Sengoku Youko

Episode 9

There are many ways for a writer to deliver necessary exposition, and one of my least favorite is when they introduce characters whose sole purpose is to tell the rest of the cast all the important stuff they'd have no reasonable way of finding out for themselves. You can dress that character up as a mystic, elder, or deity, but no amount of in-universe justification can outweigh how artificial it feels to have a seemingly all-knowing character waltz into frame and lecture us about the lore of it all. That's sadly what happens here with our still-unnamed Mountain Goddess, whose main personality traits are "explains stuff for the sake of the audience" and "mildly teases the characters while she does it" in total.

The stuff she exposits is, at least, valuable and interesting, even if I question why we needed to learn it here. Understanding the actual motivation of the Dangaisyuu's leader is nice, and it's pretty funny that it boils down to getting so unreasonably horny for a foxgirl MILF that he betrayed his entire organization and distorted its values from the inside just to pet those fluffy fox tails. It's even funnier to know that said foxgirl is Tama's mom, and from the long-lived katawara's perspective her mother's been cradle-robbing with a human half her daughter's age. Among those punchlines, there's an obvious parallel between Jinka's quest to become a katawara and continue living with his adopted sister versus Yazen's desire to make Kuzunoha human. The problem is that this info isn't immediately pertinent to the other half of this episode and its hyper-condensed training arc, so it feels superfluous, sapping desperately needed screen time from the more immediately essential parts.

Training arcs are a well-worn staple of shonen battle stories, and they're handy for developing characters in relative isolation. However, that approach takes way more time than Sengoku Youko has to spare, so we get a cliffnotes version for our main trio instead. Shinsuke has to overcome a big rock, Tama has to walk on water to escape a vast lake, and Jinka gets talked through his emotional trauma while fighting a character who's essentially just Yachiru from Bleach. Any of these could work as the base for something more complex, but since there's no time to develop them further, we rush to the conclusion for two of the three. Shinsuke at least got some good focus last week, so having his training be a simple lesson about thinking outside the box of brute force is fine enough, but with Jinka, it's a much bigger disappointment.

The pieces and ideas at play are fine – good, even, if they had the room to be explored naturally. Jinka coming to terms with both the sorrows and joys in his life to unlock his sealed power is exactly the turn his arc has been building toward. The sentiment that his desire to escape his hurt by becoming a katawara is his most inextricably human trait is profound. Yet the delivery lacks any impact because the whole sequence takes maybe two minutes, and amounts to a new character with no connection to him giving him a therapy speedrun. This should be a pivotal, emotionally compelling sequence for the audience as all the disparate parts of Jinka's arc come to fruition, but it falls terribly flat.

On the plus side, there are still some fun moments scattered across the episode. Tama's burning embarrassment at her mother's involvement is hilarious and adorable. The Tanuki striptease bit was already stupid enough to be funny, but having an unfazed Jinun cover Senya's eyes is just the right addition to put it over the top. Shinsuke's totes evil sword spirit begging him to stop whacking the blade against a solid rock is perfect. There's still plenty of charm to these characters shining through. I just wish the more dramatic moments didn't have to suffer.

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Sengoku Youko is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.