Nanatsu no Taizai: Imashime no Fukkatsu – 15

「戦慄の告白」 (Senritsu no Kokuhaku)
“A Blood-curdling Confession!”

The way that the story forced Matrona and Diane to go to the battle festival in Vaizel is more than a little lazy, to be honest. The antagonists being directly responsible is fine, but Matrona’s children being the only humans who were apparently attacked by the the messenger demons, and for no special reason, is too convenient. I did laugh out loud when Matrona was beseeching the Giants’ great ancestor Drole, only for it to be revealed that Drole is actually a member of the Ten Commandments (Ono Daisuke). I love it! That’s the kind of coincidence that I can get behind. The type that promises a big juicy dramatic scene, with much weeping and gnashing of teeth. Bring it on!

The entire deal with Denzel (Nishi Rintarou) and his Pleiades of the Azure Sky reminds me of a passage from one of the first Discworld books I read. From Men at Arms:

“Something Vimes had learned as a young guard drifted up from memory. If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you’re going to die. So they’ll talk. They’ll gloat.

They’ll watch you squirm. They’ll put off the moment of murder like another man will put off a good cigar.

So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.”

It occurs to me that, if Denzel were as concerned with achieving the ends he claims to desire as he was with proving some dumb point, he would have killed Fraudrin while he slept. Or at least given it the good ol’ college try (I know a Ten Commandment isn’t liable to go down to a simple cut throat). If his goal is to prove that humanity can kill a demon, kill him. Don’t give the demon a chance to fight back. And I know that I’ve argued before that sometimes doing the right thing the right way is as important as doing it, and I stand by that. There are many grays in many situations. But if someone is a danger to others and you’ve already decided to kill them, just do it. Don’t give them a fighting chance. Bad things can happen when you do, like the villains figuring out how to escape. It’s a foolish mistake.

I’m not really annoyed by that by the way, so much as enjoying a good tangent. It does illustrate the risk of shounen tropes, and of embracing them too much. It was predictable that Fraudrin wouldn’t get killed here, and it would have probably been out of character for Denzel to try to gut him in his sleep. But it can still be annoying when the expected happens without even a perfunctory attempt at justifying it. I do really appreciate that Denzel anticipated that killing in front of Grayroad would be unwise, but how was it okay for Fraudrin to stab someone in front of the Pacifist? I had to look it up it was bugging me so much:

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Either who, the revelation that Gowther is the real Ten Commandment of Selflessness is certainly out of left field. It also feels repetitive, since Meliodas’ special thing was already that he’s from the Demon Clan and somehow linked to the Ten Commandments. I’ll wait to see what happens when rubber meets the road between the Ten Commandments and their long lost comrade, I suppose.

My SECOND novel, Freelance Heroics, is available now! (Now in print!) (Also available: Firesign #1 Wage Slave Rebellion.) Sign up for my email list for updates. At stephenwgee.com, the latest post: Forbidden Island, coast to coast.

 

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