One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.
Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!
Before we even start talking about today’s actual chapter, turn your eyes up to that cover.
I’ve been basically just letting the whole Chibi Buggy Saga play out without much commentary in the headers of these articles (always cropped, to make them not look absolutely awful on desktop) but this one actually introduces a new character! A mysterious lady-pirate rocking a cowboy hat who seems to have taken in Buggy as her pet short king. Good for him, I guess?
As for the chapter itself, this is the first one in a while to basically be pure action. An honorable duel between the villainous Hawkeye and the heroic Zolo (eh, more or less, on both counts). I also want to highlight Zolo’s quip here off the top, because, yeah, I am also surprised that we’ve gotten to actually meet Hawkeye this early.
Part of me wonders; was One Piece being allowed to publish basically indefinitely not a sure thing yet this early on? That would make sense, we’re 50 chapters in, but given that as far as I know One Piece has always been a weekly, that only represents around 2 1/2 months of publishing time. Maybe it was not yet the utterly massive hit that it would later become, and Oda wanted to start bringing some plot threads to a close, or at least moving them closer to a conclusion, just in case? This is all speculation, if I’m wrong and 1P was a total smash basically right away feel free to correct me in the comments.
In any case, much of this duel is devoted to showing how much better at Sword Hawkeye is than Zolo. Zolo hasn’t really had a proper challenge in this series yet, and Hawkeye less gives him one and more completely wipes the floor with him.
Did I mention, he doesn’t use that big fancy cross-shaped sword across his back with the black blade to do it? No, he uses a little dagger. Like a really little dagger.
I bet people ship these two really hard.
Spoiler alert; he does not need anything bigger than the dagger.
This sends Zolo into a bit of a spiral, with Oda again deploying his technique of “fading” memory panels in and out to create a flashback that’s actively weaved with the manga’s present-tense. (It’s worth noting that alongside all the memories of his late friend to whom he promised to become the world’s greatest swordsman is a memory of Luffy recruiting him to his crew.) Zolo refuses to believe that they could possibly be this mismatched, but they are, and Hawkeye cuts his belly open to prove it.
Hawkeye is, at the very least, impressed by Zolo’s bravery as he manages to spit out that to him, death would be better than defeat. Hawkeye, out of a sense of honor, makes him stick to that, and the second slash he delivers to Zolo’s frame is a lot more lethal.
Tomorrow: How will the swordsman survive?!
One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!
Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
In its fifth episode, Call of The Night refocuses on its first thought as a creative work. Namely, that Ko is down absolutely awful for Nazuna, and is maybe a slight bit in denial about it. Just a smidgen. The series recenters the two’s dynamic here, as after several episodes of also palling around with Akira, she’s entirely absent from this one. Thus, it’s just Nazuna and Ko.
The episode actually opens in Nazuna’s apartment, where we learn that the vampire version of waking up in the middle of the night is waking up in the middle of the afternoon. (This is where the show puts its allotted few scant minutes of actual daylight per episode. I have noticed that in restricting its usage of normal sunlight so heavily, Call of The Night basically inverts the usual day/night dynamic of most anime of this sort. It’s a neat trick.) Here, she does things like miss a FedEx delivery, paly a video game she’s not really that invested in, and other such Normal Things for people who are teenagers or young adults to get up to.
She seems a bit lonely, underneath that teasing vampire facade, but perhaps I’m just projecting a touch. Most importantly, she visits a bath house, and from there the episode’s plot springs.
You see, she’s only in the bathhouse for a little while when she gets a beep from Ko. As such, she leaves in a hurry, and when she meets Ko, her hair is all down and soft-looking.
This causes Ko to become self-conscious of the fact that, oh yeah, this pretty lady who sucks his blood every night is attractive, and he kind of falls down the stairs of being awkward and being aware that you’re awkward but not really being able to do anything about it for the remainder of the episode. When Nazuna sinks her fangs into him, perhaps finding his squirming cute, she actually bites him so hard that he cries out in….well, I’ll leave cries out in what up to you, dear readers. Suffice it to say, this is the hardest that the series has yet leaned into the whole “bloodsucking as sex” metaphor.
