This is my first blog post as an engaged man. It’s a bit interesting because how many engaged people own their own weeaboo-ass anime blogs? People be like “dude this guy ain’t gettin’ nuttin’!” Anyways, enough improper grammar and strange dialects, let’s get on with the review.
Brynhildr is back and this time it’s even MORE in the darkness than it was previously! OW THE EDGE! We learn this week that mages have a rough 30 hour period to survive between each of their magic pills or else they fall apart, melt, and die similarly to the girl we witnessed in the previous episode. The show paints this (unsurprisingly) as a rather painful way to die so I’m sure this is something we’d like to avoid.
Time is ticking though – a rather convenient (or inconvenient, depending on how you look at it) fire destroys their home and the last of their supply of pills – of which they only had about 6 left anyway. Worse, our favorite cripple had hers yesterday, so she’s very much on the verge of dying. She’s not upset about the fire and wishes to be killed rather than to “melt away”, but our MC hatches a plan to raid the facility for more of them.
It’s interesting how our MC isn’t such a dolt in this show. It’s nice to know you can rely on him to do more things than “act instinctively” and “get into danger and have Kuroneko bail your ass out”. I was also impressed when he memorized the bar code signature on the pills and thus recognized where they would be from. Sure, normally this would be a cheap writing deus-ex machina but something felt very genuine about it here. The show continues to evoke a feeling of near horror and helplessness in every situation.
This episode also introduced a ranking system to the mages. It apparently goes from AAA to C. Our heroes, unfortunately, are B ranked and a AA rank has been stationed at the facility. This is the horrible-why-do-I-like-this shonen tendencies shining inside of me but I freaking love it when ranking systems are introduced. Something about numbers and quantifying strength is so exciting, I wonder why?
Our heroes have no home and now they’re up against someone way out of their league. This episode ended with an ambigious “Someone got cut up and it looks like it’s Kuroneko but maybe it’s someone else haha maybe they’re all fine and the bad guy got sliced up – we won’t tell you!” kinda ending. Hey, you know the one.
It seems to be popular to bash this show on /a/ but I’m convinced it’s simply because they hate elfen lied. Honestly, I’m enjoying every bit of it so far, especially considering it took an “on paper” very, very typical plot but handled it with extreme proficiency.
