originally posted at https://canmom.tumblr.com/post/163675...
God this story is long. I think I need to pick up the pace a bit.
Gohda is closing up the house. It’s pretty spooky offers a semi-serious prayer to Beatrice to go easy on him - not yet knowing it’s murder o’clock.
He hears a sound in the kitchen, and when he goes there, discovers the pressure cooker rattling despite the absence of flame. When he taps it, it stops.
He has a bit of a freakout.
This is a concise expression of the thesis, also espoused by Battler etc. The witch side is the antithesis. What will the synthesis be? (Apologies for not actually understanding dialectics at all still… I’m a poor sort of Marxian lol.) [note from future Bryn: yeah Marxian dialectics don’t do the whole thesis antithesis synthesis thing, you’ll get there though]
When he opens the pressure cooker, it’s empty. So he closes the pot, expecting it to make no further sound.
So then limbs start coming out of all the pots. The limbs turn out to belong to the Seven Sisters of Purgatory. They waste little time killing Gohda. Then, they go to find Kumasawa. She turns out to be in the rose garden. The Sisters attack… only to find she’s protected by a blue shield, at least per the animation. (Sayo’s shield was red.)
Is anyone in this house not secretly a magic user?
Kumasawa asks them to get ‘that child’. Could she mean Beatrice, Bernkastel or Lambdadelta perhaps?
Beatrice and Ronove arrives on the scene. Ronove says he was sure Kumasawa would ‘awaken’. Is that what Sayo and Kanon did in the previous episode?
Kumasawa is apparently on familiar terms with Ronove and Beatrice.
WHAT.
So silver!Beatrice is… Kumasawa of all people?
Actually, Kumasawa’s kindly manner is not at all unlike silver!Beatrice. But what a confusing turn of events!
OK, new (magical) hypothesis: Kuwadorian predates Kinzo’s mansion. Gold!Beatrice grew up here, mentored by silver!Beatrice, and at some point Kinzo came to the island and encountered her where she offered him the gold. Then all that body-swapping stuff happened. Though that would not explain why Beatrice considered herself to have answered a summons from Kinzo.
Ah, but Ronove’s cryptic comment about Beatrice being among the creatures that came to the island in the distant past. Let’s say Kuwadorian was actually built around a thousand years ago, and it was then that the opening scene with silver!Beatrice took place and gold!Beatrice began her magic studies. Kinzo did not go to Rokkenjima at first, but summoned Beatrice from Kuwadorian. Later, he took up residence on Rokkenjima, and fenced in Kuwadorian to keep gold!Beatrice there? Hmm. Perhaps that came after her disembodiment attempt…
Let’s see what Beatrice has to say.
So, first, Kumasawa turns back into silver!Beatrice. She says her sleep has been disturbed, suggesting she put her witchy consciousness to sleep inside Kumasawa?
Twice the Beatrice, twice the fun.
Silver!Beatrice says gold!Beatrice needs to to respect the ways of the Jedi endless witches.
Gold!Beatrice refers to a ‘corrosion’ that is advancing and making it easier to call her minions, and that also broke the ‘seal’ on silver!Beatrice. Yes, says silver!Beatrice, and I’m very disappointed.
She tells Ronove to make the Seven Sisters of Purgatory step back, and he happily obeys. Ronove warns them they’ll be turned to dust if they try to get involved between the Beatrices, or rather, silver!Beatrice says, the current and former Beatrice.
Ex-Beatrice suggests she may rescind Beatrice’s name and title, though it seems the Wild Murder Party isn’t sufficent grounds. Beatrice claims to have far surpassed ex-Beatrice.
Time for a witch fight, I guess? We get a cool CGI.
Ex-Beatrice says she regrets surrendering her name, and will now take it back.
Beatrice gives a good old Sith speech. Then it’s time for all the VFX clips in the library to play. I think what happens is, Beatrice breaks ex-Beatrice’s barrier, ex-Beatrice teleports and counterattacks, Beatrice uses Double Team, hits back, and ex-Beatrice blocks with a new barrier?
Anyway meta!Battler steps in to express confusion. Ex-Beatrice appears in the meta world to reassure him. Battler is torn between asking her for help, and denying again that witches exist. (He also makes a sexually objectifying comment to remind us how heterosexual he is).
Back in the narrative, Beatrice acknowledges that ‘this level of magic’ isn’t touching ex-Beatrice, and if she stepped up, the collateral damage would ‘wreck the whole island’. So she summons her, uh…
Shoulder? What?
The Shoulder War Towers are portrayed by bad CGI. (As in, dodgy 3D renders, not just the VN term for a splash screen.)
I mean come on. Even I could do better than these graphics. And what’s with the meaningless numbers? (A note in the grimoire says a merute is a Nausicaa reference, which I should have caught, but I don’t remember it being used? In any case, it’s said to be about a metre.)