Sometimes I feel obligated to try to come up with clever captions for these pictures, but I really don’t know how I’d make this more of a sex joke than it already is.
Would you believe the two end up at a love hotel by accident? Yes, just like that episode of My Dress-Up Darling from earlier this year, and I’m sure I’m neither the first nor last person who will compare the two. But while I found that episode to be one of MDUD’s weaker forays, this episode—and this part of it, in particular—is surprisingly nuanced. More or less; Ko is definitely attracted to Nazuna, he knows that, and she knows that. Apparently, drinking someone’s blood lets a vampire get a sense of their thoughts and feelings via taste. This is a weird and cool bit of worldbuilding tossed in here, perhaps as a metaphor for Nazuna’s being generally more experienced than Ko is.
More to the point; Ko feels bad about his attraction, because he does genuinely consider Nazuna a friend, and those feelings rest uneasily together in his mind; he feels like he’s, to quote the subtrack directly, doing something “immoral.” Nazuna, interestingly, waves the entire notion off. Be immoral, she says. That is what nighttime is for, after all. The only thing she cautions him against is “being lazy about [his] emotions.” Feel anything, but feel honestly.
It’s hard to know if the show herself will still be backing her up there in six weeks, but it certainly is for now. Later on, the topic of conversation turns toward other people whose blood Nazuna has sucked, and Ko, perhaps predictably, gets a bit jealous. (She tells him, in an apparent attempt to make him less so, that she also sucks women’s blood. One might call her bi-neck-sual, if they had a love of awful puns, and I very much do.)
Nazuna also reveals, upon taking Ko back to her apartment, that her job is actually how she meets most of the people whose blood she sucks. What is her job? Well, she is a “professional cuddler.”
Yeah, really. I did not know this was a thing either. Maybe it isn’t! Who knows?
What that seems to entail is a kind of non-sexual prostitution where she wears a slightly revealing nurse getup and gives people massages or the like while lying down with them but, pointedly, without actually doing anything beyond that. Frankly, I am a little torn here. Part of me thinks this is a bit of a cop-out. There isn’t anything wrong or immoral about sex work and I feel like that might’ve made more sense given the episode’s whole theme. On the other hand, it might make Ko and Nazuna’s relationship seem even dicier than it already is, so maybe it’s fine that they didn’t go that route. Who can say?
Nazuna proves herself to be pretty knowledgeable about massage work. (Watching this part of the episode honestly kind of made me want one myself. I do have pretty stiff shoulders.) She’s also, as we’ve long known, very adept at relaxing Ko, and just when she’s about to sink her teeth into him yet again, her door bell rings, and the episode’s denouement makes an abrupt swerve into cringe comedy.
The person at the door is one of her regular customers, and Nazuna is—or at least claims to be—far too tired from massaging Ko to actually help her out. So, Ko will have to do it in her place, using the knowledge Nazuna’s imparted to him.
Cue the credits!
Yes, on that particularly odd cliffhanger, today’s episode ends, promising next week’s will be perhaps a bit heavier on the wacky hijinks side. (Although honestly, who knows? This show is a bit hard to predict.) Overall, I like this episode. I know some folks find Nazuna and Ko’s relationship rather unpleasant, but for my part, I think the show manages a decent job of selling it as being good for both of them. This episode serves as a sort of back to basics, while also progressing that relationship along. The night keeps calling, why would Ko stop answering?
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.
Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!
The water around the ocean restaurant is a wooden graveyard as chapter 50 opens, with the splintered tatters of Don Krieg’s flagship littering the ocean.
