Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon - The Second Act

Episodes 12-13

Hey, Kirinmaru, there's already a red-headed royal who has “of the dawn” appended to her name. Get your own fancy title for episode fourteen! Especially since I suspect that not even the death of your sister, the somewhat confounding Zero, will shake you from your purpose…whatever that actually is at this point. Honestly, Kirinmaru snatching up the black pearl that holds Inu Yasha and Kagome prisoner in order to blackmail Moroha into fetching Akuru for him is the only action he's taken in one-and-a-half seasons that makes any real sense, although Zero's dying revelation that he hates half-demons because one killed Rion sadly does carry some believability, human (and demon) nature being what it is.

But yes, the big news for these two episodes is that Zero dies, freeing Rin from the silver scale curse and effectively ending Setsuna and Towa's mission. I think that episode twelve, which features Setsuna learning that her sister really shouldn't just off Zero as well as a trip through Towa's tortured (for a given value of the word) past, is the better done of the two, if only because the focus feels a little sharper. Episode thirteen is packed with so many events that it gives you the mental version of feeling like you ate too much: Towa fights Zero, Setsuna rushes to her side, the girls learn what really happened in the fire, Riku kills Zero, Zero saves Rin, Sesshomaru reunites with Rin after giving Moroha the pearl holding her parents, Zero reveals why her brother hates half-demons, and Kirinmaru blackmails Moroha, who is conflicted about reuniting with parents she's never met. (We won't speak of the flyover from earlier in the season.) That's a lot to cram into half an hour, and while much of it is important and has been a long time coming, there's really not enough time to do any of it justice. I feel like Towa and Setsuna perhaps deserve a resolution that's a bit more heartfelt, seeing as their partial estrangement has been a thorn in Towa's side from the start, and while Sesshomaru is hardly Mr. Emotion, his reunion with Rin also feels somewhat lacking. We're finally getting some serious emotional content here; please let us revel in the moment a bit more.

Actually, the most emotion in the episode seems to come from Riku as he kills Zero. That's interesting given his status as part of Kirinmaru; based on his actions, we have to wonder if Riku isn't truly representative of Kirinmaru's emotions. That could raise the stakes of the romance subplot with Towa, since it means Riku will have fallen in love with the thing (a half-demon) that his originator hates the most. I'm not going to hang onto much hope of that coming through, but it seems like a real possibility given Riku's tears as he stabs the woman who is, more or less, his older sister. If he only knew Zero as Kirinmaru's sister and Rion's aunt, it doesn't seem like the act would merit so much pain on his part; likewise his attachment to Rion can be read as a version of her father's feelings residing in Riku's body. Certainly it would offer an interesting series resolution were Kirinmaru to be taken out, leaving only Riku as someone who has the emotional capacity to resolve the original's hate with his love for Towa.

Love is something that Towa becomes more aware of in general over the course of these two episodes as well, with her flashbacks serving to remind her that Sota and the rest of the Higurashi family really do love her. She may not have had her (blood) sister, but she did have a family, and with that realization, she's in a much better position to move forward herself – especially since a reunion with her birth mother may cause some conflict given that she was raised by a different set of parents. (Or it would in a better-written story. Again, not holding my breath here.) This could be an issue for Moroha going forward as well, since she's faced with the very real possibility of actually meeting her own parents – assuming she does Kirinmaru's bidding of course. She tells Takechiyo that she sort of assumed that she never really had parents, which is bound to hit Kagome and Inu Yasha where it hurts, but that's oddly reasonable in light of how she's been living. Her reluctance to just break into the pearl comes from a much more grounded place than many of the actions in the series.

It's also going to be the basis of the next story arc, and hopefully it'll be an interesting one. And now with Zero's death, I will be forced to wonder why Zero, associated with butterflies, could spin webs like a spider for the rest of time.

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Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon - The Second Act is currently streaming on Crunchyroll, Funimation, and Hulu.