Sakuna: Of Rice And Ruin

Episode 3

Sakuna continues to chug along, as our titular goddess and friends are still trying to figure out how to adjust to their new life. Unfortunately for her, that's much easier said than done as farming life proves to be more of a challenge than she expected—and her new companions prove to be less than helpful. Fortunately for the show, this was the push it needed after the slow start of the first two episodes—and while it still hasn't won me over yet, it's left me a lot more interested in where it's going.

Sakuna learned that the only real chance of survival she and the others would have on the island is for her to learn how to harvest and till the land herself. This leads to Tauemon giving Sakuna (and the audience) a lesson in the ins and outs of rice farming—from learning how rice seeds need to be sprouted before they're even planted into the ground, to her learning the hard way what exactly goes into making fertilizer. While the level of explanation here does come close to coming off like a game tutorial, it's done naturally enough to overlook that, and, not knowing much of anything about farming myself, it was pretty interesting to learn about how much prep work goes into managing rice fields.

However, while Sakuna starts to get more enthusiastic about farming, she's much less enthusiastic about all the extra work it gives her—as between farming and hunting, she's taking care of the group by herself. While Sakuna is still probably a little too haughty for her good, it's hard not to feel a little bad for her when Tauemon is still too clumsy to help her much with working the fields and none of them can have a decent meal because Myrthe keeps burning everything Sakuna hunts. Of course, I felt slightly less bad for her upon learning the reality that rice fields take a few years to be truly sustainable, Sakuna immediately tries to row herself off the island as quickly as possible, only to turn around once she learns how rough the seas are. Terrible of a move as that is, it's still pretty hilarious. And now that Sakuna knows she has no way out, she has no choice but to put more faith in her new companions—who end up proving to have more talents than she gave them credit for

As it turns out, while Tauemon isn't much of a farmer, he is a good negotiator and convinces the Ashigumo living on the island to let them use one of his fields. Meanwhile, Myrthe shows that while she's not much of a cook, she does at least know how to preserve food, meaning they'll have something to sustain themselves in the long run. Even the kids who otherwise spent their time dodging any real responsibility at all show they have some good handiwork skills by repairing Sakuna's tools and making her a new hat. This doesn't immediately solve their problems with working as a group since they're still bickering here and there but they are getting there—and the episode ends with them all bonding over Tauemon teaching them a song about rice planting. It's not the most exciting conflict but seeing Sakuna and the others slowly sprouting the seeds of both their rice fields and their potential makeshift family was a better time than I expected. For now, it's still hard to tell how much the show is going to get out of all that but there is more potential here for a good story than the first two episodes left me with. So with any luck, it'll all result in a good harvest.

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Sakuna: Of Rice And Ruin is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.