This chapter is mainly about two things; for one, we see that yes, Nami really did make off with the Merry-Go and all the treasure on it. Most of Luffy’s meager remaining crew are willing to write her off, but not the captain.
To that, he sends Zolo and Usopp after Nami while he stays to help the ocean restaurant fend off the attack from Krieg’s pirates. But, before that can even be acted upon, the other person this chapter is about shows up. Someone I’m very surprised to see so early, given the nature of the foreshadowing just a few chapters ago.
I’d introduce the man, but that’s kind of the sum of it right there, isn’t it? “World’s Greatest Swordsman” is not a title that leaves a lot of room for interpretation. This is, in fact, the man Zolo’s been looking for, and it doesn’t take long for the two of them to start doing the whole “circling each other menacingly while talking shit” routine. The fight doesn’t actually happen here—that’s next chapter, presumably—but the tension is palpable. (And marginally homo-erotic. Par for the course for this sort of thing.)
As for Nami and her floating trove of stolen treasure, well, that’s a bit of a mystery for the time being as well. The chapter closes on this page, and this particular note. Much is in the air, just waiting to fall down.
One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!
Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.
Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!
Gonna just warn you ahead of time here, folks. Today’s chapter and tomorrow’s are going to be covered by a decidedly tired Tired Jane. What is the main distinction between regular and Tired Jane? Well, mostly, the tiredness. But a general laxness of grammar, tendency to fixate on minor details instead of actual plot developments, and an increase in profanity are some of the common symptoms. Just a heads’ up if the next two columns are a little looser than usual.
The main thing we learn in chapter 49 is that the guy who wrecked Krieg’s fleet is not just some random background character. No, he’s a specific background character.
This Hawkeye fellow seems pretty darn important. He’s both the man who wrecked Krieg’s armada and the guy that Zolo’s been after. (Or at least, Zolo seems pretty sure that he is.) There’s a fairly lengthy scene after this about the various dangers of the Grand Line that mostly rehashes things we already know or could easily infer.
Meanwhile, back on Krieg’s ship, his pirates return themselves to health, and he announces his plan to hijack the oceangoing restaurant and then return to the Grand Line. One of his crew objects to this plan, and is promptly dealt with in, ah, pirate-y fashion.
But before Krieg’s men can actually launch their attack….well, something happens. To be honest, the art gets a little difficult for me to parse here? It seems to be that Krieg’s flagship is suddenly rocked by an explosion or similar force, and promptly sinks like a stone, leaving the pirates to distribute themselves between the restaurant ship and Luffy’s ship. Except that’s not quite right either, because Nami seemingly takes the ship and runs as the chapter comes to a close!
What just happened? Questions for tomorrow, one supposes.
One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!
Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.
Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!
Battle shonen is a bit like wrestling. For instance; you can usually divide the characters firmly into faces (good’ns) and heels (bad’ns), the storylines are usually fairly over the top and dramatic, and everybody’s got a gimmick. Yesterday we learned that Don Krieg’s is that he’s a god damn cyborg. Today, we learn Zeff’s. Krieg is evidently knowledgeable about this kind of thing. (Though not about the Grand Line, as we’ll get to.)
But Krieg’s no fanboy. He uses this knowledge of Zeff’s past to make an interesting—and correct!—deduction, that he must still have his logbook somewhere. Naturally, he demands that, in addition to the ship.
Krieg leaves with the sinister warning that, after he feeds his crew, he’ll be back to take the ship and the book, and that anyone who’s not gone by then will be “buried at sea.” Rough guy, that Krieg.
But the chapter’s truly interesting revelations come from Gin, who is still a bit in shock that Krieg turned on the ocean restaurant’s cooks so quickly. (I’m not sure why, given everything we’ve learned about Krieg over the past few chapters. Maybe Gin is just a terrible judge of character, or maybe Krieg didn’t used to be like this. Who knows!)
