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「友よ、なぜおまえは……？」 (Tomo yo, Naze Omae wa ……?)
“My Old Friend, Why ……?”
As Kumo Desu ga, Nani ka? gets closer to the finale, it begins its initiative to wrap up its main conflicts. More specifically, it shifts attention away from Hugo as we are now contending with Sophia and Ariel planning to mow through the elves and the elves alone.
It was pretty funny that, with all the build-up they gave to Hugo for being an underhanded warrior imbued by demonic energy, he went down fast. As soon as Shun entered into the picture with a one-on-one fight, Shun daydreamed through the entire fight as Hugo got the tar beaten out of him. For anyone that was fed up with all the big talk and tall tales that Hugo was dishing out, it was a treat to see him get kneed in the gut as Sophia sasses him about suddenly wanting help for his one-on-one fight.
With Hugo being revealed to be a pawn for Sophia to use to get closer to slaughtering the elves though, it brought perspective to the idea that this is ultimately part of a larger feud between demons and elves that sees reincarnations more or less like an inconvenience. At the moment, details are still fuzzy about what either army wants to get out of the battle, or how it factors into the prophecy about the reincarnations being removed.
Your mind defaults to the idea of the demons being the worst, but the elves in Kumo Desu ga, Nani ka? are consistently unsympathetic. It makes it easy to overlook the bad that the demon army provides to the world when Potimas is consistently plotting behind everyone’s backs and is now currently in command of a mecha-elf army. Kyouya solidifies this notion with how baffled he is that anyone would side with the elves knowing how shady they’ve been since everyone was reincarnated. Even though he’s just as sketchy, it’s hard to root for anyone in this back-and-forth when the only characters that seem to be on the right side of history are Shun and his friends, and they’re not even certain what side they’re fighting for.
But with how much of the episode was built around Shun fighting Sophia in a drawn-out and one-sided fight, it was a bummer to watch. The episodes without Kumoko tend to be, but ever since the battle between Shun and Hugo’s armies began, the stink of Millepensee’s CGI wafted even more into the air. It’s simple to tune out with Kumoko since she’s just as animated as Yuuki Aoi’s performance. But when CG Shun and CG Sophia are crossing swords, it’s a painful reminder Millepensee still has a long way to go to create 3D animation that replicates the 2D anime style as well as Guilty Gear Strive or Dragon Ball FighterZ.
………………………………… you know I may have realized why they got the director of the CGI anime Berserk on here. -_-
Yes, sorry for you to realise the tragic directing style that gives you motion sickness & splitting headaches.
Then again, there’s Ex-Arm so I don’t know what I would if I were to be force to choose which of these two anime directors I want to adapt another great LN. 😐
By this time in the LN, we had a very clear idea of why they were fighting. And the stakes for each side. The weakness of the anime adaptation is that they removed practically every point of view character that is not Kumoko or Shun’s merry band. I think that this is to its great detriment; as even the show itself notes the drama between the Reincarnates is pretty much a sideshow to the larger plot and not a particularly interesting one at that. The LN had much more interesting PoV characters as well as relating how everyone is basically related by one or two degrees of separation.
The anime has people as important as Kyouya just pop up out of nowhere. Put him in a stinger and now we are supposed to smile and nod that he’s somehow here now. What’s the deal with the horns? And swords? Read the manga or LN I guess.
Next week is the last episode so I hope they saved at least enough budget to give the show a proper farewell. I think its inevitable that some bombshell revelations will be dropped, it is the series finale after all, but I do hope they do it well. I liked the way the LN and manga did it so I hope for that same sense of dramatic timing to shine through.
The novels had a lot of different points of view that tells the story by adding different narratives like different simple ingredients in a food dish that turns out to have a tasty and complex flavor to it. I was always worried about it’s be hard if not impossible to adapt this to an anime, and the impact it’d have with people like those who still don’t realize that there is more than one timeline.
To be fair, even at this point in the novels there was a lot left to be relieved, even within the shown time frames.
We are watching show called Ningen Desu ga, Nani ka? now, and let me say this ain’t what I came here for. I wish worst of luck in life for everyone who cleared this adaptation and those involved in it, apart from voice actors, they did everything they could for this heaping pile of crappy adaptation.
Dryadales delende est.
Remember when this showcsas about a Spider?
It still is but they kinda have to focus on other characters too as Kumoko at present has no way to communicate with regular people.
The story was never really about Kumoko, as she was just a player, abet a significant one, within a much larger and broader story.
A lot of people came into this expecting a story that was all about the main character or even a story/world that seems to rotate around the main character, instead of a multilayered one that builds up the story from disparate parts like construction materials in a building. You can’t really appreciate it until the entire story is brought together from those disparate elements.
Looks like they made this episode with a stimulus check level budget. There were so many close ups of peoples faces filling the screen, which I guess was to save on background art? Lol. Very disappointed as its so close to the finale and think they should have made the effort.
Forgot their names but they looked like robots, they were awfully drawn too. Is it too late for them to scrap this episode and redo?
