Ao no Exorcist Half Season Review 2

ARGHBLARGH I NEVER TIME THINGS RIGHT

HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW WHEN A SEASON ENDS AND THE OP CHANGES

GOD THIS IS SO STUPID

SO I WRITE A POST ON TIGER AND BUNNY AND NICHIJOU AND IT TURNS OUT THE OP DOESN’T CHANGE NEXT EPISODE

ok ok so then the next post which is this I’ll WAIT an extra episode because 25 / 2 = 12.5 rounded up = 13.

BUT EPISODE 13’S OP CHANGES

WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING

Anyways, stuff happens. Rin and Co. pass the Esquire/ExWire (seriously, what the fuck is an ExWire? It’s like, you have a wire, and now it’s not a wire anymore, so it’s an Ex-Wire?) test, which was concealed as a fake demon attack on the group. Apparently, all of them passed. Neuhaus, an instructor at the school, nearly kills Yukio and Rin for revenge on Satan, who killed his entire family, but stops due to logic/blood loss.

A black cat familiar, Kuro, realizes that Fujimoto has died and goes berserk. Rin re-tames her (using his head, though not to think) and Kuro becomes his familiar. The Earth King Amaimon, a son of Satan and thus both Rin and Mephisto (who is also a son of Satan)’s brother decides to play with Rin, who is utterly helpless against him. However, the black-hooded guy is actually Kirigakure Shura, a high-ranking Exorcist sent from the Vatican to investigate Mephisto, and Amaimon retreats. Shura, an apprentice of Fujimoto, decides to exterminate Rin, but Rin says some words and she becomes his mentor/teacher instead. The end.

Apparently, ExWires/Esquires in Ao no Exorcist can go on to specialize in five different classes – the Aria (who kills enemies by reading old books), the Doctor (who heals and shits), the Tamer (emo people who cut themselves), the Dragoon (people who use guns), and the Knight (people who use swords). Of course, you don’t have to stick to just one – for example, Fujimoto was proficient in all five classes. This feels so stupidly RPG, and also raises a few questions, the most important being how Dragoons or Aria existed before guns and old books. I mean, seriously, since so many holy things dealt with the Bible and such, there must’ve been like a hundred people as strong (with like thirteen people a hundred times as strong) as Fujimoto back in Jesus’s day. I mean, they were so strong that what they /wrote down/ was enough to scare demons, literally, to death.

Perhaps it was just that the times before Jesus had Assiah and Gehenna fused into one world, and everybody was sad etc. but Jesus, using his (literally, once again) Godly power tore the two dimensions apart, sacrificing his own life in the process. The more I think of it, the more believable (and badass) it gets…

Also, since the Gospels weren’t written in Japanese, what translation are the Aria using while they chant? Or is it something stupid like ‘the power flows out from our hearts’? I’m pretty sure that demons don’t understand every language in the world, and I’m also pretty sure they weren’t speaking Greek.

A true son of Satan

It wasn’t shocking at all when Shura revealed that Mephisto really was a demon who abandoned Gehenna to live in Assiah (weeaboo much). Perhaps it would’ve been better if they built up to that point, with Mephisto’s contact with Amaimon less brotherly. Shura and Mephisto talking to each other was especially entertaining – you see that both of them are obviously very uncomfortable, but they do their best to act like they aren’t to each other. There aren’t that many shows that have characters with deeper sides, though AoEx is barely on that line.

Though AoEx really is a slice-of-life school-setting show, the plot is moving at a steady pace. I thought that nothing really happened this last half-cour, but turns out there was a lot of plot/action to write about. AoEx’s tradition of a battle an episode has been doing pretty well so far – admit it, those battles are pretty awesome, even if there are a bunch of shounen words and talking and stuff like that.

I mean, Fujimoto says shounen things too to Rin, but it’s not the cheesy kind, it’s the badass kind. Really, if you look at Fujimoto’s eyes (without his glasses), the slant makes him look like a demon too. Maybe he’s also a son of Satan?

That would explain how he found Shura riding on that big giant dragon thing, which obviously wouldn’t exist in modern-day Assiah – he can travel back and forth through the Gehenna Gate, and inside Gehenna is where he found Shura. After all, to use a demon sword, you have to be a demon, right? That doesn’t really make sense, as Shura was the one who warned Mephisto that the Vatican doesn’t trust him because he’s a demon. So they trust her?

Rin in berserk-mode seriously looks like he’ll have horns grow out of his head at any moment. You don’t realize it during the first OP, but after Kuro’s introduced, you suddenly realize that there’s a black cat following him. Interesting, huh? I still feel sad for Paku and how easily she was cast aside :( BETTER RETURN LATER, YOU HEAR?!

It’s funny, even Paku trained harder than Rin did. Everybody else has some sort of speciality and trains to improve, but Rin just has that one special ability from when he was born and doesn’t train at all. It’s nice to see Amaimon and Shura beating the shit out of him to show him that he really needs to stop relying on his natural abilities and start working his ass off. He’s like Harry Potter with his natural ability for magic, but just like Harry Potter, I hope he actually learns and grows as a person. The character development in this show is really good – it’s not sudden, but gradually, Rin is changing. So is everybody else, really.

Izumo during the beach episode looked a lot like Kyouko – blue jacket, shorts, reddish hair, and that ponytail. Of course, dem eyebrows don’t have any resemblance to anything, though… (what the heck type of design was that) Even halfway through the beach episode you could tell what the ending was going to be. How? I will demonstrate with my NEET detective skills:

– There has been no new events in the first half of the episode:
-> This is a filler episode.
. Filler episodes are never more than one episode long.

– All of Rin’s attacks have been repelled.
-> There is not enough time to kill the squid in an epic manner.
. The squid must be dealt with in an alternative way.

Which must have been that the squid was actually a friend – after all, the squid wasn’t aggressive, it was just protecting itself. I have a feeling that fisherman guy is actually an incredibly strong Exorcist – perhaps he would’ve appeared later in the story, if this wasn’t an anime-only arc. Is this?

I find it ironic that Rin tells Shiemi “Don’t talk to demons!” in this episode. Y’know, Shiemi’s chest is rather smart, as now the producers force us to rewatch the previous episode to see how the fuck that was possible. Same with Shura.

Anyways, I now realize why conventional firearms won’t work, but Yukio can still shoot them – they’re filled with holy bullets, which are like bullets dipped in holy water, which is like God’s urine or something. I wonder if the bullets’ actual role is merely to pierce the body of the demon and then release an explosion of holy water inside, which would make bullets and swords have around the same ‘power’. Of course, the swords would have to be coated with holy water too…

Neuhaus is very, very shady, being able to understand the language of demons. Either that, or Amaimon is absolutely and impeccably fluent in Japanese, whilst still being interested in the Japan Mephisto loves, which he obviously hasn’t lived in before. Is this all because Fujimoto conquered Gehenna and brought it under tyrannical Japanese rule? That would make Satan more like a slave uprising leader and Fujimoto less like the good man we think he was.

It is nice to see that things are darker and broader than they might’ve been – there are a bunch of different factions, all with mysterious goals (the Vatican, Mephisto and Amaimon, even Fujimoto is very suspicious), and, uh, yeah.

The end.