m not really a fan when shows do this. I enjoyed when we only focused on the Wrath fight, and then on the Greed fight. I don’t like jumping around the multiple fights too much because I can’t really savor them all, at least we got to have a good few minutes with the Garfiel and Kurgan fight. That said, I do have my gripes with it.
The Gluttony and Lust portions were just alright. Seeing Otto lend a hand with those water dragons was pretty cool though I am curious how he got them and was able to control them. Looks like he and the others are going to hold the fort down while Felt gets her metia, not much more on that front. With Lust vs. Al they’re really pointing out that Al was behind the opening of the water gates and the deaths of the people who know the whereabouts of the remains of the witch. There’s just so much intrigue surrounding Al and I hope we get to have some more focus on him. What the heck has he been doing all this time and his relationship with Priscilla and all that. His reactions and responses to Lust are also pretty fun to watch.
I think the only part of the episode I truly cared about was Garfiel’s battle against Kurgan. Kurgan himself has a really cool design and I like his lore so it’s a shame we only got to see so little of him. Garfiel continued to tackle his trauma and fear with Elsa you can say, and finally was able to overcome to really unleash all he had on Kurgan. It was great to see the two siblings again, and unharmed. And oh my goodness, Garfiel calling them his little brother and sister was SO SWEET! It really touched my heart. I was getting nervous when water started pouring into the shelter. I was thinking time was going to run out for them as it would slowly flood the room up, but Kurgan ended up being really honorable until the end. He closed the hole in the wall and only focused on fighting Garfiel, not even thinking of harming the innocents in the room. And hey, I can respect that. And he clearly showed Garfiel respect as well, even though he started off with only using a single sword against him. It was an exciting fight and I love the detail of Kurgan taking out more swords throughout the bout, showing his respect for Garfiel. Again, sad that the fight was really only six or seven minutes at most but looking at the episode count of the season, it looks like we are running short of time.
I’m not sure if this is a hot take…but while this part was my favorite from the episode it still didn’t do much for me. I can acknowledge that the animation for this part was phenomenal. Lots of action, camera angles, impact and flow, art style and even the accompaniment of the music and all of that was really pleasing. The animators did a great job and I do applaud it. But for me it actually took away from the fight because I have no clue what even happened. It was really hard to keep up exactly with what was happening and how Garfiel even took down Kurgan. I actually had to go back and rewatch it to try and figure it out (the cut on the shoulder?) and I’m still a little stumped. Did it succeed in giving us a fun and crazy spectacle? Absolutely. Did it succeed in clearly showing us what was going on? Personally I did not think so. I think most people won’t care and just awe at the visuals, but I’m annoying and nitpicky about this stuff so it bothered me. It didn’t kill the fight for me completely, but in the end I just thought the fight was just fine. This episode was just fine.
I actually hadn’t noticed how little episodes we have left so I am curious how things will go. Next time will be Wilhelm and his wife. I like Wilhelm a lot and feel for the poor man so I’m expecting it to be an emotional one.
Berry, it was revealed in Season 1 and reaffirmed in Season 2 Otto has the Divine Protection of the Soul of Language that lets him speak to and understand all living creatures. If you recall from Episode 58, Otto took a day off from the Emilia camp in Episode 51 to go to the man who can repair what was Roswaal’s not-quite-Tome of Wisdom. He probably spoke with water dragons during that time in case the city came under attack since it doesn’t take a whole day to speak with one man. I’m guessing he bribed the water dragons with food since there isn’t anything else he can offer them.
This episode hints Al isn’t a future Subaru. If he was a future Subaru, he’d know the extent of Capella’s regeneration, and this gap of knowledge shows he isn’t Subaru. Assuming my assumption about Al being the previous hero of the story in the previous iteration of the world is correct, this shows either that Al had little involvement in fights with Capella when he was the hero or that Capella wasn’t the Archbishop of Lust when he was the hero as otherwise he wouldn’t believe cutting off her head and making her body explode would kill her. In my theory, it’s mainly the hero and the heroine of the story who are different when the world’s reconstructed after its destruction, but there may be other small differences as part of the world’s attempt to break the cycle of being destroyed and reconstructed may involve changing a few things up with the hope that the next iteration of it will see the end of the cycle, which accounts for Capella possibly being the Sin Archbishop of Lust in the current world but not the previous one.
I agree the last part fight was directed poorly. During the fight, Garfiel uses mana flow, much like Gaston did earlier, to launch himself to the ceiling while using earth pillars to block Kurgan’s arms, and after doing so, he ruined Kurgan’s left eye in exchange for a slice to his abdomen. Then the strange directing began, and Garfiel rushed up towards Kurgan using earth pillars to block his arms, and he used all his strength to destroy two of Kurgan’s Devil Cleavers with blunt force in exchange for breaking both his arms. Kurgan thought he was gonna finish Garfiel, but he didn’t notice that one of his left arms wasn’t working well due to the scratch Garg had given him earlier in the sewers since he can’t feel pain as a corpse soldier. Garfiel used mana flow again to launch himself to the ceiling and used the earth pillars to block Kurgan’s arms and dive down to bite through Kurgan’s carotid artery by attacking Kurgan from his left due to his eye being disabled, which was difficult to see, and I had watch more than once with no understanding until I saw a piece of his neck gone after the fight had concluded.