Gin says that, yes, he and the rest of Krieg’s men were, in fact, at the Grand Line, but the things they saw there went well beyond anything we’ve seen in the story so far. Consider this a kind of far-foreshadowing, I doubt we’ll see the Grand Line ourselves ‘in person’ for many, many chapters yet. (I’m betting at least 100, absolute bare minimum. Even that’s probably very low.)
The chapter ends there, with Zolo’s knowing (?) / shocked reaction, and the threat of Krieg hanging in the air.
One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!
Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.
Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!
Here’s a thought I’d had but not directly articulated until just now. After the last two arcs’ main villains were, respectively, a clown with bizarre powers and a butler-pirate with cat paws, it seemed a little that Don Krieg, in this arc, seemed to just be A Guy. A hulking, towering figure for certain, but still just a man.
Well, in this chapter, we learn that he’s not, and it’s possibly my favorite moment of One Piece thus far? Definitely of the arc so far, at the very least.
But we’ll get to that, let’s start at the start. Krieg opens the chapter by demanding 100 full meals for every one of his still-living pirates. Of the cooks present, only Sanji—who declares that it’s a cook’s job to feed the hungry, not judge whether they’re good or bad people—is at all willing to do this, and the others do not take it terribly well.
Name a meal you’ve cooked that had people acting like this.
Patty then just whomps him over the head, taking matters into his own hands as he fires a fish-shaped hand cannon(?!?!) at Krieg. It does not do anything.
Because, you see, Krieg is actually a cross between a World of Warcraft character and a nautical Iron Man.
Yes.
But even this display of raw firepower can’t intimidate everyone. Quick shonen manga writing tip; what’s the quickest way to make a character seem like a badass? Have a more obvious badass show up, and then make it clear that this guy isn’t intimidated by that guy at all.
In this example, it’s Krieg who is “that guy.” Who’s “this guy”, then?
The head chef, obviously. Who straight up accuses Krieg and his men of cowardice.
Who, in the final panel of the chapter, Krieg finally puts a name to.
I do love this. Just from Krieg’s reaction alone we know that “Red Shoes” Zeff must have been, in his day, some truly hot shit. With a name like that, I’d guess probably the kind of pirate who turns up as the villain in movies even centuries later, but it’s probably too early to make any definitive calls. I’m sure we’ll learn more tomorrow.
Until then!
One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!
Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.
Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!
AHOY!
Yes, after a long time being—ahem—lost at sea, we’ll say, the column is back. In the grand scheme of how long this is going to take us, a week-ish off is not that much time to be away from One Piece, but I did miss the series while I was gone, and I’m excited to see where this whole thing with the Dread PirateDon Krieg is gonna go. So, without further do, we return to the ocean-going restaurant ship, Baratie.
As we do, we open on a fight between Sanji and the head cook / captain. The chef wants him gone; Sanji’s a lousy cook, flirts with women, and gets into fights. He has no reason to want Sanji on his boat, and because of that actively tries to get him to leave with Luffy. Sanji, of course, refuses. Although, even as he goes back to work, he spends a fair amount of time flirting with Nami (who is entirely willing to take advantage of his weakness for women).
I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen the noun “digestive” in a comic of any kind. Also isn’t it actually “digestif”? Whatever.
In any case, Luffy must spend quite a while washing dishes here, because shortly after this scene, he’s hauled off to do more chore boy work, and we promptly get perhaps my favorite transition panel in this entire manga so far.
This is how I feel whenever I get a letter from the government.
You can probably, and properly, guess that the thing that comes “out of nowhere” is Don Krieg and his flagship, flying a jolly roger flanked by hourglasses (which a pair of randos helpfully point out symbolizes that his enemies’ “time is up.” Thanks lads). However, not all is as it appears, because Krieg’s ship is in bizarrely bad shape.
Sanji (correctly?) guesses they were caught in a typhoon, and soon, Gin returns, quite literally propping his captain, who is on the brink of death, up on his shoulder.
