Attack on Titan #35 – After teasing us for several episodes, Attack on Titan is ready to give us a look at the implied other place beyond the walls — but with one very important footnote, mumbled offscreen, which puts an entirely new spin on things.
Ymir was once a street kid in that other civilization, until a cult picked her up and made her the representative of their deity. When the cult was broken up, she was punished along with its leaders by being dumped with the walls, forced into the form of a Titan.
For sixty years.
Ymir isn’t from a different faction within the people who sent Bertholdt and Reiner to break the walls, she’s from a different time. How was she able to calculate how long she was in hibernation, though, if she hasn’t been back home? There would have to be some shared form of timekeeping or knowledge of historical events for her to work from among Eren’s people. And there is one sign of a shared heritage of some sort: the cult leader’s outfit looks remarkably similar to that of the priests who appear to Know Too Much about the Titans.
If that isn’t a big enough revelation, Ymir’s story and the ensuing conversation indicate that someone becoming a Titan for the first time has to eat another person before they change back. Only there has to be more than that to it — Eren definitely hasn’t been shown eating anyone, and plenty of rampaging Titans have stayed in Titan form after eating multiple people.
(Crunchyroll — FUNimation — VRV — AnimeLab — Wakanim — VVVVID — Anime on Demand — bilibili)
Alice & Zoroku #9 – The rest of Sana’s day goes pretty well. She learns that sleepovers are a thing and gets to hang out with her friends from the lab and chatter about all the fun things she’s learned since joining the Kashimura household. But she is still deeply shaken about suddenly being cut off from Zōroku and anxious about any time he spends out of her sight. So she comes up with a plan. Not a very good plan, but hey, she’s a very young semi-alien still trying to get the hang of being human.
Meanwhile, Ayumu’s next day goes like this: First she listens to her best friend making an eerily calm speech explaining that she has concluded she is a danger to society and wants Ayumu to go away forever. Then she goes to Harajuku and is confronted by a floating disembodied grinning cat head that talks. Then she falls down a magic trapdoor and into a pocket dimension where nothing makes sense.
So it’s Ayumu who will get to play the part of Alice in Sana’s Wonderland, until either she can talk some sense into Sana or the adults manage to catch up with what’s going on. This may take some time.
(Crunchyroll — bilibili)
The Eccentric Family 2 #9 – The title of this episode is “The Various Successors”, and so there are. Benten is all but recognized as Akadama’s heir when he appoints her to certify the tanuki election in his place. So Yasaburō is called on to maneuver the Nidaime into accepting the position instead, which works a little too well. If Benten and the Nidaime are about to come to blows, there may not be much of a tanuki community left to elect a leader for.
There’s also Yaichirō and Kureichirō, supporting each other as the new heads of their clans. (If you think you see a theme in their names, you’re right; the Shimgamos and Ebisugawas have both named their sons by starting with a common character, adding a number and a counter for “son”. In the original Eccentric Family, we learned that Kinkaku and Ginkaku’s real names are Kurejirō and Kuresaburō.) And Yaichirō as the next leader… maybe. I have a gnawing suspicion that Yasaburō’s tengu management skills are eventually going to make him the obvious candidate.
(Crunchyroll — ADN)
Rage of Bahamut: Virgin Soul #9 – Nina and Kaisar are put to work with their respective genders in the enormous sprawling Generic TV Mine somewhere…under the lake, I guess? Which kind of defeats the purpose of putting the prison on an isolated island, doesn’t it? Then again, the guards didn’t see any problem with having one guard per convict and both guards’ hands busy with steering a boat when transporting prisoners, so Charioce’s government just seems to be bad at security all around. The guards in the mine don’t even seem concerned when Nina starts flaunting her hellacious strength, so either there are some major magical countermeasures for prisoners like her or…yeah, I’m just going with “bad at security”.
Not that our heroes are much good at security either, what with the aforementioned flaunting of super-strength. And the fact that when Joan of Arc and Nina decide to plan an escape, every prisoner in the area knows it immediately and no one can keep quiet about it.
Two interesting points are buried beneath this lake of incompetence. One is that although Favaro goes into lots of detail about his time with the dragons, he manages to avoid saying why the Onyx Guards were hunting for him. They are not the sort of force you send after just any random bounty hunter who happens to break a law. I’m guessing Favaro’s last bounty was someone very important to Charioce.
The other is that Joan is certain she had a son, and Nina is equally certain she was dealing with a girl. So either El/Mugaro has a widely changeable appearance, or Azazel was able to cast the world’s best disguise spell.
Kado: The Right Answer #8 – The problem with setting up a story to be about a hyper-competent guy is that everyone around him needs to be a certain kind of incompetent to give him room to shine. The further problem with addressing either gender balance or the need for a love interest in such a story by making the next-most-prominent human character female is that now you have a woman whose entire reason for existence is to be wrong and make mistakes and be constantly corrected and rescued and generally patronized by the male lead.
At least Tsukai is being spared a hamfisted romance plot, but the show can’t help pulling out the old “invites a guy over so everyone must assume he’s her fiancé” routine. This gives her father and brother a chance to remind her that no matter how successful she is in her career, she will always be defective in every aspect that defines womanhood in Japan. Ha ha, humor!
Tsukai’s not-a-date with Shindō is supposed to convince him to stop zaShunina. But he doesn’t try to interfere with the sansa broadcast, and it looks like zaShunina will be unveiling another new gadget next week, so…fail? She did introduce some doubt, but it looks like all that’s going to achieve is friction between Shindō and zaShunina.
