Top Level Canon Reviews - relaunched!

Leila Hann · Feb 6, 2025

The final Chainsaw Chapter of this order. An appropriate title, given everything that's just happened. We've already had so many secrets revealed. The Gun Devil is still active, or at least there are a bunch of people who think it is! You can get around the one-devil-per-warlock rule through certain means! Denji-Pochita aren't the only symbiont! Makima is even scarier than she seemed!

As for lies, well. I'm starting to wonder if anything we were told about this world in the early issues is actually true.

Yakuza-kun and Sawatari still have a dismembered Denji at their mercy, though they might not be able to escape with him after the loses they just took. They're still making a noble effort of hefting his surprisingly-body-even-without-the-legs body into their van when out of an alley comes...Kobeni.

It took me a minute to be sure it was her. Both because of the whole "not being dead" thing, and because of her behavior and body language in these panels. But, no, that really is her. We rewind a bit to see that when she and Arai were getting ambushed, Arai spotted the shooter at the last second and threw his body in front of Kobeni's, shielding her from the bullets meant for both of them.

And, um. Apparently she killed their assailant(s?) with a knife.

She turns right back into Kobeni right afterward, but still, she actually did that. Huh.

After taking a minute to self-recriminate about how useless and pathetic she is and why it isn't right that Arai would have laid down his life for her, Kobeni switched back from depressive to manic and went running toward the sound of chainsaws and gunshots from across the neighbourhood. Then, she closes the distance with the baddies, slices Yakuza-kun up badly enough to drop him to his knees, grabs a dropped gun, and holds off Sawatari well enough to force her to abandon Denji and drag the wounded humanmode Katanaman into the van with her and flee.

Kobeni was lucky that Yakuza-kun had used up so much blood fighting Denji and Sawatari had used up so many fingernails fighting Himeno. She'd have gone down quickly if not for either of those things. Still though, she moved like grease lightning and attacked like an experienced killer there. Slashed Yakuza-kun like she'd done it a million times before, and would have actually put a bullet in Sawatari if the gun she picked up hadn't happened to be empty.

She apologizes to the unconscious Denji (whose body, incidentally, she's just used as a bullet shield) for that time she wanted to feed him to the Eternity Devil. Hopefully this will make up for it, at least a little bit.

So, yeah. Kobeni's got some wild DI shit going on, or something. Might have to do with her devil contractor, or it might not. I don't think we ever heard which devil she's bound to or what powers it gives her, so maybe it's something like brief periods of benign possession or the like.

Guess that would make her an exception to the "warlocks only produce external manifestations of their devil's power" rule that I commented on last post, depending. Again, assuming that what we just saw was a devil power and not all her.

So, Kobeni to the rescue. I didn't think I'd never end up typing that sentence, but I didn't expect for it to play out like this. Arai, on the other hand, I'm pretty sure is dead for realsies.

Back in Kyoto, Makima juggles some status updates and then boards another train back to Tokyo. Her intel guy, a rare Metuka who was never even offered the chance to become meguka, hands in his resignation. Not because he thinks he dropped the ball here, but because, after the near-eradication of four full squads plus several support staff today, he's decided that this line of work is just too dangerous for him. Makima shrugs and bids him goodbye. Their final exchange before he leaves is...well, it's peak Makima.

Not what she says, so much, but what he says and what's implied by it. Maybe she knew this was coming and chose not to prevent it for reasons of her own. Maybe she didn't, and was legitimately caught unawares by Fireteam's careful planning. But, Metuka has worked with her long enough and seen enough from her to think it highly likely that she knew in advance and just didn't think the lives of over a dozen of her underlings worth acting to protect. Such a decision would be emminently believable for Makima, based on his familiarity with her.

I'm not sure how old this guy is exactly, but he appears to be at least in his mid-to-late twenties. I think that's around the age when you start learning how to see through Makima. Devil-Hunters might die young, but I don't think that's the only reason why Makima's department consists almost entirely of teenagers.

The remnants of Tokyo's Public Security apparatus is being reconciled into a single division, due to the sudden manpower shortage. Makima is now in charge of the entire thing. Maybe this is the outcome she was hoping for, maybe not.

The pair of Kyoto agents who she's been dragging around after her since arriving, Tendo and Kurose, are told to accompany Makima back to Tokyo and help her rebuild the newly-reconciled department. The brass told them they'd be going to help with recruitment and crash training, and to fill bureaucratic manpower gaps until they get new people to fill them. A reassignment that shouldn't extend more than a week or so. However, Makima seems to disagree.

Ever since they followed her up to the shrine, Makima has been acting like they're already her official underlings. We don't see her face here, but there's an air of resentment when she gives her response. A "how dare you," or perhaps more like "oh, is that what you think?" I have no doubt that *something* will happen to force their relocation into her domain to be extended. Or that she'll dangle something in front of them that compels them to do it proactively. Not because she particularly wants these two, I don't think, but rather because she's simply loathe to let anyone out of her power once they've been in it.

I don't know. I'm reading a lot out of a very small number of panels. But the focus here seems deliberate, and meaningful.

I'm starting to think it more likely that Makima and Gunny are allied now. Or at least, that their relationship is more of a mutually beneficial rivalry than genuine antagonism. And, looking at their methods and motifs, I can see how they'd naturally feed on each other. The Gun Devil who rules over crime and chaos, scaring people into the arms of...for want of a specific name, I'm just going to say she's the State Devil. The State Devil who crushes and presses down and scares people at the margins of society into the Gun Devil's sway.

Going back to my musing over whether devils are actually just kami seen through an excessively negative filter, and whether awe and worship can empower them as well as fear...Makima is building a little cult of worshippers for herself, isn't she? The ambiguity of what it means to "fear your god" applies pretty much exactly the same to a government through the lens of nationalism. Worship it. Love it. Be terrified out of your mind of it.

And, looking at her opposite number...the Gun Devil has been not-so-subtly associated with America in its exposition chapter. What are guns, in the American national zeitgeist? Gunny's Japanese agents use firearms, but they also now feature a katana guy, and they seem to be tied up with the yakuza. What functions have the yakuza played in Japan's national consciousness over the last couple of centuries? Again, there are elements of that masochistic merging of self-identification and fear, the backhanded admiration for "our monster" that one more naturally associates with theism.

I could easily be wrong. Both about devilish nature, and about Makima and Gunny's relationship. But, these are the thoughts that this stretch of comic has left me with.

Leila Hann · Feb 10, 2025

This review was commissioned by @ArlequineLunaire. I suspect because of my own background. And, heh, it actually did give me a little bit of nostalgia when I saw Scrooge McDuck walk down the streets of what looked a lot like my own hometown.

It's not my own hometown, to be clear. Putting the context clues together, I'm pretty sure this is supposed to be Skagway, another town in the same general region. But, similar scenery, similar buildings, similar mom-and-pop seaplane companies operating off of wooden shipdocks, similar dopey pink paint on certain large buildings.

It's accurate in a way that only personal familiarity can give you. I would have thought that the artist took a Southeast Alaska cruise before penning this, but this comic was created in the 1950's, shortly before those Alaska luxury cruises became a thing. We still had tourism back then, but not on nearly so large a scale, and so there may have been a bit more of a story to this.

Hmm. Reading up on this a little, the creator and longtime Disney comic artist mainstay Carl Barks was born and lived much of his life in Oregon. Not exactly right next door, but still, Pacific Northwest cultural sphere. Makes him having travelled up north less surprising. Well, anyway!

Scrooge McDuck is a really, really weird character. He's named after the thoroughly antiheroic protagonist of "A Christmas Carol," and his characterization is all a play on that character's pre-redemption folly. And yet, somehow, Scrooge McDuck isn't a bad guy. His all-consuming greed is usually portrayed as somewhere between a harmless eccentricity and a moderately annoying personality defect. Sure, he often gets taught Important Lessons about why he shouldn't be so greedy, but they never stick, and his relapses are framed as "oh, that whacky old Uncle Scrooge.~"

As time goes by, Scrooge's character and how we're meant to see it seems ever more questionable. Getting back to my own childhood again for a bit, one of the first toys I ever remember playing with was a jigsaw puzzle that featured Scrooge and his nephews rowing down a jungle river with a canoe full of gold, while angry natives glared at them from between the trees. One of the kid nephews was pointing a gun at these natives. A pop-gun, sure, this is G-rated, but...we aren't fucking kidding anyone with that, come on. I remember asking my mother why the natives were mad at them, and she told me, very nonchalantly.

I couldn't have been more than four years old at the time, but I still knew there was something wrong here. Isn't Scrooge the greedy-but-still-nice uncle who takes his family on fun adventures? Aren't theives supposed to be the bane of his existence? Why is he the one stealing? Why do the natives all look so ugly and sinister if they're the ones being stolen from?

Scrooge McDuck gave me my first ever awareness of colonialism. Come to think of it, it might have also been the first time I ever applied critical thinking to a work of fiction as a work of fiction. At least, it's the earliest one I can remember.

Now, is that part of Scrooge McDuck's baggage relevant to this particular comic? Well, sort of, yeah. Not directly, but very closely adjacent.

We start with a slice-of-life-y gag about Scrooge battling the onset of senility. A bunch of hiijinks that he dismisses the importance of at first, but then starts to take seriously when he realizes he might be risking leaving his fortune vulnerable to thieves with him in this state.

Or, well, "senility." He gets a medical diagnosis of Blinkus Of The Thinkus Disease, which is fortunately much more treatable than its real life counterpart.

