Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon

Episode 4

My thoughts on this week's episode of Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon are mixed, to say the very least, so before I rankle fans who have been enjoying these first episodes more than me, let me start with the positive: Moroha is great. She's just an adorable, spunky, charismatic little bundle of murder, and literally every single scene that she is in is elevated by her presence. She doesn't even need to be speaking to spice up the proceedings, since her goofy facial expressions alone can steal the scene from her two cousins. Pretty much every episode of Yashahime is going to get a bonus half-star grade courtesy of Inuyasha's mischievous spawn — unless the show makes the catastrophic mistake of not giving her screen time whenever possible.

Unfortunately, I can't entirely rule out such a ludicrous possibility, because with “The Gateway to the Past”, Yashahime continues to make storytelling decisions that I just cannot wrap my head around at all. One of the benefits of being a sequel series is the freedom to do virtually anything with the characters and setting of the beloved original property. The possibilities aren't exactly endless, since audience expectations and the presumable input of authorial voices like Rumiko Takahashi's have to be taken into account, but still, there's an awful lot of room in the sandbox to play in. Time and again, however, Yashahime fumbles its opportunities with mistakes that aren't just frustrating; they're completely avoidable.

At the end of last week, it seemed like the girls' quest to figure out a way back to the feudal era of Japan was going to be a story that would come with some amount of difficulty and conflict. This would have at least justified how the show went so far out of its way to clumsily transport Setsuna and Moroha out of their native element and into the future, since it playfully inverts InuYasha's premise by having its characters be fish out of water in the modern day. Except, no, that isn't a thing at all, since Moroha just ends up wheedling the secret of time-travel out of the Root Head Demon with almost no effort, and she doesn't even have to skip her calisthenics sessions with the local elderly folks!

It's a lame resolution to be sure, but fine, whatever — we were bound to get back to the past eventually, since the first episode showed the three half-demon princesses doing just fine in the Feudal Era. At the very least, I figured that the show would do something interesting with Kagome's family meeting her teenage granddaughter for the very first time, and all of the questions that must come from that, right? I mean, Moroha flat out reveals that she doesn't even really know her mother, which has to be a major red flag for Sota, and Mom, and Grandpa, who must want to know why and how Kagome vanished from her own child's life.

Nope! We get one schmaltzy scene where Mei rambles on about how much she loves all of her new sisters to try and convince the audience that there is any emotional weight to Towa, Moroha, and Setsuna's leaving, but it doesn't stick. The girls have been living in the present day for weeks, but it may as well be the day after Moroha and Setsuna arrived, and the Higurashi clan treats this potentially permanent separation as if they're dropping their kids off for a trip to summer camp. I know that Kagome's own excursions to the past were never treated as especially serious by her family, which also always bugged me, but at least Kagome had enough back-and-forth time between her two worlds for that to make a little bit of sense.

All of these issues are the result of rushed and sloppy storytelling, but there's another issue that is more deeply rooted in Yashahime's premise, and it's one of conflict. I've outlined before how I think this story's conflict could have been drastically simplified to the show's benefit, but we've got to work with what we have, and Yashahime has done a very poor job of communicating the stakes and conflicts of the plot it has decided to run with. Four episodes into a series, we should have a clear idea of what our heroes' motivations are, and how they can accomplish them. Towa has the most straightforward goal, which is to find the Dream Butterfly and restore Setsuna's memories, but it's really hard to get invested in that when the two sisters have virtually no chemistry or emotional connection, and Towa doesn't exactly have the kind of star-charisma to carry a story on her own.

Setsuna is very much her father's daughter – cold and detached to everyone around her – and while she's starting to open up a tiny bit, I still can't tell you much of what she wants, or why we're supposed to care about her outside of being Towa's sister. Moroha's past is equally shrouded in mystery, and her lackadaisical approach to life is a rule of thumb. This makes her a lot of fun as a character, but she's not a particularly great heroine yet, and it feels like she's only here because of not having anything better to do.

So, newcomers to the franchise are likely going to have a much more difficult time latching on to the three Princesses than the likes of, say, Inuyasha and Kagome. What about the old guard, the fans who have come to Yashahime with decades of appreciation for the franchise under their belts? I'm hardly a veteran, but I'm certainly much more invested in the whereabouts of &TEAM “Sit, Boy!” than in what the Next Generation Trio are currently up to, and Yashahime has struggled to even make proper use of that mystery, which should be the easiest sell of all. We've gotten plenty of little hints and teases about Sesshomaru and the like, but the issue is we still haven't reached a point where Towa, Setsuna, and Moroha either know or care about the fates of their parents.

Obviously, we want to know what the deal is, but it takes until the girls travel through the Tree of Ages for their story to crossover with their progenitors'. This much needed (but still very clunky) exposition dump comes from the tree itself, who has taken the form of Kikyo, on account of the arrow that she shot into Inuyasha all those years ago. Here, we learn that back when the Great Dog-Demon (aka Grampyasha) ruled over the West, the Beast King Kirinmaru ruled over the East. Now, Kirinmaru is back to do evil bad guy stuff. The Tree of Ages tells the Half-Demon Princesses that they must defeat Kirinmaru, and in doing so, destroy Sesshomaru, who has allied with him. Setsuna protests that she isn't about to do the tree's dirty work, and that she doesn't give a damn about her father one way or the other. Towa doesn't want to kill her father mostly on the principle of the matter, since her dad is Sota, for all intents and purposes. As for Moroha, well, she's still here! Just hanging out. Doing Moroha things.

I'm not a fan of introducing the ostensible villain of the series through boring exposition rather than, you know, seeing Kirinmaru actually be evil, but you know what? I'm just glad that our protagonists have some meaningful path to reuniting with at least one of the Brothers Doggo. It also helps that the final scene reveals that this whole convoluted mess of a plot is being partially engineered by Sesshomaru himself, who is in cahoots with the Tree of Ages. An older Rin is in suspended animation within the tree, you see, and Sesshomaru's grand plan is to do…something…to revive her. I think? The details are still Big Mysteries that Yashahime is taking its sweet-ass time to solve, but it's the closest Yashahime has come so far to indicating that it might have an interesting story to tell. I'll take what I can get.

Rating:

Odds and Ends

• This review is already way too long, so I'm going to wait until Rin is officially revealed to be the mother of Towa and Setsuna to unpack anything on the subject. It's a good thing that there is nothing unsettling or controversial at all about the very idea of Sesshomaru taking Rin on a visit to the Dog Pound, that's for sure. No sirree, this definitely won't be the cause for a bunch of heated fandom arguments to start up all over the internet!

• Finally, does anybody want to take bets on how long Yashahime is going to keep using those annoying pop-ins to remind us of every character's name and relationship? It can't keep up for the entire series…right?

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.

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