[Note from the future: come on, past Bryn, enjoy this goofy spectacle for what it is. This is great fun. But hey, here were my original reactions.]
Apparently these towers belonged to the ‘gods’, defending them from ‘heroes of antiquity’. So, neat I guess? It does seem a bit like Beatrice can just make up whatever shit she likes. Anyway, Beatrice floats between her two big war penises. They’re full of ballistas, apparently, and the windows all light up red. Beatrice is convinced this will destroy ex-Beatrice, but ex-Beatrice is not at all impressed as Beatrice turns this into a bullet hell shooter. She has her own tower.
This is turning into forum RP level of ‘nuh uh’. So this causes another tower to appear and fall down and block all the bullets with rubble. Then she summons the ‘Sons of Ivaldi’ to make her a spear (Gungnir), which turns things up to even more ridiculous levels.
Sure, the tower explodes and turns into a tower-sized spear. Let’s go with that. Who even knows anymore. Ex-Beatrice sends it flying at Beatrice with the ‘most ultimate and extreme precision’.
Are the Ushiromiyas noticing everything fucking exploding right outside their mansion?
In response, Beatrice summons a ‘Giant Solder Battle Line’. It seems a lot of dialogue can take place while projectiles are in flight.
This isn’t going to leave much in the way of a rose garden. The narration says these soldiers defended King Wilhelm and even blocked the rain. The only King Wilhelms that I can find are the two Kaisers who used that name in the 19th and 20th centuries, which seems rather too recent.
Anyway, Ex-Beatrice and Ronove say this is a bad move, because humans can’t defend against a godly weapon like Gungnir. So Beatrice summons Hephaestus to make her a shield. Apparently this conversation takes place while the spear is still in flight. Hephaestus grants Beatrice’s soldiers the Aegis Shield. Apparently Greek mythology beats Norse, and Gungnir is repelled.
I seriously can’t help but read this as taking place on some PHPBB forum. Some old-school invisionfree board with the one person who’s obsessed with Dragonball Z, someone else trying to be serious and grimdark, nobody prepared to admit their characters are anything less than the coolest shit in town.
Apparently following custom, Beatrice responds with a spear attack of her own. (Also did I mention this battle is turn-based for some reason?) She turns the Aegis into lightning spears, which the soldiers break into 18,900 thunderbolts. I feel like the author is aching to program this into a bullet hell game.
Ronove flatters the opposite side as previously, clearly hoping to be backing the winner.
But ex-Beatrice (Predecessor Beatrice, in the game’s terms) dodges this attack and appears behind Beatrice with Gungnir. She gets her Dvergar (the Sons of Ivaldi) to turn it into a hammer (specifically, the Iron Hammer of Heaven) for some reason. Apparently this hammer is very scary for giants, so they can’t block it. As a last ditch defence, Beatrice turns into a tower. I guess they ran out of illustrations. The tower is smashed, but she escapes. The narration says this impregnable tower is her last trump card.
OK then.
It turns out to be a giant horseman, ridden by the ‘god of war and death’, with a really big cloak. Ex-Beatrice declares a ‘smothered mate’.
And, the fight resolves with… no property damage whatsoever. Come on. Was this just a little roleplaying game they played?
Oh but wait. All the other summoned stuff has gone, but Beatrice has still been impaled.
So ex-Beatrice demands her name, title, and the power of Endless Witch back from the ‘too immature’ Beatrice, who will be returned to her ‘original form’.
And on an especially resonant note, the words she uses are the same ones she used for the vase at the beginning.
Original Beatrice says a strange thing…
And who was Beatrice, originally?
But then Beatrice is like, look behind you. And there’s a ‘creepy hedgehog’… which turns out to be her own body lacerated by ballista shots.
I guess if Beatrice were to be stripped of her powers now, it would be an unsatisfying sort of ending, but I honestly believed the plot was about to completely change direction from Rokkenjima murders.
Honestly? The level of anime bullshit…
The narration reveals ex-Beatrice was killed early on, and Beatrice immediately resurrected her with ‘Endless power’.
She leaves it to Ronove to deal with the bodies and create an ‘extraordinary locked room to torment Battler’. Once again, the idea that narrative!Beatrice and meta!Beatrice are distinct people is eroded.
Battler, meanwhile, is already just about won over by this Yu-Gi-Oh shit.
I mean, it would be easy to say ‘the narrator is lying’ or an equivalent.
Battler sarcastically makes fun of potential explanations in terms of robots, clearly not serious. Beatrice taunts him as he starts to cry.
Again with the acknowledgement of the genre. She suggest Battler secretly loves fantasy shonen anime battles, basically.
In short, the last episode provided the stick (casting doubt on your friends) and this one the carrot (fantastic anime battles).
We don’t see how Battler might answer Beatrice’s taunts, as the chapter ends.
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