The main plot kicks off when Scrooge takes his cartoon Alzheimer's medication, and finds himself remembering things that he'd forgotten many years ago. Including the location where he hid a substantial amount of gold near where he discovered it in a Canadian rainforest. I don't recall if Scrooge having struck it rich in the Klondike Gold Rush is a consistent backstory thing, or if he has a different whacky "how I made my first million dollars" background in each episode, but at least this time it was gold-panning (EDIT: it's a consistent thing after all, and this story had a lot of foreshadowing because of it). And apparently he actually made his first two million dollars doing this, but left half of it buried in the wilderness and forgot about it until now.

Most of the comic consists of hijinks as they travel back through Southeast Alaska and Northwest Canada in pursuit of Scrooge's memories (despite the gold he left there being almost meaningless in the face of how rich he's gotten since then) and his miserliness causing all kinds of comical misfortunes and inconveniences along the way. There's also a long buildup about this "dance hall" owner named Glittering Goldie who he used to know up in Yukon, and who he's eager to meet again if possible. Allegedly because she owes him a thousand dollars, which he calculates to now be worth a billion with fifty years of interest, but he sure looks and acts like he had and still has feelings for this woman. Both before and after the inevitable reunion.

A nice touch is that she's wearing typical buckskin and denim roughneck clothes at first, but gets her old "dance hall owner" outfit out of storage when she needs to lay on the charm to hopefully deter Scrooge from collecting on the debt she can't pay.

Anyway, the final act of the story has Scrooge and his nephews discovering that the site where he hid the gold is now inhabited by an elderly Glitterin' Goldie. Her "dance hall" failed after the Gold Rush ended, as most of the "dance halls" in this time and place did. She used up her fortune caring for mining accident orphans, and has spent her twilight years living in this old cabin in poverty with her shotgun and her guard bear.

How to tell between a black bear and a brown bear? Climb a tree. If it's a black bear it'll climb after you. If it's a brown bear it'll tear the tree down.

Once they pacify the bear and get passed the shotgun, Scrooge overcomes Goldy's charm and tells her here's here to collect with interest. She starts to morosely hand over her last few heirlooms and keepsakes and head for the nearest homeless shelter, but then Scrooge suddenly tells her that in the interest of good sportsmanship he'll give her one last chance to save what she has; they'll have a competitive gold-digging contest, and whoever finds a fleck or nugget first gets to keep this property as well as the find. And then he manipulates her into digging where he hid his old gold cache, while pretending to have mixed it up and given her the spot by accident. He attributes the "mistake" to him having forgotten to take his amnesia pills today, but the nephews learn the truth when Donald counts the pills and realizes there aren't any extras.

I'm not sure why Scrooge is so invested in keeping up his reputation for miserliness. Maybe because he doesn't want his family expecting handouts from him in the future or something. Reading further into that, it does add a bit of a tragic dimension to Scrooge's character if he thinks the only way to keep opportunists from taking advantage of him is to maintain a reputation of absolute greed and mercilessness...but like, in order to care that much, he'd need to be legitimately greedy and ruthless enough for it only to be a slight exaggeration of his true self.

Well, at least Goldie got to walk away feeling like she won rather than feeling like she was granted mercy by a capricious god that decided not to smite her after all on a whim. Definitely more empowering and less anxiety-inducing.

Anyway, the real gold that Scrooge had forgotten about was the golden-hearted woman named Goldie, and remembering her and her value was a redress of old mistakes, yada yada.

Like I said, Scrooge McDuck is a character who always sat in the grey area of likability by design, but as time goes by he has a harder and harder time staying there. This comic's purported origins for him in the Klondike Gold Rush are...well, it's not as bad as him and his kid nephews literally stealing Inca gold at gunpoint, but it's only a few steps away. The lesson he learns at the end of the comic is...well, it's a lot like the arc that the original Ebeneeze Scrooge underwent, but the difference is that in McDuck's case we know that it's just a momentary act of mercy rather than a change of art. He'll go right back to being awful in the next episode.

I'll give this comic its due respect for the accurate depictions of a part of the world you don't often see featured in this medium, either back in the 1950's or today. Also, this work is surprisingly dance-hall-worker positive. There's not even any implied shame in Goldie having owned a dance hall, or in Scrooge having been a patron of hers. Her portrayal is mostly positive, but not in a way that others her or infantilizes her like you often get with "token virtuous dance hall worker" characters from that era of fiction. She has her impressive charitable works, but in her old age she's also a cranky old redneck who shoots at anyone who comes on her property unannounced. And she's got plenty of traits that aren't part and parcel of being a former dance hall person. So, that's good.

Leila Hann · Feb 13, 2025

This ultra-pedantic excruciatingly detailed autistic review was commissioned by @Synaptic Star.

This 2009 shonen manga by Shuzo Oshimi is one I've never heard of before. And, since @Synaptic Star paid for a live react, this will be an old school blind Let's Read like the kind I started with. In keeping with the spirit of that, I won't be doing any more research about this work until I've finished the post to keep myself unspoiled.

Let's go!

We start in a sleepy Japanese town, under an overcast sky, with a teacher handing back tests to a classroom full of teenagers. Our apparent protagonist, a boy named Takao Kasuga, hasn't done very well on it.

He's clearly an enthusiastic reader, as evidenced by him having a copy of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal on hand despite it having nothing to do with his coursework. However, the fact that he has this personal reading material out and visible in the middle of class is likly giving us a hint as to why his test scores haven't been reflective of his intellect.

Also, his friends give him shit for being an annoying smartypants nerd who still can't even get good grades.

A difficult life, some of us live. I had pretty much the exact same problem with regards to focus in my teens (my ADHD was undiagnosed until just a year or so ago), so I can relate.

We learn also that Kasuga has a crush on his classmate Saeki Nanako, who's as booksmart as him but also much better able to leverage it toward academics. And also like, confident and pretty and stuff. You know the type.

Kasuga is too nervous to approach her, let alone form a friendship, let alone let that friendship become more than a friendship. You know the type.

The next character who our attention is called to is Nakamura, the girl with the only test score in the class even lower than Kasuga's. I'm not sure if it's really fair to compare them though, because while Kasuga made an actual effort, Nakamura just left her entire test sheet blank. She looks surly, perhaps even indignant, when called up to take her graded test back, as if she's furious at the teacher for even acknowledging her presence in the room. Then, when he scolds her for her perfect zero, she does this:

The teacher loses his shit. For a moment, he actually raises his hand as if to strike her, before catching himself with a frightened expression and lowering his arm again before issuing her detention. It looks for all the world like she was deliberately baiting him into doing something that would get him fired, and he came within centimetres of biting.

Neither Nakamura nor the teacher come out of this exchange looking great. Nakamura at least comes out of it looking like she has giant balls though, so that puts her slightly ahead of him in both the readers' and her classmates' estimations.

After school, Kasuga and his friends exit the building, gossiping among themselves about what a scary bitch that Nakamura is. It turns out that Kasuga's social group all give each other shit about stuff, so they're not just picking on him. That's good. Less good is when the conversation turns to the subject of other girls in their class, and one guy with a really creepy face starts acting really creepy about good girl Saeki.

Sleep paralysis clown face up there is soon named as Kojima, which is lol. I'll bet he thinks Saeki breathes through her pubes.

Granted, for all that Kasuga gets indignant on Saeki's behalf and gets even more shit from the others on account of it, his own thoughts about her are...well...honestly almost worse.

Granted, these boys are like 14 or whatever, I wouldn't expect them to not be creepy about girls at all. But within the spectrum of teenaged boy weirdness, I feel that "I'll bet she has great pubes" is significantly less toxic than "this girl who I've never talked to is my muse and goddess." More obnoxious when expressed aloud, but less toxic.

Nice Guyism is an insidious mind trap for boys. Well, hopefully he'll get better.

It's likely that he will, because - refreshingly - the author of this comic is aware that Kasuga's attitude toward women isn't any better than Kojima's. When Kasuga realizes he forgot his Baudelaire book in the classroom and runs back to grab it, he happens to notice Saeki's gymbag left forgotten as well. This would be a great opportunity to make conversation with her, if he sought her out and told her she forgot her bag. However, instead of doing that, Kasuga steals her gym clothes out of the bag and hurries home with them to rub his face all over her sweaty underwear.

There's so much tension and nervousness around Kasuga's transgression, with him frantically looking around every five seconds as he leaves the building to see if anyone has seen him, jumping whenever he hears a door close or a voice speak from around a corner, etc, that at first I thought he was reacting to literal poltergeist activity. Like, his fearful reactions to all the sounds and shadows, the artist's exaggerations of those sounds and motion to convey his hyperfocus on them, it really looks like a horror manga for a few panels there. Nothing supernatural after all, though, just a protagonist's guilty conscience.

Getting home doesn't calm him down. He was the same reaction to his mother showing up to scold him about his messy room that he did to the sounds in the school building.

Straight up Calvin & Hobbes gags, heh.

I haven't read Baudelaire since undergrad myself, and unfortunately I don't remember his work well enough to understand the literary reference Kasuga makes as he starts fondling Saeki's shorts while imagining her ass is inside of them and we fade to black.

I know that "The Flowers of Evil" is the one collection of Baudelaire poetry that he published during his lifetime, but I don't recall what significance the name itself has. So, not sure what he means, aside from a very straightforward "enjoying the sensual pleasures born of misbehavior" thing.

The next day, Kasuga is alarmed when Saeki isn't at her desk, and her gym bag isn't where he left it. And then even more alarmed when the teacher addresses the class with an accusatory, interrogative air, and Saeki enters the room late looking like she's been crying.

