Black Clover

Episode 64

Last week saw our heroes trapped by Witch Queen's insatiable thirst for power and perfection, tethered to crucifixes made of blood while Asta's inner-demon was being manipulated into slicing his friends open one by one. This show has gotten surprisingly metal in the span of a single episode.

This is clearly Vanessa's episode through and through, with the show returning to her past and fleshing out her relationship with Yami and the Black Bulls. When she was a child, she was imprisoned inside a giant birdcage by her mother, who had been hoping that she'd unlock a spell capable of controlling fate. Then years later, a teenage Vanessa met Yami, who burst in through her cage in the middle of one of his adventures and implanted the idea in her head that fate is something to brush off. This is the same sentiment Asta was thumping his chest over a few episodes ago, and while Asta has the uncanny ability to make anything sound ten times cheesier than it should, it's obvious that this is the real heart of the arc, and I appreciate legible set-up and pay-off wherever I can get it.

Words like "fate" and "destiny" seem to be falling out of vogue in the public consciousness these days, and stories that eschew them are seen much more favorably. We want to believe that our future is in our own hands, and that the future isn't nearly as set in stone as another person might try and tell us. Black Clover kind of goes half-and-half, where fate is something to turn your nose up at when it promises misfortune and something to grab hold of when it can offer a ray of hope. Vanessa's new power, the "Red Thread of Fate," takes the form of a cute little red mascot cat and can literally control the destiny of anything it boops with its paws, which is how she stops Asta from killing anybody and also drops the Witch Queen to her knees. The message of "choose your own fate" doesn't sound quite as applicable to real life when it takes the form of a fictional magic spell that appears just in the nick of time, but I'm actually a fan of deus ex machina when the surprise turn ties into the theme and tone of the story in an important way.

The tail end of this arc has turned out to be fairly strong, allowing all the moving pieces to finally fall into place. The Vanessa stuff is really good, though it feels like the kind of thing that we should have been exploring earlier. On one hand, it's effective to have the story keep rolling past its supposed climax, allowing the surprises to actually feel like surprises, but I think that just highlights how superfluous a lot of the Diamond Kingdom stuff ended up being. We entered the Witch's Forest with this tragic family drama at the forefront, and then it's almost treated like a twist when said family drama ends up being the whole point after all.

There's a lot to like here. I don't know how Vanessa's new powers are going to impact the future of this story, but I'm glad we finally got somewhere interesting with her. The Witch Queen is also a great villain—always incredibly menacing, but when things don't go her way, it's exacerbated faces galore. I think the way that we've been peeling the narrative's layers back and alternating between antagonists is a good idea that was fumbled in execution, but it looks like this arc has managed to save the best stuff for last.

Rating: B+

Black Clover is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Sam Leach records about One Piece for The One Piece Podcast and you can find him on Twitter @LuckyChainsaw