Black Clover

Episode 76

The Royal Knights exam continues, valiantly plodding along without much excitement to offer.

The focus this week is on Rill Boismortier, the captain of the Aqua Deer squad. It's been bugging me how unclear the show has been about who can and cannot be a part of the exams, since the other characters are mentioning how odd it is to have a captain in the game (Rill initially entered with a disguise), and the Wizard King just shrugs it off in the name of good fun. Maybe it's just a given that captains will be in the Royal Knights, but that's never explained to us. I also thought it was odd that there haven't been any other Purple Orca members around to notice that Xerx is an imposter, so I'm trying to understand why there are so few in-story explanations to rationalize the tournament's conveniently curated cast.

Rill is the only important character fighting this week, so there isn't much progress being made. Thankfully, this episode breaks up the monotony somewhat by making the centerpiece a flashback. Rill is a happy-go-lucky young man, the youngest of the Magic Knight squad captains. He's the wielder of painting magic, and his backstory features him as an artist prodigy who hurts everyone around him in his myopic obsession to express himself. It wasn't until his butler Walter slapped some sense into him that he started to look at the world around him more carefully, and then Walter suggested he pursue a life as a Magic Knight for some reason.

I Love Me some good art-about-making-art metaphors in Shonen Jump. I think it's an inextricable part of the format, where you've got all these writers and artists telling stories about ambition and competition in a magazine that literally pits them against each other. Rill probably isn't a perfect example of this idea, but a storyteller doesn't write "misunderstood artist destroys everything around him" without trying to convey something. That being said, Rill's story doesn't make any goddamned sense. The anime seems to be making it worse by adding to Rill's relationship with his mother, where she's so tormented by his destruction that she wishes he was never born, but it's okay because when he finally leaves to pursue knighthood, he leaves behind a painting of her smiling—the way he sees her in his heart. It doesn't seem to affect their relationship either way.

I'm trying to figure out how any of these ideas are supposed to connect. "If you wish to be understood, then please try to understand others." Perfect. Got it. That's a really easy theme to work with, and it looks like the desired arc is for him to finally make friends as a Magic Knight, but there's too much other weird baggage on top of that. Walter doesn't do a good job justifying the connection between making art and being in the Magic Knights, and it's strange that Rill is already a captain by the time we meet him, despite not having made any friends in the interim. Part of Rill's childhood angst is that he keeps painting and it just doesn't come out right, so how is he a prodigy if nobody understands him and he doesn't even like his own art? I have questions, Yūki Tabata.

So Rill finishes the match almost single-handedly, somehow playing the part of the laid-back wunderkind that amazes everybody with his natural talent. I feel like there's a lot of emotional exploration missing for his character, but at least the flashback gives us something interesting to talk about. The beginning phase of this tournament has been a lousy drag, and I'm hoping something more fun can happen sooner than later. (And no, the Osomatsu-san cameos don't count.)

Rating: C

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