Kasuga's own friends, including the ones who had disgusted him the day before, all muse aloud about what a fucked up pervert they must have in their class. Saeki, who Kasuga has been putting on a pedestal, feels way, way more hurt and violated than he ever would have expected her to be if she found out about the theft (and ideally, she'd never have even known).

Kasuga is silent, shrinking into his chair, stewing in his own emotions. There's an amazing panel transition as we jump ahead to that afternoon.

The vortex of his guilt and misery literally piping him into the cloudy sky that awaits him after school. Showing how he's been totally overwhelmed by his feelings and blinded to all else for his entire schoolday.

He does not hang out with his friends after school this time. And his mood in general does not improve.

Dramatic as all hell, but like...it's realistic drama? This is about right for the mind of a fourteen year old boy who's just fucked up his own self-image and also reads a lot of modernist poetry.

...

I assume that the eyeball-flower levitating above his head in the above panel is another allusion to something in said modernist poetry, heh.

...

He rides around town all broodingly, cursing himself, his decisions, the town itself, God, etc. Making very Baudelaire-esque observations about the rusting metal, the small minds, how terrible his life is, etc. I do remember Baudelaire enough to recognize the general aura at least, heh. Suddenly, his melodramatic self-hating reverie is interrupted by Nakamura the scary girl. She was just randomly sitting against a roadside fence as he rode his bicycle past, and she calls out to him sharply, almost angrily. I get the impression that that's the only way she knows how to talk, heh.

He gets the sense that she's been waiting for him. The next few pages suggest that he was probably right about this.

After disinterestedly interrogating him about where he was going (and disinterestedly interrogating him about his choice of reading material when he says "the library"), she suddenly seats herself on the back of his bike and starts making outrageous demands.

He demands to know what the fuck. In response, she reminds him that she sits behind him in class and sees everything he reads over his shoulder. And then wraps her arms in a creepily possessive ways around his waist. And then takes off her glasses to reveal an even more deranged-looking gaze than Kojima's as she says the thing that the reader will have probably predicted by this point.

The seeds of evil, planted, have grown and flowered. And now he's got to smell them. Dunno if this girl has a messed up stalker crush on him (like a wilfully malicious version of his own feelings for Saeki. Just like her being a bad student is a warped exaggeration of his own academic woes), or if she's just doing the waist-squeeze to make him uncomfortable as part of a general opportunistic meanness. The fact that she sits behind him - and that she's just made a point of reminding us that she sits behind him - suggests the former.

The chapter closes with an author's note explaining a bit about his choice of poets, and - amusingly - about the eyeball-flower imagery I was wondering about before.

So that's cool.

I'm tempted to keep reading this comic for its own sake. Not for enjoyment, but for instruction. I've been writing short stories for an elementary-to-middle-school English curriculum, and this kind of plot is exactly the subject matter they usually want me to write about. Realistic fiction, child protagonists, moral lessons. "The Flowers of Evil" manages to make these elements feel dramatic and meaningful in a way that I've been struggling to manage. It also strikes a really good balance of featuring exceptional - if still mundanely realistic - circumstances, with actions that could have very serious consequences for the characters at least in the short to medium term, while still avoiding anything too heavy.

It's also very well drawn, which I appreciate.

Leila Hann · Feb 16, 2025

This review was commissioned by @krinsbez

Time for another Jack Vance novella! This one was published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1958, about five years before "The Dragon Masters." This one is also illustrated, albeit a bit more sparsely and by a different (though at least as talented) artist.

Dunno what this one is about, aside from my general knowledge of Jack Vance's work. As it's fairly long, I'll be dividing it into two or three posts.

Having read the first third or so of "The Miracle Workers," I think I see why @krinsbez chose this one next. Vance might have had his favorite themes and concepts, but the setting and backdrop of this story are so similar to "The Dragon Masters" that it's hard for me to not see them as earlier versions of the same thing.

By that same token, I think that TDM benefitted from narrowing its conceptual scope. It might have had a lot going on in it, and some of the moving parts might have felt like they weighed down the story a bit more than they were worth, but "The Miracle Workers" is a much greater offender. Dragon Masters was a borderline case of "too much going on." Miracle Workers is almost a textbook case of it.

Just like last time, our setting is a lost colony settled by deserters and refugees in a losing galactic war that has since regressed to pre-industrial tech levels. Once again, the story begins with feudal warlords armed with swords, a few ancient high-tech trinkets, and a weird warfare-redefining new weapon type that their ancestors obtained sometime since planetfall, doing grimy unromantic wars of expansion to each other. Would you believe me if I told you that there was a third party of cryptic, elf-like beings off in the wilderness who hold the neo-medieval humans in contempt? Yeah, well, there is.

Where the differences come in is also where this story feels like it's doing too much at once. First, there's no bleak dread hanging over the setting because of what has been lost and how few free humans there might still be. These war-refugees are said to have been soldiers who chose to go to ground rather than surrendering, rather than civilians fleeing a genocidal conqueror. The story explicitly says that the martial nature and latent anti-intellectual tendencies of these soldiers played an important role in how their society developed going forward. Implicitly, well...

It doesn't SAY that they were war criminals. The "vengeful enemies" might have just been petty and bloodthirsty. But the way the text also specifies that the anti-intellectualism and militarism were baked into the colonist population from the beginning, well.

Related to the above is that rather than the spacefaring past of the colonists before their technological regression being seen as a long-lost golden age to be looked back on with wist and longing, these people have a very...weird...view of their own history. They have grudging respect for certain unreplaceable artifacts of the past, and they value and guard them jealously despite the respect being grudging. But only the directly weaponizable artifacts, and they also see the people who created that technology - technology that is beyond them in the present day - as primitive and savage. Both because they used outdated concepts like "empiricism," and because those dark age savages didn't have any magic.

Yeah, that's a thing in this story.

Magic is apparently a thing that they only discovered a generation or three after settling this planet and losing contact with the rest of the galaxy. Why that might have happened, the story has not yet revealed. Magic is practiced by an esteemed class of professional magicians, the most accomplished of which are given the title of "jinxman" and hold a social status somewhere between a medieval guildmaster and an early modern mercenary commander. Powerful people, sometimes essentially the power behind the throne, but - for reasons that haven't become clear yet - they never seem to sit on the throne themselves.

The elflike party in this setup isn't an older, higher-tech bunch of humans this time, but rather the native sophonts of the planet. The "first folk" as the humans call them are bizarre insect-mollusc creatures. They have only palaeolithic technology, and - curiously - no "magic" like the kind practiced by the human magicians, despite them having lived on the planet where magic was discovered for infinitely longer. Despite this, they do seem to have some kind of (possibly related?) preternatural control over the nearby plantlife, which they use to create biological defences and refuges for themselves against the human invaders. At some point after making planetfall, humans started expanding into the first folk's inhabited lands and displacing them. This led to the first folk abandoning most of their territory and hiding in the deep forests where they can better defend themselves.

See what I mean about this story having way too much going on for a seventy page novella? "The Dragon Masters" also had a lot of moving parts, but they at least mostly tied back into each other and had a common origin in the ancient human-alien war. It doesn't look like "Miracle Workers" is going to do that, and...it really don't think it's going to have enough space to give all this stuff the breathing room it needs and deserves.

I could be wrong, but I mean...I'm almost a thousand words into this review, and I've only barely managed to summarize most of the background without even getting to the plot or characters yet lol.

So, plot and characters. We start the story in the POV of one Lord Faide, who...well, he's basically the BBEG of the setting. A skilled political power-player and even more skilled military commander, Faide is about to finish the process of conquering the continent, with only one small alliance of city states still standing against him before his army reaches the coast. Faide's ambitions and pace might bring Alexander the Great to mind, but unlike him Faide seems to derive zero pleasure whatsoever from his endless conquests. In fact, he doesn't seem to derive pleasure from anything at all, and even gets annoyed at his underlings when they show too much enthusiasm or sensualism. He's dreading his final victory, because he knows he's going to need to build a new order to keep his vassals in line once the looting kickbacks stop reaching them. His conquests weren't motivated by fear of being conquered by someone else either, as best I can tell. I'm honestly not sure why Faide wanted to take over the world in the first place, and I don't think that he knows either.

If Faide seems weirdly unexcited about his own campaigns, his men are in a far worse situation. Think less Imperial Macedonia, and more Imperial Germany. The human society depicted in this story isn't intrinsically horrifying the way the dragon masters with their eugenic slavery were, but their way of prosecuting warfare is. Largely on account of the military applications of the jinxmen's magic.

The *least* bad part of it is the library of effigies that every jinxman spends their life accumulating. Knights, prominant soldiers, important bureaucrats, family members and loved ones of the ruling nobility, etc. The ruling lords themselves are protected from effigy attacks by treaty, but everyone else is fair game. Typically, before the armies clash, both armies' jinxmen will start setting effigies on fire, and both armies' commanders will do their best to bully and threaten their men into not breaking even as they feel flames licking their bodies and psychosomatic burns start to appear.

The *worst,* meanwhile, are the "demons" that the jinxmen summon. These demons seem to be artificial life forms, psionic entities created by jinxmen through a complicated process. When invokes, the demons possess the bodies of friendly soldiers and grant them superhuman strength, durability, and speed. That is, until the jinxman ends the spell. At that point, the soldiers get control of their bodies back, and all the damage that they've been ignoring and overexertion they've placed on their bodies suddenly falls on them.

Demonic possession is a death sentence; a slow, horrifying permutation of suicide bombing. Every time a major battle if fought, dozens or hundreds of men are sent to this fate by their own commanders with barely a thought.