The restaurant’s other patrons—and for that matter, the cooks themselves—are pretty unwilling to feed and house a notorious pirate. Over the course of a brief page of exposition, we get a sense of why. This dude is bad news!
It’s almost like he’s a pirate or something.
Sanji is more than willing to feed him, though. And surprise surprise, as soon as the dread pirate is finished chowing down on some white rice that Sanji whipped up, he decks the cook right in the face and says this to close out the chapter.
It’s good to be back.
One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!
Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
The show about a character associated with the color red is dead! Long live the show about a character associated with the color red.
Yes, in stark defiance of all logic and frankly even my own personal preferences, I have officially made the jump. I am going to be covering RWBY: Ice Quendom from this point forward instead of Lucifer and The Biscuit Hammer, which, frankly, I just don’t want to think about that anime anymore.
So, I won’t! By more or less coincidence, I covered the surprisingly great episode 4 of this very show just the other day here on MPA. As such, anyone who’s read that and my impressions article on the premiere is totally up to speed. Let’s get into it without any further delays.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this episode isn’t quite as visually consistent as last week’s. What is surprising though, at least to me, is that it also doesn’t mark the end of the whole “Weiss’ Nightmare” arc, indicating to me that Ice Queendom is willing to invest a fairly significant amount of time into this story. (Even if it ends next week, that’s still three episodes; as many as the combined premiere!) Even with the visual wonkiness, which reaches a nadir with a botched scene transition about 11 minutes in, in mind this remains an interesting arc, and I’m curious to see how it eventually ends.
Something we don’t get here is the teased Ruby / Weiss fight from the end of the last episode. In a bit of a bait-and-switch, Shion actually pulls Ruby out of the dream before much else can happen. Team RWBY regroups in the real world, spending the first 7-ish minutes of the episode planning their next move.
Pictured: Regrouping (most of image), Weiss looking hilariously dead (top left of image).
Notably, when Ruby notes that it really seems like Weiss genuinely doesn’t like her, her teachers (including Shion!) are rather dismissive of the notion, chalking it up to interference from the Nightmare Grimm. I do wonder who’s right here, or if it’s a 50/50 sort of thing. We see evidence for both ideas throughout the episode. (Most shows would take the easy way out by revealing Weiss to be a good person “deep down” all along and thus sidestep having to thoroughly unpack the rest of her emotional baggage in the real world, time will tell if Ice Queendom is “most shows” or not.) We also learn, on an unrelated note, that diving into a dream world requires you to have a cute little mummy doll made of you.
I was going to crack a joke about how these seem like real merch, but I think they literally might be? I think one of my younger brothers owns a Blake one. I may be misremembering.
For the second dive into Weiss’ dream, all three members of Team RWBY tag along. The only other thing of note that occurs in the waking world is the folks from Team JNPR (still hate that name, by the way) checking up on her. Jaun makes a….weird comment, before our heroines set off.
Hey bud? What the hell are you talking about?
In the dream, Yang and Blake find that unlike Ruby, Weiss’ subconscious has mostly made them stronger. Blake’s weapon has been reconfigured into some wild grappling hook thing (and she’s been given a cute redesign, too), and Yang is so strong that she can knock trees flat in a single punch. Ruby laments getting the short end of the stick, it’s a fun little scene that also seems to betray who among the team Weiss has a kind of begrudging respect-of-strength for.
The dreamworld is as bizarre and goofy-dystopian as ever. With the notable exception of the grim, repeated White Fang attacks on the ice trains (which seem to happen basically constantly and are definitely indicative of some deep-held, fucked-up stuff on Weiss’ part).
A more fun thing about this kind of setting is that it invites you to try to puzzle out every little detail and its significance. Why does Weiss’ subconscious feature, for instance, storefronts filled with road signs? Why is there a musical number at about the 13-minute mark, with notably wonky and off-model animation, where a caged Pyrrha sings about how lonely she is? (Okay, that one’s pretty easy to figure out, but still, what the heck?) What of the strange shadow people that toss themselves into a frozen fountain?
