ZENSHU.

Episode 3

We all knew this was coming sooner or later: Natsuko has finally changed the world of A Tale of Perishing enough that her knowledge of the plot is no longer reliable. Thanks to her intervention, a funeral and a famine become a joyful harvest festival and ball (much like the famous scene in Record of Lodoss War), a damsel in distress finds her agency, and Unio is alive and present to hit on every attractive woman present, regardless of species.

A sizable portion of the episode is spent on letting Natsuko's curmudgeonly personality bounce off of those around her, especially Unio and the newcomer Destiny. While the people I watched the episode with liked the zany comedy, almost Looney Tunes-esque in its slapstick physicality, I have to admit that it made me edgy. It reminded me too much of Astro Note, Kimiko Ueno's most recent original series. Astro Note, like ZENSHU., drew heavily on nostalgia and relied on referencing older series – the works of Rumiko Takahashi as compared to Showa Era fantasy and science fiction, with a broad cast of characters inspired by previous work. It was also disastrously poorly paced and failed to actually do anything with that nostalgia – a B- series through and through. I want better for ZENSHU., and the idea that it may follow the same path as a series that I fell out of love with makes me worry.

But, that's a problem for future Caitlin to discuss about future ZENSHU. In the here and now, a mystery has finally been cleared up! In the first two episodes, Natsuko would flash back to a scene in A Tale of Perishing of Luke mourning over the body of a pink-haired woman clad in bikini armor. A lot of people assumed that was Unio, but in a series like this, I figured two things: that they wouldn't break color-coding by giving a blue-maned unicorn a human form with pink hair, and that in a movie with a name like that, there would likely be more than one character death. Turns out that girl was not Unio at all – she's the mayor's daughter, Destiny.

In the original A Tale of Perishing, Destiny was both Luke's love interest and the source of a lot of the party's misfortune as she stumbled her way into situations that she needed to be rescued from over and over. You know, the kind of empty-headed-damsel plot device that frequently plagues lazy fantasy. Originally she and Luke met at Unio's funeral, where she comforted him in his grief. Now she's here at the harvest festival, excited to make the acquaintance of a novel figure like Natsuko. She's exactly the character you'd expect in such a role: cheerful, empathetic, clumsy, and empty-headed enough to do things like get her loincloth caught in two heavy doors, spoiling the heroes' plans. She's also engaged to Gary Oldman from The Fifth Element because he promised to build an orphanage if she did.

One thing becomes clear in this episode: Natsuko can no longer rely on her knowledge of the story to predict when the Void will attack. She assumes they're safe at the festival, but then a Void monster makes its way into the city that wasn't supposed to show up until much later. It's unclear if she knows who let the monster in since it does connect to something that happened in the story, even if the timing is wrong. It seems like the Memmeln or the other elves are up to no good – presumably she'd be aware of that, but if she is, she's not saying anything yet. She's unwilling in general to talk about the future; after all, a movie with a title that involves the word “perishing” seems unlikely to have a happy ending. Even if that future can be prevented, how can you tell someone that you know their world is doomed? Especially since Natsuko doesn't seem to have fully internalized the effect she's having.

The episode comes together at the climax when to combat a lone but powerful Void Monster, Natsuko draws Serval Mask, a clear parody of the iconic anime wrestler Tiger Mask. Naturally, Serval Mask uses wrestling moves to take out the enemy. But the truly delightful part isn't just the obvious reference. Suddenly, Destiny's motivation to marry Gary Oldman to build an orphanage makes sense – in the original manga, Tiger Mask was a heel who decided to become a face because of a letter from a little boy at the same orphanage he grew up in. In the decades since the manga came out, there have been dozens of mysterious donations to group homes across Japan from “Naoto Date,” Tiger Mask's real name.

Destiny is so inspired by Serval Mask that she decides to don a mask of her own and take orphanage-building-matters into her own hands, rather than sacrificing herself with a predatory marriage. She's also noticeably more muscular in her new look than she was, her new internal strength matched by external strength. She's still silly and ditzy, but her sense of drive will make her much harder to take advantage of… and she won't follow Luke around to make trouble for the party or to drive him to madness with her death. Turns out, empowering and educating women makes life better for everyone!

Despite the uneasiness I felt around the sillier moments of the episode, I can see that ZENSHU still has things to say about narratives and our relationships with the stories that made us. We're only a quarter of the way through the season; why worry about something that has yet to pass? The future can still be changed.

Rating:

As an aside: do yourself a favor and watch the Italian Tiger Mask opening. It's the only thing related to the series I'm familiar with outside of general cultural osmosis, and it brings me an incredible amount of joy every time.