Lord Faide has been fighting battle after battle after battle, and constantly adding to his collection of pet jinxmen for his ever-more-magic-reliant army. The fact that the men all submissively line up and go to the jinxmen to be possessed when ordered suggests that both a) an even more terrible punishment awaits those who refuse, and b) that defiance against the nobles with their wizard enforcers is known to be futile. And Faide is doing all this for...why, exactly? Seemingly just because he feels like it.

...

An army is a reflection of the civilization it belongs to. Seeing how these armies function and clash paints an incredibly bleak picture of what life is like for the common people of this society.

...

As Lord Faide's army lays siege to one of the last bastions of resistance, the protagonist role in slowly yielded to a much more sympathetic character by the name of Sam Salazar. An apprentice magician to one of Lord Faide's warmages, Sam has a deep interest in the underappreciated wonders of their people's high tech past, and a curiosity about expanding the frontiers of magic and seeking knowledge for its own sake that his culture (and Lord Faide's regime in particular) doesn't encourage. In fact, during the attack on the enemy fortress, Faide deems Sam to be unimportant enough to put on decoy duty, making him dress in his own armor and drive his heirloom hovercar around the perimeter of the battle to draw fire from the defenders' own heirloom laser cannon. Not disposable enough to put on suicidal demonhost duty (and also, being an apprentice magician, he might not be possessable), but disposable enough to be given the next worst job. Sam's own master - one of Faide's jinxmen, a particularly unpleasant demon-specialist by the name of Isak Comandore - has tired of the young man's fanciful experiments and excess of curiosity, and is barely bothered by Lord Faide's decision.

Sam Salazar survives his decoy duties, as it turns out that the defenders' laser cannon hasn't actually been functional in nearly a century. There's also a scene when he's being assigned these duties that really characterizes both him and the social context he exists in:

Another such moment, slightly earlier in the story, is when the army is approaching their target and finds that the first folk have caused a forest to spring up in the area they planned to march through. Sam is part of the party sent to parlay with the first folk (mostly just to help check for traps in the outer forest perimeter until they make contact), and it's very clear to the reader that his thoughts and musings about the situation suggest something that everyone else is missing.

First, while away from his ill-tempered master, Sam tells another, more open-minded, senior jinxman about his experiments trying to make telepathic contact with plants the same way that he can with other humans.

He was, with great effort, able to get what he thought were vague sensory impressions from the plantlife he tried it with. The older jinxman - Hein Huss - accepts that Sam might have actually done what he says he did, even if he doesn't think it's an avenue of research worth pursuing. After all, the more different a creature is from yourself, the harder it is to touch its mind by magic, and plants and humans are about as different as it gets.

Then, when they meet a party of first folk, the aliens tell them that they intend their new forest expansions to be hazardous for humans, and that the fact a human warlord is now here to complain about them is proof that it's working. They manage to appeal to the first folk's hatred of humans in their own favor, pointing out that their army is on its way to kill a lot MORE humans, so letting them through would actually help the first folk more than stopping them. Suspiciously though, the lone first folkscreature that they talk to seem to weigh their arguments and come to a decision unilaterally, in just moments.

Earlier, it was established that the first folk don't have proper magic. However, looking at all these things that Sam is noticing and pointing out, it seems like that might not actually be the case. Pretty much all the magic we see jinxmen use in these early chapters involves psychic connections - reading minds, possessing people with synthetic demon-spirits, sympathetic effigy curses, etc. First folk are weird insectoid aliens. It might just be that they and humans are too mentally different to use magic on each other, which from a human perspective might make it seem like they don't have it at all. Likewise, if Sam's tree experiments were able to get even a very partial success, then that establishes a precedent that proves the principle. Maybe the first folk have done more research on crossing the plant/animal barrier when it comes to telepathy. Maybe they're closely related enough to the trees to easily telecommunicate with them just by virtue of being born of the same planet's biosphere.

It's pretty clear that the individual they met was a first folk magician, and that it was in telepathic contact with their leadership during the conversation. They've perfected magic into something much more reliable and readily usable than what the humans have figured out, and can even use it to control plantlife. They just can't use it directly on humans.

Sam Salazar is probably beginning to figure this out, but nobody else besides the reader is.

After they cross the forest and Lord Faide wins the battle against the human resisters, Sam manages to finagle his passage out of Isak Comandore's tutelage and into the less cruel and more openminded Hein Huss'. I wouldn't call Huss a great guy or anything. He's another senior member of Lord Faide's magical warcrime squad, after all. But, he seems like the least bad of the lot, and at the very least he sees value in having Sam as an apprentice whereas Comandore is on the brink of sacrificing him or something.

Not sure where things are going from here. Like I said, there's a ton going on, and the story isn't that long.

I will say that Jack Vance's ability to exposit via action is nothing short of incredible. This story throws even more wild high-concept crap at you than TDM, but it still, somehow, even when it's at its most busy and overcooked, never crosses the line into overwhelming or impenetrable. It's all readily understandable. Everything explains itself quickly, clearly, and concisely just through demonstration, with only the very rare paragraph of third person exposition ever being needed.

Vance was an absolute master of "show don't tell." I know that that writing principle has come under scrutiny lately, but even if it isn't always the right approach Vance is a perfect example of what it can be good for.

On a random sidenote, this 1950's vintage story has the wizards refer to "mana" as a supply of mystical power that can be used up and replenish over time. The word comes from Pacific Islands shamanism of course, but my understanding is that it being a resource you expend and regain over time is not part of the source mythology. Was Jack Vance the first fantasy author to give magicians recharging spell points and call them "mana?" Did he actually introduce BOTH of fantasy gaming's go-to magic systems? Would be wild if so.

Not sure what else to say until I've read further into the story. Just explaining what it's about is work enough for now!

Leila Hann · Feb 21, 2025

Unfortunately, the "too much going on, nothing gets enough attention" issue only gets worse throughout the rest of the story, and it applies as much to characters as it does to worldbuilding. On top of that, the quality of the worldbuilding itself gets...I wouldn't say bad, but definitely not up to the standard I've come to expect from Vance.

I'm more sure than before that "The Dragon Masters" was a refinement of this story's concepts. Or at least, of some of its concepts. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that there's another later Vance story that refined the rest of them.

After making sure his men aren't riding high on victory because he's allergic to joy, Lord Faide consolidates power, appoints one of his family members as governor of the conquered fiefdom, and starts bringing his army back home to Fade Keep. It turns out that the first folk have set new traps and raised new obstacles in the path that the army took through their new growth the last time, and are no longer interested in negotiation. Not that Lord Faide even bothered to try; despite clamping down on everyone else's exuberance, he seems to have let victory go to his own head behind the mask.

...honestly, maybe they actually WOULD have been willing to talk again. Probably not, but maybe. They didn't even bother to check lol.

It turns out that the first folk have learned some new tricks that catch the humans totally by surprise. New tactics. New weapons. New psionic techniques. The first folk have figured out how to do something similar to the humans' demon-summoning, fortifying the bodies of their forward troops enough to temporarily shrug off arrows and darts and forcing Faide's army to close into melee. First folk are too small and weak to use bows that can match the humans' range, but they've come up with a truly brutal combination of bioengineered weapons to make up for that. Turns out they've gotten almost as good at manipulating animals as they are plants.

First, they've got these wasp-analogues that are trained to fly in a perfectly straight line when released from their sealed tubes and sting whatever they hit. Paralysis follows within seconds, and death within minutes. The wasps are foiled by metal armor, but only Faide's elite knights are wearing that, and the men in cloth and leather (not to mention the horses being ridden by the armored knights) drop left and right. Then, when the knights move to the front and come closer (delayed by the need to search for booby traps every step of the way), the first folk shoot them with these gumwads infested by flesh-eating mites that spread out over their armored bodies, find cracks and visor slits, and start burrowing into skin. The agony of this infestation is such that the stricken knights are compelled to tear off their armor to get at the mites, at which point there's a wasp-bullet already coming their way.

Combine that with the first folk having learned to use their own bodies' natural ability to produce an expanding foam as a weapon rather than just a defensive screen, blinding the soldiers when they get close and then disappearing backward in a defence-in-depth strategy, and, well.

There are first folk casualties. For all his many faults, Lord Faide does get to show off his chops as a tactician, quickly adapting to each new weapon of the first folk and managing to dish out some damage in return. He's a very accomplished military commander, and Vance manages to let him show that while still keeping him overwhelmed and disadvantaged due to sheer unfamiliarity with what he's facing.

The solution comes in the form of a suggestion by Sam Salazar, though it needs to be relayed by chief jinxman Huss in order for Faide to take it seriously. Back when Faide was getting mad at Sam for pushing buttons of unknown function on his hovercar's control panel, Sam briefly caused the car to levitate much higher off the ground than it normally ever does. If they do that again, and have the car drop flammable oil on the forest strip from outside of wasp range, maybe they can set a fire that the first folk can't put out in time. Granted, the only person who knows which buttons Sam pushed is Sam himself, so once Huss has talked Faide over to trying it he's forced to let Sam fly his ancestral vehicle again. And, it works. They burn a path through the forest barrier, and the first folk can do naught but contain the blaze at the sides using their foam spray, giving the army time to get through.

They still take a ton more casualties when the first folk attack their tail at the end. They DO manage to smother the flame and close again near the end of the humans' passage. When all is said and done, Faide has lost a third of his entire army; much higher losses than he suffered during the actual conquest. But they get through.

Lord Faide is enraged at the humiliation he suffered, and fearful of what comes next. The first folk have now learned that their new tactics and weaponry are indeed effective. Additionally, his loss of so many troops - including members of his own clan, who in typical feudal fashion make up the upper echelons of his command structure - has weakened his hard-won new status as emperor. As soon as they hear about his losses, some of his conquered territories begin eyeing Lord Faide with a new calculation.

