It’s about love.
What They Say:
Episode #12: “The Red Fur of Fate”
The Review
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Careening out of control toward the earth in a triple-stacked train trolly, Benten arrives to threaten Yasaburo for hijacking her Friday Club. Ever the quick thinker and smooth talker, Yasaburo points below to the manor home of the Nidaime. Benten nearly strangles Yasaburo in glee and eagerly crashes the trains straight into the tanuki meeting.
As if that wasn’t chaos enough, everything becomes even more chaotic. Tenmaya threatens the pile of tanuki with the gun while Soun becomes enraged that his daughter was involved and shot. The elder of the Friday Club just stands there and tells Tenmaya to capture all the tanuki (seriously, what’s this guy problem?) but Soun charges. That’s when Benten slightly redeems herself for the season by opening the gate to hell and Tenmaya and Soun are dragged down and in. Yes, I called it!
Benten is flying pretty high at that point and confronts a sulking Junior. The Nidaime doesn’t take kindly to Benten’s grandstanding and that’s when things kick off.
The battle between Benten and the Nidaime is fucking brutal. For someone who claims to be an English gentleman and not a tengu he fights like a thing possessed. It’s a cat-fight in the sky as we finally get the battle that I thought would happen episodes ago. The two appear evenly matched until the Nidaime plays dirty and sets Benten’s hair on fire. (That ending scene makes sense now.) While it looks like the son won he isn’t happy about it at all. He lost his house, lost his respect, lost the girl…
The only insight we get to the Nidaime is that his fight with his father a century ago was over a woman. The Nidaime fell in love with a human woman and she took off on him. Benten reminds him of her. That’s it, that’s all we get. It’s clear Benten is looking for love in all the wrong places, but these two take tsundere to a whole new level of angst. If we get a third season eventually I hope this whole thing is straightened out. I knew there wouldn’t be time to unravel the tengu succession wars, and I know this has been a sore point for some viewers. Our last glimpse of Benten is Yasaburo pitying her and realizing that they as a couple was never meant to be.
Yes, Yasaburo gives in to the red fur of fate. He invites Kaisei back out on his snipe hunt, and she tells him no but meets him there anyway. It takes a surprise visit from grandma to get the two to confess that marrying each other isn’t such a bad idea. The whole eye contact thing is going to have to be worked out, but all’s well that ends well, for now.
Speaking of which, Yaichiro and Gyokuran tie the knot! I really like those two as a couple, so I can’t say I’m disappointed with how everything ended. I just wish we had more time with these characters. P.A. Works and the director have said they plan on making a third season when the third novel is published. Let’s hope it’s not too far in the future.
