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「不動卿」 (Fudou Kyou)
“The Unmovable Sovereign”
As expected, trial by Ozen is rather harsh. Does she do this to everybody? She seems to have experience with robots (what did she call Reg? Aubade?), so maybe she likes toying around with them, and I can totally imagine her thrashing every new Blue Whistle that comes her way. It will explain poor Marulk. Or maybe this is a Lyza tradition, and what she did for the mother she’s doing for the daughter. I don’t 100% agree with her methods—I suspect she enjoyed herself just a bit too much there—but it sure does get the point across. Ozen is, in her own right, a monster, at the very least in physical strength. She may have no super death beam coming out of her hands (…as far as we know), but she’s definitely more capable than Riko and Reg combined. But even she has not plumbed the very depths of the Abyss. If there are things down there even scarier than Ozen the Unmovable, she who does not yield and does not die, then chances don’t look good for the kids. We already know that though, but at least now we know why other adults like Hablog and Leader were willing to let the two go so easily; there was someone more effective than they to drill the terror of the Abyss into young souls.
We also get some questions answered, firstly about why Ozen seems to be in such a wicked mood all the time. Turns out, she’s just really old. You know how grandparents are. ‘Back in my day, we raided the Abyss barefoot, in the snow, Cursed both ways’. Funnily enough, I’ve been writing about Owarimonogatari recently, and if Oshino Ougi lived to be a hundred I can totally see her ending up as someone like Ozen. I wonder if Ozen had always been a sadistic grandma, though? She’s been a White Whistle for 50 years, and she mentioned the lower strata of the Abyss grinding at one’s sanity. Maybe all the White Whistles have a bit of crazy in them. They called Lyza, ‘The Annihilator’, right? I wonder how she turned out.
Other answers simply raise more questions. It turns out the Curse Repelling Vessel doesn’t repel the Curse at all, but reanimates the dead. That’s honestly incredible, and I wonder why they don’t use it more often. Riko’s been living happily as a highly functional zombie for a good 12 years, so it’s fine, right? How about her mother, too? Did she have access to this thing? If so, the empty grave is a bit suspect, no? Ozen wasn’t lying about finding a grave. And she probably did find Lyza’s whistle there as well. But if nobody was in the grave, for whom was it? The plot thickens.
Will we have time to resolve all of it, though? We’re at episode 07 and only now are we starting a training arc. A 10-day training arc, even. I recall that Fullmetal Alchemist had something of a survival training arc too, but that was done relatively early in its run, and in a flashback to boot. In comparison to the multi-cour FMA, how far is Made in Abyss intending to get? Is it preparing for a second season? I’m definitely fine with that.
‘Cause it’s not reliable, maybe…? Ozen (I think) didn’t think Riko
would be revived, it was more of what to do with Riko’s corpse.
A subtle (maybe significant) difference is that Riko’s stillbirth wasn’t
a result of the curse, so maybe the cube really did bring her fully back
and she won’t expire like a walking piece of dinner. We’ll have to wait
to see if it’s explained.
And the enigma of Reg is still contained with Ozen revealing almost
nothing more than we already know (or should’ve known). Reg’s greatest
asset is also their greatest liability. If he uses the “beam”, Riko is
completely exposed during his recovery time. A difficult lesson to teach
the team, but they (should) understand it now…
Ozen’s tough love was a difficult watch, and caught me a little by surprise.
It’s hard to imagine this coming to a tied up ending in the remaining 6
episodes – they also seem to be taking their time with the story telling.
Wonder if a 2 season will be planned…
I’d wager there’s a big difference between reviving a baby with all of her organs relatively intact vs. a headless, gutless carcass.
Still, should we not worry too much for our protagonist’s life then, because what is dead shall never die?
Season 2? If there would be a season 2, that’ll take years waiting for enough manga chapters to be released first.
So it begins.
An aubade is a legendary artefact that is way off the usual rankings.
Because, as Ozen pointed out, the amount of time it restores some semblance of life for can be quite small, and also because the revived things will inevitably head for the depths of the Abyss.
As for the pacing, I’m worried now, though. Right at the start I thought they were going to breeze through most of the current manga chapters, but they are taking it at a much more sensible pace now. However, in order to cover characters and events depicted in the OP and ED, that would really need 2 cours. It became clear quite early on that this anime wasn’t doing well on pre-orders, and now all of a sudden we start this episode with a notorious white whistle seen in the OP who doesn’t occur until later on in the manga.
That whole section at the beginning of the current episode jarred totally as it switched between two different narrators, not to mention it reconnected us with people in Orth who we had seemed to have said a definitive goodbye to. So have they realised now that this won’t make a second cour and have started to introduce characters just for the sake of making the OP and ED more relevant?
Sad… So many a good idea becomes
degraded because of economic reasons
instead of adapting the series for art’s sake
and the sales will take care of the rest (IMHO).
Also, the pre-order packaging is a little spendy
where you buy the whole season in two releases.
Like you, I’m taking a wait-and-see approach.
These last 6 episodes are going to be interesting…
I’ve heard it said that one of the remaining 6 was going to be a recap episode, and although I really hope that’s not true, it might explain why some sites say it’s 13 episodes but others say it’s only 12.
Actually no,it was almost they the same in the manga,adapted chapters also have white whistle silhouettes and one in particular seen in the OP and kids talking with Habo on surface,you probably just forgot that 🙂
Yes, I probably did, it was a long time ago. I still don’t think it was handled well, though. Suddenly switching voice-over narrators didn’t work for me, they should have had an establishing shot of Habolg first.