Not that it's especially easy to sympathize with him or his loyalists because of this.

I lol'd. Maybe if you weren't still referring to them as "savages," they wouldn't still be thinking of you as "invaders." I dunno, it's just a thought.

Lord Faide thinks his best bet is to figure out how to make the first folk vulnerable to human magic. That might be theoretically possible, his jinxmen tell him, but practically impossible. Not only due to the physiological distance between humans and firstfolk, but also because of complete unfamiliarity with their lived experience, culture etc. Hein Huss lets Faide in on some secrets of magic that the jinxmen don't typically share with outsiders, regarding the degree to which "demons" and "curses" require the target's ability to understand a mental suggestion and willingness to believe what their subconscious is telling them. Notably, the effigies containing hair or skin flakes of the target to be cursed aren't actually strictly necessary; they just make it easier for the wizard to concentrate on the right person when they aren't physically in front of them, largely due to the wizard making an intuitive mental connection between doll and victim based on human tendencies to associate symbols with objects and body parts with living bodies.

Basically, under the ritualistic aesthetics, the magic of this setting is what a lot of science fiction calls "psionics" and provides technobabble justification for. Which means that this actually could be literally set in the same universe as "The Dragon Masters," since the Sacerdotes in that story had pseudoscience telepathy of a similar kind iirc. But anyway.

Hein Huss thinks that this entire idea should be dropped, but asshole Isak Comandore is eager to succeed at something that Huss refuses to do in the hopes of taking his place as Lord Faide's chief jinxman. So, both wizards - along with Sam Salazar, who asked to come along and help them make camp and stuff - end up going to learn more about first folk culture in the hopes of learning how to get their hooks in. And...here's where the worldbuilding and the pacing both kind of take a nosedive.

On the former: apparently, there are "forest markets" where firstfolk and humans trade with each other. This has been seemingly going on for centuries. Peaceful contact and trade, with livelihoods apparently being based on it. And yet, in all that time, no one has ever travelled to the first folk's own villages further out in the woods? Their culture is still a complete black box to humankind, despite the literal generations of friendly contact?

Now, this *could* be justified. We soon learn that the first folk are more innately psionic than humans (there must be something on this planet that encourages that to develop), and because of instinctive low-grade telepathy throughout their species they have much less sense of individuality. Their superhuman persistence comes from them essentially having a continuity of purpose that transcends lifetimes and local groups. Almost a hive mind, but not quite. So, with that factor in play, one could imagine that the first folk might be able to keep up trade with the humans for centuries while still coordinating to keep the rest of their society secret.

Except...they just let Huss, Comandore, and Salazar travel to one of their deep forest villages unopposed. They actually let them hitch a ride on a trade barge and bring them there themselves as long as they don't get in the way. And, when asked, politely tell them "oh yeah, we're planning to wipe you all out."

Yeah, apparently the humans didn't know about these giant water beetles that the firstfolk have bred over the last millennium and a half either. It comes as a total surprise, along with the rest of the selective breeding and psionic bioengineering projects that they've been conducting for centuries on end. Despite them literally using these engineered creatures to pull their trade boats to the market while hidden just underwater.

The loose-lipness of the first folk, by the way, is justified by them supposedly not seeing individuals as important, due to their more collective hive-ish perspective. But...it's also established that they've learned to communicate messages from individual to collective and disseminate information that way, so shouldn't that make them even MORE reluctant to let any human see what they're up to? Shouldn't they be paranoid about the human hive mind letting any of its eyes near them, to a degree that humans can never even experience paranoia at all?

Yeah. Sorry. No. I'm not buying it.

The pacing, meanwhile, suffers from the three wizards' time among the first folk being completely offscreen and told entirely in a few pages of retrospective summary from Huss when he makes his post-mission report to Lord Faide. The most interesting piece of worldbuilding in the entire novella, and it's just...mostly not in the novella at all. Genuinely jarring.

Vance also starts getting really, really heavyhanded about how antiscientific the current human settler culture is. Like, cartoonishly so.

Their word for "science" and their word for "irrationality" are literally the same word. Yeah, I'm not buying this either.

We do learn some interesting things about the first folk's militarization, at least. For instance, their bioengineering and more advanced toolmaking was inspired by seeing the sophisticated machines of the original human invaders, the very things that the humans themselves have come to dismiss. Likewise, their equivalent of demonic possession was inspired by human magic, but they can use the concentrated will of the hive itself to soup up their vanguard instead of making up "demons," making it much simpler to initiate the process and coordinate the possessed individuals.

Isak Comandore thinks he can try and get into the first folk's minds now, but Huss still thinks that they don't know what they're doing and that this is a bad idea. Also, um. Huss and Lord Faide have this conversation:

Remember, the only notable thing that Sam has done so far is remember "hey, we apparently have a flying machine, let's use it as a flying machine."

:/

I can see that winning him a lot of respect. But deciding, based on that, that he's the herald of a new age? Sorry Vance, you've got the beats of your nerd wish fulfilment fantasy where you show all the dumb jocks and doddering conservatives who's dick is really the biggest of them all out of order.

Anyway. Comandore tries to do a psychic intrusion on the firstfolk hive mind, and only succeeds at enraging them and causing them to move up their war timetable. They start attacking the humans all across the map. As Lord Faide and his advisors try to figure out what they should be doing about this, Sam Salazar reads the script and realizes that the most important thing for him to concentrate on right now is figuring out how to dissolve the first folk's foam. Why does he decide to study the foam, rather than trying to find an antidote to the wasp venom, or a chemical that repels the burrowing mites? Well, like I said, he read the script.

Huss seems to know an awful lot about how science used to be done. Interesting. Not interesting enough to make up for everything else, but interesting.

So, the first folk send an army at Faide Keep. Like the other ancestral castles, it's made from the hull of one of the humans' original starships, which is a cool detail. Faide tries to use the ancient laser cannon on the first folk, but it turns out that the maintenance his family has been doing on it for centuries wasn't nearly enough to keep a weapon of this grade functional, and in fact may have been actively damaging it. The big laser fizzles out after less than a quarter second of fire, inflicting only a handful of casualties. The first folk advance, this time using giant beetle and centipede like creatures as well as the previously seen bioweapons as shock forces. They flow across the land and destroy all in their path as they draw the net around Faide Keep.

The first folk don't have any way of penetrating the hull. However, they work together like a hive of army ants to assemble a foam covering around the fortress, peppering any would-be defenders with wasp and mite ammo to keep them suppressed. They're going to cover the entire fortress in foam, and then let it dry and harden and become airtight, suffocating all the humans within.

Fortunately, Sam Salazar has determined that while the foam isn't especially easy to burn and isn't washed away by water or alcohol, it is fairly alkaline, and reacts with common acids like vinegar. Well, he doesn't use the terms "acid" and "alkaline," but he learns that vinegar melts it. It was earlier established that Lord Faide's home territory has a lot of grape-farming in it, so wine and vinegar are things they have in large supply in storage.

They melt an air tunnel through the foam and manage to defend it. And then...erm...this happens:

The first folk agree to negotiate; now that the two species are capable of hurting each other in something like equal measure, they can now treat with each other as equals. The firsst folk are given freedom of navigation in their ancestral lowlands, and arrangements for shared land use start to be made. By listening to his advisors in this matter, Lord Faide is able to repair his reputation, and with the humans now unified under his rule there is a good environment for Sam and Huss' reinvention of science to spread around. Everyone agrees that Sam's dick really was the biggest all along. The end.

I mean, it's preferable to "and then the settlers used their rediscovered science to slaughter all the natives and lived happily ever after." On that front, this story didn't go nearly as bad as I was afraid it would. And, to be fair, the natives making a show of force like this is indeed a vital component in how injustices like this can and have historically been redressed.

But...it also wasn't really foreshadowed. The story wasn't about making peace with the natives. It being the solution to the main conflict, after spending the whole story focused on this science versus tradition conflict, is just...what the hell was the point of anything that came before?

If this story was going to be nerd revenge porn about science beating muscle, then the conflict should have just been intrahuman, with Sam helping his faction rediscover the use of their lost technology while the enemies are still limited in using their own by ignorance and superstition. If the story was going to be an anticolonial narrative about how building native strength is a necessary precursor to good faith negotiations with the conquerors, then the first folk should have been the protagonists. The story's titular focus only barely interacts with the story's primary conflict.

This, and most of the other problems I have with the story, all seem to be symptomatic of it just having too much going on. There's great material in here ("bug-controlling gnome aliens vs medieval humans with the odd laser gun" is the RTS game pitch I never knew I needed), but it didn't have enough room, and the story didn't know what it wanted to be the centrepiece.

That said? I wouldn't dream of calling it bad. It's mostly good. Just, also kind of frustrating.

Leila Hann · Feb 25, 2025

This review was commissioned by @ArlequineLunaire

"Burning Hearts on the Road" makes me considerably less comfortable with this series than I was after the pilot. Not because Keiichi behaves any differently. Not because Belldandy behaves any differently. It's more of a troubling recontextualization than any kind of change or escalation.

Apparently, the episode I skipped contains a major development in the form of Belldandy's big sister Urd having moved in with the gang. We're still going with the Norse fate goddesses for naming inspiration, I guess. From context, it seems that Urd has been temporarily banished from the divine realm for some kind of transgression, and is crashing with Belldandy, Keiichi, and Keiichi's sister Megumi in their reclaimed shrine for a while. Then, early in this episode, we're introduced to Belldandy's other sister, Skuld, who comes to join the others out of loneliness with both her sisters away.

