Anime Pilgrimage RTT

Kiba – episode 10

June 7, 2006 on 10:58 pm | In Kiba | 3 Comments

“The Lonely Princess”

Jimoto’s new reign relies entirely on blood sport to control its citizens. Serve the Jimoto army and die, or refuse the Jimoto army and die a little earlier!
Zed’s ideas grow more and more irrational, while Robes gains a veneer of professionalism.

Roia breaks into Robes’ expeditionary force and makes her way for Zed. Having arrived in Jimoto, Zed affects an attitude of “Well excuuuuse me, Princess!” and hastily gets himself abducted by the um … Dark Underground of Jimoto.

I’ll start with what I should have mentioned with the last episode, that which undermines this entire story: Dumas is a lousy villain to chase after. Zed’s anger at Dumas seems to spring from something that would amount to this in a head on confrontation:

Zed: You bastard! You taught me that field work equals power!
Dumas: grunt
Zed: Right … our master/apprentice relationship never really existed, but let’s fight anyway, ‘kay?
Dumas: grunt Curse my meaningless past!
Zed: Your three dimensional character offends my precious Calm sensibilities! Have at you!

What I’m saying is this: I don’t buy Zed’s reason for being in Jimoto.

Now that he’s in Jimoto, though, we’ve got to focus on that. Zed is a character that has no idea of how to speak to people.He goes somewhere and they tell him something, so he just acts rude and walks off. It serves him right that he had to go to the Death Pits and kill a man to save his own life. Except he can’t kill a man, because he has an instinct that tells him that a deus ex machina is going to come and save him.
I don’t know, with that character design I find it hard to feel sympathy for the bugger. Yet the death pits did make me think just how messed up Jimoto is: one of the best ways to upset your citizenry is to kill all of those who refuse to die for their country. The path that, by its very design, leads to everyone dying somewhere down the line.

In the death pits, entered through being knocked out in the desert, we meet a member of the Karbuhu. They used to run the area until they were enslaved by the Jimoto regime, and I’m inclined to believe that the people that Noa presently finds himself with are free Karbuhu. How they’ve managed to get themselves out of the desert, I’ve no idea. I suspect that I’m not supposed to ask such a question because, of course, the desert is right next to everything in the world of convenience.
So Noa is the secret weapon of a repressed native people, in theory. Who can wait for him to set the world on fire, killing everyone in Jimoto and not remembering any of it? I know I sure can’t.

There’s remarkably little narrative contrivance in this episode, with the exception of one major scene. After the separatists saved Rebecca they begin to discuss if they really need her. If you say something that you don’t want someone to hear in anime, chances are they’re going to be right around the corner, and they’ll take everything that was said to heart. Plan your puppetry before you reclaim the puppet, you people. On top of that, stop being so damned power hungry! What’s the point of being a restorationist if you don’t believe in restoration? I’ll tell you what the point is: the point is stupidity, that’s what.

The other possible contrivance is the fact that the entire Robes Expeditionary Force, with the exception of Robes and Roia, get destroyed upon arriving in Jimoto. I did not mind this as it is far more practical to have only these two characters out there (and I didn’t want to have to look at the ugly secondaries, anyway). Roia and Robes have the potential to be an interesting team worth watching because Robes is actually more than competent in the field of battle – and he’ll certainly be different in a situation where the outcome is somewhat meaningul – and Roia is … um … a girl. Who wears yellow. A yellow clad girl. I’m sure I can think of something to justify her presence, and I’ll get back to you when I can: at any rate, this partnership represents potential that Kiba has not shown for a while now.

Kiba continues to throw words at us that ultimately don’t mean anything … yet. You can only keep an audience in the dark for so long before they start asking “what the heckfire is a ‘joker’, anyway?” More of the same, really, but the higher standard of similarity.