You do aware for an ending favorable to most manga readers’ hopes need around 16-18 ep. 2 cour are too drawn-out for pacing similar to the first 3 episides, and will fall victim to the unecessary padding of the last 4 episodes.
What really are missed opportunities, is the opportunity to insert “Facts of the Abyss” from the manga extras as eyecatches before and after commercial breaks to enrich the worldbuilding, somewhat akin to Shingeki no Kyojin’s 1st Season. Other opportunity is gathering the 3 omake into a single episode. This way, there would not be any need for drawn-out scenes and unecessary flashbacks for things that happened just minutes ago for padding as seen in the last 4 episodes. This way, the anime should have the apparent ch 24 cutoff without sacrificing the pacing.
Actually, this episode followed the manga fairly faithfully. If anything, the other episodes will also feature the Orth characters as they introduce the other White Whistles in a fairy tale like manner before it cuts to what those characters are really like.
Plus, there’s the extra chapters in Orth that takes place 3 days after Riko begins her dive.
I doubt it’s even gonna get to Bonedaddy at this point tbh. Which might be better for the psyche of some people rofl.
as you know the openings of a show can be deciving that why i think they taking slow pace
riko totally loves reg! noticed how devastated she was at how he was hurt and how relieved she was at him being ok each episode is giving more reasons for this ship to sail besides that the story, setting, and characters are amazing. this show is what happens when a creators researches and takes time to study what they want in a story to make it the best it can be instead of what twenty different shows all day getting “inspired” by them and copying 99.9% of them just because.
I like how Ozen’s full armor kinda makes her look headless, like that thing she revived. Extra creepy.
When Ozen was “towering” over the children I was sure she was actually going through some metamorphosis, but no, she’s just super tall and the show does a really good job of showing the kids’ perspective. I hope for more amazing episodes like this! Really enjoying this anime so far. Hard to hold back and not read the manga.
Considering Ozen’s style of “tough love”, I find her an unreliable source of information and am willing to entertain the possibility of everything she’s said as potentially untrue. Such as the true effect of the artifact box. There may be truth in what she has said but it feels as if she is lying by omission or straight up being partially truthful. She is established as being such a person.
I’m sad to learn that there isn’t enough source material for much more story; another anime adaptation blown by premature media expansion. It doesn’t appear to be in style for anime studios to go in the “and now we go original” path anymore, which is ultimately a good thing for adaptations. Now studios need to back off of picking up titles when they can only produce short cours with handfuls of years in between ….
Which is ironic, considering that back up at the surface everything a white whistle reports back is taken as fact.
I can’t really figure out what their plans are because at the current pacing there’s not enough material for two cours and unless they do some dramatic slowing down or speeding up then it’s going to end right in the middle of a big story arc. Maybe they’ll pull a Shaft and have a few OVA episodes to finish things up.
I would consider it less that she’s deliberately lying and more that her personality is shaping her perception of everything. Ozen will always jump the the darkest, most unhappy, and cynical conclusion about everything, because that is the way she’s concluded the world works. Thus, when a dead creature is put in the box and starts moving, where we might conclude that the box brought it back to life (and indeed, I’m almost sure that’s what it did with Riko), she concludes it turned it into a soulless undead abomination with no will of its own other than to blindly charge into the Abyss.
I’m happy Habo and the kids (omg I already forgot their names) made a reappearance, even just briefly. I’d thought we’d never see them again, like villager A and B after the hero goes on a one-way journey. I guess to everyone in the town, Abyss is just a place that is close to home, but yet very far. I mean technically Riko and Reg are just doing some training with good ol’ Ozen on second level.
Anywho, I was all ready to be like “well Ozen is has a bad personality but she’s gonna do good and be a harsh teacher,” which although turned out to be true, I threw that notion out the window while she was beating the poor two kids up. I also readily accepted that Malluk left them to die cause such things are just the norm in the town, so I’m glad I was a bit wrong.
I think the anime will end around chapters 26-28, either at the end of the next major character introduction arc or the beginning of the following arc (tease or cliffhanger).
Any hopes for more content were wishful thinking at best. When they started planning the episodes, the Idofront arc probably wasn’t even complete when this anime was in planning stages.
There’s probably going to be one more arc, and that’s it.
Now, how on Earth are the censors gonna cope with chapter 25? XD
Harshest teacher this year in anime.
But not without reason, and cause. The Abyss has unknowable secrets, and most people who go down to the depths and return are scarred for life in several ways. Ozen the Old (my name) is just one of the survivors, and we know she changed herself with alien artifacts to survive.
Here’s my spoiler-free/no LN theory: several hundred years ago, an alien colonization starship malfunctioned and crashed nose-first on the planet. Unable to turn it’s infinite-engine off. The ship’s computer has a mission of making habitable worlds for its’ (hibernating) passengers. So down it goes to the center of the world, making an alien ecosystem as it burrows, getting more and more alien-like. Eventually the ship will come out the other side of the planet, and continue on its’ merry way. The “artifacts” are colonization tools the ship makes and leaves behind for its’ future colonists.
And yeah, I don’t want to see a 3-episode training arc. Maybe 1 episode, max. But let’s continue showing what the ending credits hint at.
Quote of the week:
I’ll leave you and Google to work out where to find this.