I love the character design here, with them all falling alone a spectrum of height, skin tone, and hair color, with the "past" goddess being the tallest and most weathered and the "future" one being the smallest and youngest looking. Lots of little details in each of their appearances that help support the theming. But, regardless.

Skuld and Urd do not act like Belldandy. At all. Both of them are far more human, with humanlike priorities and humanlike self-interest. Urd thinks that Belldandy's devotion to a mortal is unwarranted, and that the domestic labor she performs for them is beneath her. Skuld desperately misses Belldandy, and feels betrayed that her sister would abandon her divine family in favor of this human lover. When either of them confront Belldandy about this, her answer is always something to the effect of "I'm sorry, but I need to obey the terms of the wish, it's what I want to do."

If it's what she actually *wants* to do, why does she need to appeal to the rules to justify her decision?

The fact that Urd and Skuld have emotive faces and their voice actors put some passion and feeling into these conversations, while Belldandy retain these dully placid expressions and sounds like she's half asleep when speaking her answers, doesn't do anything to help.

The most charitable interpretation of this is that Belldandy had been looking for an excuse to flee her home and family and Keiichi's wish provided her with one. But I don't think that's the intended one, and it's not the most intuitive one either.

The main plot for the episode involves Keiichi being roped into yet another task he doesn't want to do by his "senpais" within the motor racing team. I'm not sure how and why these people still have any leverage on him, after they threw him and Belldandy out on the street and the two of them found better accommodations off-campus on their own, but apparently Keiichi still can't say no to them. They tell him he's going to be participating in a bike race against a highly aggressive rival league, and give him a bunch of parts that they instruct him to assemble into a racing bike with unreasonably high specs by the date.

Including a twin-engine setup that doesn't even properly fit into the vehicle frame.

Also, apparently the Chief Senpai made a bet with the leader of the opposing league. The bet being that if the opponents win, Belldandy has to join their team. And...the leader of said opposing team is a comically unpleasant Karate Kid-esque villain who seems to be taking it for granted that if Belldandy is on his team, it means she'll necessarily be taking his D.

I swear I've seen this guy in memes before.

I'm not sure how that follows, personally. I guess the logical inference would be that he's banging all of his teammates on the reg, and that Belldandy would need to participate in this tradition in order to be a proper member.

Also, what the hell is Chief Senpai getting if Keiichi wins the race? Presumably someone bangable, but come on show, we need the deets!

Now, Japan might be weird, and the sitcom logic here might allow things to be even weirder, but Keiichi still knows limits when he sees them. He points out that this stupid bet between two guys she barely knows isn't binding on Belldandy. But, Belldandy herself agrees to the terms, over Keiichi's, Skuld's, and Urd's disbelieving objections. Promises are sacred, and must be kept whenever possible. If she can prevent a promise from having been broken, she feels obligated to do so.

Once again, her own sisters - goddesses like her, who have known her for their whole lives - find this as deranged as Keiichi does. However, at no point - either in this scene or in the rest of the runtime - does the episode make the logical next step and have people ask Belldandy wtf is even wrong with her, or have the others sit down together and try to figure out what's up with her. This isn't treated as a character flaw of Belldandy's; if anything, the framing leans more toward the others just not being too impure to comprehend her.

...

You know, if it turns out that Belldandy just has an extreme submissive fetish that her sisters are weirded out by, and the only reason she's going through with all of this because it makes her wet, that would actually redeem this.

It wouldn't just make the story more palatable than the alternative. It would also make the story make more sense than the alternative.

...

Granted, Belldandy is also supremely confident that Keiichi will win anyway. To a degree that suggests she might be planning to use magic to cheat. So, that might be a mitigating factor.

The racing plot and the Skuld introduction come together when Skuld turns out to have technology powers. The show apparently is going a bit deeper than just name-level with the Fates naming, with Urd having some old fashioned mannerisms and often invoking spirits of the ancient past and the like, and Skuld having a futuristic scifi vibe to her powers and childishness to her personality. Erm...I don't know what the hell Belldandy's characterization is trying to say about the present, looking at her in the context of the other two, but I digress. Urd's technomancy allows her to build a motorcycle to the impossible specs mandated by the senpais using the hardware given.

However, Urd also realizes that if Keiichi loses the race and Belldandy has to join the other bike racing sex cult whatsit, Keiichi might not want her anymore. At which point, she'll be free of her obligations to him and can return home like Urd wants. So, Urd decides to sabotage the bike.

When the race happens, the resolution is...a little anticlimactic. When she sees Belldandy cheer enthusiastically for Keiichi, and then start looking genuinely fearful and horrified when the sabotage kicks in and it looks like he might lose, Skuld becomes remorseful. Realizing that this actually is important to Belldandy and not just an obligation for her, Skuld does...something? Or else maybe Belldandy does, I'm not sure...that magically causes the rival racer's bike to fail harder than Keiichi's does, letting Keiichi beat him.

So, Belldandy doesn't have to join the other jerk's motorcycle sex cult, and Skuld decides to stay at the shrine with her sisters so as to not be lonely. End episode.

Belldandy actually seeming to be afraid of what would happen if Keiichi loses unfortunately weakens my "she gets off on this" interpretation. So, that leaves us with...what, exactly?

Meeting Belldandy's sisters and learning that they're NOT like her - and not even inhuman in different ways than her, like you might expect from goddesses with different purviews - makes it hard to not conclude that there's something wrong with Belldandy and that she shouldn't be put in these kinds of situations. It's hard to have a sympathetic view of Keiichi or his feelings for her in light of this. But I'm pretty sure the show wants me to be totally on his side.

It's the same problems I had with "Bewitched" all over again, only without the queer/racial subtext and with more weird misogyny of the "fetishized infantilism" persuasion.

The next couple of episodes...well, they're different. Very different. I'll cover them in another post.

Leila Hann · Feb 27, 2025

Episodes 4 and 5 of the OVA are basically a two-part finale. OVAs are almost always compressed significantly from their manga source material, but this is an extreme case. The "Oh My Goddess!" manga ran monthly for over twenty-five years. Five of those years had already passed by the time the OVA came out. The first three OVA episodes adapt three introductory story arcs from right at the beginning of the manga, and then the last two are a completely original ending for the story written with minimal input from the mangaka and jammed in right after the introduction. No middle part. No act 2.

Add in the fact that the ending two-parter is a major tonal departure from the adapted material, abandoning the comedy almost entirely and doubling down on drama (and also trying to make these magic-technobabble elements that it introduces out of nowhere suddenly be super important), and it makes the OVA a bewildering and confounding experience as a whole. It ends as soon as it's gotten fully started. Also, the two-part finale's plot doesn't even make sense.

That said, this finale does make Belldandy a much more relatable character, which by proxy also makes Keiichi look a lot better. And also makes the writers look a lot better, assuming the first few episodes are faithful adaptations of the source manga.

"Evergreen Holy Night" starts with Keiichi having a nightmare. He's about to propose to Belldandy, when suddenly she announces that because of some arcane rules beyond his understanding she will now be returning to heaven and never seeing him again. Her entry into his life was incomprehensible and unpredictable, from his perspective, so who's to say that her exit from it won't be likewise?

The subtext of this nightmare is as important as the text. Belldandy has the same neutrally cheerful expression on her face that she usually does, and her voice is the usual clonked-on-the-head monotone. Suggesting that she never loved him, or was even capable of experiencing love in the way humans do, and that everything about her behavior since the first scene of the pilot has been affected in order to comply with his wish. They never had anything, and he was never anything to her.

He wakes up in a cold sweat and finds her making breakfast the same as always, but the underlying anxiety here is...well, it's totally justified. Like, seriously, looking at their relationship logically, this probably is exactly what he's afraid it is. The only possible alternative I can think of is that Belldandy got a crush on him while observing from the spirit world, and set up the whole goddess relief program thing in order to create a legal excuse for herself to go be with him. Which is possible, and watching this unfold while knowing that it's a story it seems like a twist an author might well deploy, but from an in-universe perspective it wouldn't seem terribly likely.

...

The funny thing? That's almost what this finale actually goes with.

It doesn't go with it. It goes with something kinda-sorta adjacent to it that makes much less sense. I was slightly disappointed and extremely confused by the actual backstory for Belldandy and Keiichi, in large part because of how easily it could have been made better.

...

The plot itself kicks off with an unseasonal snowstorm descending on the shrine. Unseasonal, and also seemingly limited to just the one neighbourhood. The anomalous freeze is followed by other temperature fluctuations, magnetic fluctuations, and eventually objects randomly moving or shattering without warning. The culprits turn out to be these little rabbit-spider yokai that Skuld refers to simply as "bugs."

In episode 3 we briefly saw Skuld hunting one of these things and bashing it to death with the sledgehammer she always carries around. We now learn that these creatures are living glitches in the software of the universe, and that - as a goddess with an engineering purview - Skuld is one of the spirits tasked with culling them when detected.

There shouldn't be so many bugs showing up in one place in the mortal world. Hell, they don't usually manifest on Earth at all. When more of them keep spawning and local physics keep hiccupping as a result, Skuld breaks out the heavy magitech sensors to try and get to the bottom of this. And, apparently, there's a hole in reality hovering between Keiichi and Belldandy, and whenever the two of them interact too closely it starts shitting more of these bugs out.

Keiichi's recent dream makes him very, very nervous about where this could be leading. For now though, they decide to just have Keiichi and Belldandy avoid being in the same room for a while until Skuld can figure out what's causing this.