And what, also, of her mysterious advisor, a living candleflame that seems to constantly dangle a bizarre carrot on a string in the form of a place of “true rest” in front of her face? Is this character part of Weiss’ own mind, the Nightmare’s influence made manifest, or is there not even a meaningful distinction anymore? What is pretty obvious is that the “resting place” being a frozen coffin is pretty damn ominous, as are the thorned vines that encircle Weiss almost any time she’s on screen.
Eventually, Ruby and Yang hear an announcement over a PA system. An announcement that they are “missing” and need to be recaptured. They actually allow themselves to be captured, and to be returned to the living prison where the “Sillies” are kept so they can’t cause any harm. (Specifically, the door to the jail is alive. His name is Sleepy Klein. This is delightfully weird.)
Blake, meanwhile, notes that Weiss’ announcement doesn’t mention her at all, and wonders if there’s just not any version of her in the dream at all, although Weiss mentioning a “woman in black” to her dream advisors would seem to indicate otherwise.
Ruby and Yang’s “prison” is a lot more like their dorm room than anything, and it’s filled with things Weiss likes. Some of these inclusions are rather telling.
In it, the two find a mysterious “artifact” (a red chess knight), which Shion helpfully informs them could possibly help them reach farther into Weiss’ mind and wake her up. Blake finds one too, while infiltrating the inner fortress of Winter City in a more conventional fashion. She breaks Ruby and Yang out of their prison, but Yang stays behind so that Sleepy Klein won’t get suspicious.
The episode then ends much like last week’s; after Blake and Ruby discover a new, strange part of the palace—a vast, spacious hallway lit by purple lanterns—Weiss discovers and confronts them, again an obvious setup for a fight next week. This time, though, she seems to have much more of an issue with Blake being there than Ruby, because her final comment in this episode is pretty straightforward about how she, or at least this particular part of her, actually feels about the ‘B’ of Team RWBY.
And on that note of extremely blunt bigotry, we cut directly to the credits!
It’s a little hard to know how to take all this. Weiss is, pretty obviously, a genuinely prejudiced person, and it’s not like it’s not worth exploring how she deals with that and, presumably, eventually rids herself of those notions. But even if “hatred of fantasy beast people = racism” wasn’t already a very difficult, if not impossible, metaphor to make work well, the extremely abstract approach taken here—with the dream world and all—might make it even harder.
What’s worse is that this arc, for all it does do right, is definitely going out of its way to paint Weiss as a victim, rather than as a perpetrator. The simple fact of the matter is that she is of course both. Being one does not excuse the other. (Note also how little of this arc has actually been about Blake so far, even though she’s the one who Weiss has this irrational bias against.) Some part of her does seem to recognize that what she’s doing is wrong, but her desire to “be worthy of the Schnee name” is overriding it, and she’s hurting people in the process. I would really like to see her have to actually deal with that and try to actively make amends somehow.
Of course, if Ice Queendom does simply take the easy way out and play the “Weiss was actually secretly a good person the entire time” card without any further development of the character, that will be disappointing. Strangely enough though, the fact that I’m even invested enough that I could eventually be disappointed is still a huge improvement over the premiere.
I think breaking down the places where the cracks show in the series’ writing is just the responsible thing to do, and it does legitimately bother me to see something trotting out this particular bit of hackery in 2022 (not that it’s ever really gone away. See Bright, infamously and somewhat recently), but on a moment-to-moment level, Ice Queendom is actually working a lot better now than it was during the premiere. (Which, to be fair, handled the Faunus stuff even worse, so maybe there’s a correlation there.) There is certainly more than enough room for Ice Queendom to go up from here, and I really hope it does. As it stands, this has gone from, frankly, a pretty bad show, to a solidly decent one. I would really love to see it get even better.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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