There are two choices to make Kumoko’s series be worthy to remember:
1. Season renewal with a capable team, e.g. the ones handling 86 regardless of being a debut director, who might have a little power of choosing how to adapt this isekai for continuous second season.
OR
2. Scrap the memories of you watching this two-cour disaster and go purchase the LNs right from its very first volume.
As for the main player in charge of Background Art, I think it’s nowhere to be found, meaning the BA you see throughout this adaptation is made by freelancers who might have not enough experience to draw them at consistent rate…
I’m with Gimli on this one:
Never trust an elf.
Especiall one hiding army of mechas in the basement…
Shun lacks the capacity to stand back and question his “allies”.
So does Oka-sensei.
Only good miss Dragon has the wisdom to call for truce and cessation of hostilities between reincarnations.
And who really is that White girl, anyway?
At least Katia/Kanata does question them. She did take Kyouya’s words into consideration. You could see it on her face. Too bad Shun and Sensei was filled with too much adrenalin for them to have a proper discussion.
White has the same voice actor as Kumoko. Will be interesting to see how this all connects together. Though I have serious doubts we’ll see how Sophia ended up this way. She’s more over powered than expected. Last time we saw her, she was just a defenceless baby.
I’m taking a wild guess that the elves want the reincarnators as sacrifice to the gods. Still don’t know why the need to be wiped out, but at least it would explain why the demons want the reincarnators alive. Can’t have someone being too powerful.
Can’t help notice the title of the next episode. I take it she’ll still be a spider?
From the few lines she said I couldn’t say whether it was her, but since it says so in the credits, we now have official confirmation that white girl has to do with Kumoko. Only question if if it’s fully her or just a temporary body that she can transfer (part of) her mind.
There must be a reason why white girl is emotionless without the happy go lucky traits of Kumoko.
There better be a bit of background information next episode instead of the simple reveal that it’s her.
Kumoko is talkative, inside her own head. As for communication with others, she used to be a shutin, then a spider that can’t talk giving her zero social skills. She really struggled to form a sentence when “talking” to Giri-giri.
Ah yes, you’re completely right of course. We have yet to see white girls inner thoughts. Sounds like we might see funny white girl next episode, then. I‘m interested in a flashback of what she thought of the fight against Shun‘s brother.
If it’s paced like the rest of the show, you’d probably need another 2 seasons to cross the gap of development between Kumoko and White Girl.
A lot of those major questions won’t be answered unless we get a season two. Though I’ve heard it is super popular in China and American book sales have been good, the Blu Ray sales have been subpar. So unless the Japanese light novels have massively risen in sales (it was already one of the most popular current light novel series) it is unlikely to get a second season, which is a shame because so many other inferior series keep on getting sequels and praised by some fans far beyond the series worth.
That’s kinda sad. Just seeing the LN covers, it doesn’t look like it’ll be easy to fill in the blanks.
I’m genuinely losing more interest in this show every episode. The human characters were somewhat interesting at first, but, and maybe it’s just that I’ve gotten more used to them, but they just feel so milquetoast and bland at this point. Every one of them feel like they were just pulled from some generic Isekai create a character screen with only the most basic of traits to their name, and I find myself just so increasingly bored every time that they’re on screen. I’m finding it harder every episode to care at all what happens to any of them. Of course, it’s not helped by the fact that the human modeling and animation is getting progressively worse every episode, and it seems like they spend less time actually drawing the characters each week than the week before.
The only thing keeping me watching at this point is Kumoko. I realize it’s weird to say that about the supposed main character, but if it weren’t for her, I’d drop this series right now. She is literally the only character with any actual “character” remaining in this series, and the 3d modeling doesn’t look as bad on her, probably just because of her being a spider.
I would assume, and I get the idea this is true from reading the comments of those who’ve read the source material, that the LN and/or manga treat the non main characters with more respect, and don’t just hang them out to dry development wise. If true, then it just makes me more upset, and this adaptation truly has gone to crap.
And we sometimes wonder if the LN author wrote them with “limited screentime” in word forms because they really love Kumoko and maybe they were tired of those “generic human characters in another world” stories that they wrote a spider being the actual main protagonist.
Yeah, there was so much screentime given on the Humans’ side in this anime adaptation. Heard they’ve got so much of this screentime is because of the manga adaptation.
Guess this proves we non-readers shall trust avid fans of the LN for if they say they dislike certain characters, it’s for a very good reason why sometimes they aren’t keen in watching the anime adaptation of their fave LN series.
They claim even if the human characters get less screentime that may lead to skipping character development of each one’s plot, these characters will still make a connection to Kumoko’s POV given that their interactions with Kumoko someday will reveal their character development of how they became like that before they meet her.
Despite the poor adaptation, as a light novel reader I’ve found the best part of the show to be all the anime-only reactions trying to predict and figure out what is going on.
Anime only here, and things like Kumoko’s eventual fate in the human timeline, is kind of obvious if you can read subtext.
That’s always my favorite part about these kinds of series.