Shit gets more serious than that, though, when Belldandy gets a call from her father. He's apparently some kind of major divinity. Perhaps even the major divinity. He looks...both very detailed character design, and very much not what you'd probably expect.

The fact that he has such an elaborate design and yet only gets less than a minute of screentime in this entire two-parter leads me to surmise that he's a major recurring character in the manga, and the OVA writers managed to squeeze in a bit role for him.

In any case, unnamed god-daddy tells Belldandy that the bug situation at her location is starting to get really worrying, and that he's going to have to give her a wish-countermanding recall notice until such a time as they can stop this from happening. It will take him three days to open the portal to summon Belldandy back to heaven through (I guess going there is a lot more complicated than travelling the other way). If she and her sisters can figure out how to solve the problem on their own before then, great. In any case, she and Keiichi are to stay out of each other's presence until the situation is resolved one way or another.

Belldandy is crestfallen, and tries to argue with him about this. The question of whether she's getting emotional because she actually likes Keiichi or because she's failing to be helpful to someone who thought she would keep helping them or because she's just loathe to break a contract, of course, keeps casting its shadow over her behavior.

From here on out, the two-parter is mostly split between Keiichi and Belldandy pining for each other from across the shrine as the former wonders if this will really be the end and whether or not he's been living a lie, and Urd and Skuld trying to come up with a technical solution to the problem before the three days are up.

And um...then there's this bizarre scene where Skuld and Urd determine that this big cherry tree growing near the shrine is somehow related to the problem. The camera slowly pans up at it amid creepy music and unsettling lighting effects, like it's the tree from "Poltergeist" or something.

I don't know if this is on the localization or the writing, but there's a gigantic disconnect in the exposition here. Apparently, this tree has some kind of aberrant energy sealed inside of it that's attracting the bugs. However, nobody says what that could have to do with Belldandy and Keiichi. If the tree is the source of the problem, how did it end up extending into their relationship? If their relationship is the source of the problem, how did it end up extending into this particular tree? Nobody even raises these questions.

Also, if the tree is part of the problem, shouldn't that change the entire calculus of the situation? Shouldn't their divine father be reconsidering what measures need to be taken in light of this new information? Apparently not.

...

Well, okay. There's a moment at the beginning of "For the Love of Goddess" when Urd tries to inform their father of the tree development. Which he's apparently not aware of on his own, despite having mysteriously learned about everything else that happened while it was happening. But she can't get through to him, because he has a new secretary who doesn't recognize the sound of Urd's voice on the phone and won't put her through to him.

That's what we're going with? Well, um. Okay I guess.

It seem like she gives up awfully fast, too. And neither of her sisters are shown trying to attempt this on their own. So I really am not sure what to make of this.

Especially given that this two-parter otherwise eschews comedy almost completely. If this was more like the early episodes, this could have been a decent throwaway gag. With the situation being treated this seriously though, all I can think is "why did they give up after just the one Urd call?"

...

As a final baffling detail, when the tree is pointed out to Belldandy she lets out a gasp of horrified shock and starts staring at the tree in mute, trembling terror before stammering out some incoherent words of dread and disbelief and then running away and ignoring everyone's demands for an explanation.

On one hand, it's a well-executed "shit has gotten serious" moment that increases the mystery and anxiety of the situation.

On the other hand...this tree is literally growing a dozen meters away from the building they've all been living in. It's been there this entire time. It's a big tree, you can't miss it. I can't believe that pointing it out to Belldandy would make her react as if she saw it murder her entire family in front of her, but that she didn't even notice it at all for the entire time up until then.

The explanation we eventually get...um...I'm not sure that you can even say that this gets an explanation at all. The tree does play a minor role in the twist backstory that gets revealed in "For the Love of Goddess," but not a role that seems like it should merit this metaphysical weight, and absolutely not a role that should make Belldandy see it as the monster under her bed.

And then, um. Urd and Skuld try doing this magic ritual in front of the tree that's apparently highly illegal to perform without authorization and that would get them the kami equivalent of felony charges if they got caught.

Is it just me, or does that look an awful lot like Brothar's philostone-breaker?

This culminates in a weird sequence of events where they try to use the illegal superglyph to exorcise whatever's in the tree, while simultaneously the portal manifests and starts trying to suck Belldandy up away from Keiichi while both of them struggle for each other, and um...this causes an explosion that almost kills Keiichi and then Belldandy has to do inception and go into his mind to foqdsqfljislfdnjd

Okay. Whatever. I literally cannot make sense of this resolution. So I'll just go into the revealed backstory stuff that also doesn't make sense, but is at least the sort of nonsense that I can summarize in text.

When Keiichi was a kid, his family took a vacation to the area where the shrine is located. At the same time, Belldandy - herself a child at the time. I thought she and her sisters were a hell of a lot older than that, but apparently not - ran away from home to Earth and they ended up meeting under that tree. They spent a week being cute preteens together.

At the end of that week, Belldandy got caught. As a punishment for her unauthorized playtime on Earth, she was made to erase Keiichi's memories of their time together herself.

...

Once again, this would lead in really well to a twist of Belldandy long having chafed under her father's authority and the divine society in general, latching onto Keiichi on account of his connection with the one escape from it that she'd ever had, and then setting up the Goddess Relief Hotline incident knowing how it would play out. That would make perfect sense. It would also make Belldandy a much more interesting character, and while her feelings for Keiichi might not be healthy per se they'd at least be genuine in a way that makes sense.

Maybe that is in fact what the viewer is supposed to read from between the lines.

However, it is never made explicit. As far as the show ever SAYS, the Goddess Relief call was an astronomically unlikely coincidence that happened to see Belldandy and Keiichi reunited.

For that matter, there's absolutely nothing in the episodes before this two-parter to imply that Belldandy already knew Keiichi before the pilot. The only thing that could be seen as foreshadowing for this is how Belldandy guided him to this particular shrine to move into in the pilot, but even there the causality is unclear.

...

Apparently, Keiichi starting to recover his suppressed memories after living with Belldandy for a while is what caused the reality distortion bugs to start showing up. But then the SOLUTION to it ends up being to...go into his head and restore those memories, rather than erasing them more thoroughly. I don't know. This is some of the most stream-of-consciousness plotting I've ever seen. Anyway they all live happily ever after or something.

On one hand, I feel like this finale does more to humanize Belldandy, or at least rewrite the story around her in a way that could hypothetically let her be humanized. On the other hand, it's almost completely incoherent.

My monthly fast lane order for this January is the first few episodes of the later 2000's OMG adaptation, so I think I'll dive into that next for compare and contrast. With how inane the direction the OVA creators took this in was, I'm not even sure what the hell I can say about it until I've seen some more material.

Leila Hann · Mar 2, 2025

This review was fast lane commissioned by Aris Katsaris.

I can't say how faithful this series is to the manga, but it's definitely much more in-depth than the OVA. The four episodes of OMG2005 I just watched only barely catch up to the ending of the first OVA episode, and introduce some major plot elements that either weren't present at all in the OVA or were brushed passed in literal seconds. The pacing of the later series definitely has a more "adapted from a serial manga" feel to it, for sure.

Now, as for the story...there's a lot of stuff going on here that I wasn't expecting. A whole framing context that the OVA completely left out, that turns Oh My Goddess into a different type of story. Well, sort of. I have mixed feelings about how it all fits together. On one hand, it's a story exploring the concept of "fate," what it would really mean to have capricious metaphysical forces deny you your agency, and how one might find self-actualization even in such circumstances. On the other hand, it's a "magical girlfriend, wut do?" story. These two components have very little to do with each other, at least in the four episodes I've seen, and you can probably guess which of them interests me much, much more than the other.

Honestly, the "u get a girlfriend" aspect is skeevier here than it was in the OVA. On top of it feeling like a distraction from better things now.

The series starts out with a conversation between the three Fate sisters, spoken over a cosmic panorama of galaxies and stars. They discuss a particular mortal, a resident of a particular country on a particular planet, who has fallen under the sway of a malignant star. He is fated to suffer, fail, and be taken advantage of, his gifts and good intentions coming to naught no matter what he does. It is beyond his power, or the power of any of those around him, to counteract this. His fate is twisted, the symptom of a metaphysical snarl with no physical solution (the cosmic system of fate is referred to as "Yggdrassil," in an extra bit of mythic continuity). In such cases, the fates typically intervene in the mortal's life at some point, trying to equalize the problem with the granting of a wish.

So, right off the bat, this changes everything. The scope of the change only gets more apparent as time goes on. Keiichi isn't just some luckless underdog here, he's literally cursed. More interestingly, his cursed status isn't ended by Belldandy's insertion into his life. The misfortune continues to pull and claw at him, episode after episode. He and Belldandy have a constant battle to fight, with her magic and his ever-more-precarious optimism and good nature pushing and pulling against conspiring fate.

Well. The sitcom-friendly version of conspiring fate, at least. Keiichi has family that seem to care about him at least a little, hasn't suffered any horrible disabling or disfiguring accidents, and hasn't been targeted by any predatory psychopath types. Maybe fate just still hasn't pulled out the big guns yet, or maybe we're just keeping this light for genre reasons.

That's not to say that Keiichi's life is great, to be clear. It's pretty unpleasant and depressing, much more obviously so than in the OVA version (his peers are outright abusive toward him rather than just apathetic, for the most part. He's constantly on the brink of being broke due to the accidents, mishaps, and lot opportunities that plague him. His unusually small size is actually noted and commented on, with clear disfavor, by other characters. Etc). Just, there are definitely people much worse off than him in the world. Then again, his badass podcycle never works properly, which means that instead of the pussy magnet he usually has to drive around on this:

...okay, you know what? I take it back. The tiny motorbike is also a pussy magnet. Different form, but they both fit the function.

The weirdo musclebound motorbike club that he lives with is portrayed much more antagonistically, and also are noted in-universe to be a bunch of cultish weirdos by the rest of the student body. They're perpetually too broke to actually do much motorcycle construction or repair, so most of the time they just lift weights, talk about the bikes that they're theoretically racing on, and act weird about women. Not in the creepy way; more of a gradeschooler-afraid-of-cooties way. This does provide some context for why Keiichi and Belldandy get thrown out of the club's dorm/townhouse/whatever for the latter's existence.

The night that Keiichi meets Belldandy, he's holding down the fort and waiting for a phone call for Boss Senpai to make up for messing up a club fundraiser earlier that day (or rather, serving as a scapegoat for its failure).

Also, the club leader is named as Toraichi here, but that's okay, he'll always be Boss Senpai to me.

Also also, after throwing Keiichi and Belldandy out on the streets for getting cooties in their MGTOW fortress, the bike club senpais start trying to woo her out from under him the next time they meet the couple. Great guys, truly.

Quite a number of people are trying to break Keiichi and Belldandy up, actually. The senpais. Other random jealous boys. Other random jealous girls who don't like Belldandy getting all the attention. Etc. In all cases, they are stopped by a combination of neither of the two being interested in breaking up, and by the intervention of the "system force." The system force is a binding, metaphysical power that ensures that the recipient of Belldandy's wish gets what they asked for, in this case for Belldandy to be with Keiichi forever. The system force does confuse me a bit with how it defines its terms. In some situations, it seems to take the wording of the wish literally, causing events to conspire to stop Keiichi and Belldandy from ever physically being out of sight of one another. In others, it interprets their "togetherness" romantically, and punishes would-be homewreckers with twists of cursed fate like an overprotective parent when they get too meddlesome. This actually serves as another source of comedic drama; the system force causes more and more dramatic events the longer the threat to Keiichi and Belldandy's togetherness persists for, so the two of them sometimes need to scramble to prevent it from literally collapsing buildings on people when they get pushy enough.

So, that gives the whole thing more of an actual plot with conflicts and stakes. And it's a clever setup that allows for all sorts of shenanigans and gags, ranging from merely silly to dramatic and spectacular.

The themes of fate, luck, and karma interplay heavily with both of the leading personalities. From the beginning, Keiichi lives up to the Norns' opening descriptions of him as a man who gives and gives without ever being given anything in return. Despite his terrible luck, low-to-nonexistent social status, and beaten-down-to-the-point-of-meekness demeanour, Keiichi remains proactively kind and helpful to everyone around him. Granted, in some situations this comes across less as him being good and more as him being spineless. A lot of pop culture from the 80's and 90's, on both sides of the pond, had trouble distinguishing between these two things. In other situations though - such as when he goes out of his way, despite being in a bad situation himself, to help a little girl find a wallet she lost on the other side of the stripmall - he really does seem like a guy who truly deserves a break. In fact, part of what Belldandy's magic does is allow Keiichi's positive energy to rebound back on him as it should rather than dissipating into the ether due to his star-curse. The wallet incident happens the day before Belldandy's appearance. The following day, when her and Keiichi are homeless and hungry, Belldandy casts one of her spells, and that same little girl's family happens to run into them, and treats the two of them to lunch for helping their daughter last night.

It's an interesting philosophical premise. We *should* live in a just world, but there's some kind of metaphysical corruption that prevents it from being so, with entities like Belldandy doing their best to keep the corruption under control. It's a premise that would have a lot to answer for if you zoomed out and showed more of the world with all the horrors and injustices it contains, but FOR a small-scale supernatural sitcom about this struggling college kid it's much more palatable.

As I said before, there's also a thread running through the story about agency. And...well...here's where my feelings get more mixed. Keiichi's side of this is fine, for the most part. Him learning how to meet the powers of fate halfway, using the breathing room afforded to him by Belldandy to make decisions and stand up to people and dealing with potential System Force reactions in the manner of his own choosing, is pretty nice stuff. As for Belldandy though...yeesh.

Belldandy gets to show a lot more sides to herself in these episodes, and she comes across as a much more complete (if not quite human) entity. She makes her own observations and draws her own (often bizarre, but also oddly insightful) conlusions about the human world as she gets used to it. Her ability to read people's minds and nonchalance about this invasion of privacy keeps an unsettling edge about her, despite the unrelenting sweetness (though the effect would be stronger if the show was more consistent about her being able to do this, heh). For her, the laws of fate are as intuitive and natural as the laws of physics are for us, and - while she herself is bound by it via the System Force in some ways - she also sees herself as its master. She's like an engineer, and her spells are akin to her building machines of destiny.

This subtextual commonality between her and Keiichi is embodied by the scene where she magically soups up his podcycle (the major repairs were actually done on it by the senpais, as a rare gesture of genuine kindness before they threw him out) and switches her goddess regalia for a conjured biker outfit (which she rocks, by the way). Them riding together on a machine that they both had a hand in bringing to life is a pretty solid symbol.

The Norse trappings might go a little further than they did in the OVA, but Belldandy is still more of a Shinto-style kami overall than she is a Norn. The particular style of animism she often interacts with is very Japanese flavored. For instance, the story of how they end up living in that shrine is the subject of one and a half episodes in this version, and starts with her invoking the resident spirit of a two thousand yen note to guide them to further prosperity.

When the bill gets blown out of Keiichi's hand by the wind, Belldandy's spell hiijacks that bad luck and turns it into good luck. Driving after the flying bill leads them to the temple, where the overworked priest initially hires them to help him restore the building and grounds, and then yeilds it to them entirely when he catches a glimpse of Belldandy's true form when she goes out to (literally) stretch her wings one night.

He very reasonably concludes that this literal divine being and her companion are probably better suited to this job than he is, especially when he's already fallen behind on its upkeep in his age.

Unfortunately, there's also another side to Belldandy's relationships with both the forces of fate and with Keiichi. Mostly apparent in one particular scene, but given that it's arguably the most important scene in the entire series it casts a very long shadow. So...honestly, this might ruin the entire thing for me.

When Belldandy first appears to Keiichi in the Motorbike MGTOW fortress, he's much further into the side of actually believing her when he makes his wish. She shows him a few displays of supernatural power before he makes it, and he's engaging in her scenario at least half-seriously. And then, when he wishes to have her by his side forever, she looks absolutely horrified.

Then, while Keiichi is trying to figure out what he just did and what the consequences of it actually are, Belldandy hurries to the phone and asks her divine father (in both series, you can apparently call heaven via landline) if such a wish really is valid. When the answer is affirmative, she tries to argue with him, tries to extend the conversation, but then he just says goodbye and hangs up.

For a moment, she's just crouched over the phone with her back to the camera, completely silent. Then, when she turns back around again in a few seconds, her face looks like this:

She tells Keiichi how happy she is that she'll get to spend the rest of his life with him, and he immediately starts freaking out over how he's going to be able to handle this.

At no point, in this scene or afterward, does he ask if she's really okay with this. Even after her initial reaction making it really, really seem like she's NOT okay with this.

Is she putting on a brave face and affecting cheer in order to avoid triggering System Force consequences? Does her worldview simply force her to accept twists of fate that she can't change and make the best of them, even if it's painful? Or was her personality actually just rewritten in order to turn her into the thing Keiichi was wishing for, regardless of her previous self's strong desire for that to not happen?

For the rest of the ensuing two and a half episodes, Keiichi is always worrying after Belldandy's comfort and accommodations. But he never even questions whether or not she wants to be here with him in the first place. Or shows any acknowledgement that that's a question that should - or even can - be asked. He shows concern for the wishes and agency of minor female characters who they encounter along the way, but the series itself doesn't seem to think that Belldandy's position here falls into the same category. The strong impression I get is that the story thinks that women are people unless and until they belong to a man. Then, they're people except where their commitment to the man they belong to is concerned, and there's nothing that even needs to be questioned or considered there, it's just an intuitive fact of life. There are periodic moments in the later two episodes where the story reminds you of this. When Belldandy's unfamiliarity with the human world makes her need to lean on Keiichi for guidance, and he worries about being able to ensure her happiness, and the question of "should she even be here with you at all then?" seems like it's begging to be asked, but no one asks it. That's on top of the creepiness of the "born sexy yesterday and you're her daddy" vibes that these sequences had for me in both versions.

When it comes to a man's view of romantic relationships...another thing that bothered me in the first episode and change is Keiichi periodically bemoaning his lack of a girlfriend, and imagining that having a partner would make life worth it. On one hand, having a significant other is awesome, sure. On the other hand though...I remember being a put-upon teenager who thought that romance was what my life needed. I remember my first relationship in college, and how it didn't change who I was, or my problems with myself, or the broader difficulties of my life. That relationship and the one after it would have both been longer and more successful if I'd prioritized my nonromantic social life and broadened myself as a person for its own sake, instead of thinking of getting a girlfriend as The One Thing I Really Needed. It's a mental trap that a lot of younger AMAB people fall into, and it's a bad one. And, here, it's just rewarded.

Combine these two issues, and then have the girlfriend *actually* be able to manipulate fate to improve his life for him, and the whole setup gets...creepy. To the point where it hangs over the entire story like a toxic miasma and prevents me from taking the rest at face value.

There's a great story in here about luck, fortune, and agency. It being bound at the hip to "submissive magic girlfriend, wut do?" in this particular way is deeply unfortunate. I'd like it a lot more if Belldandy was a more conventional guardian angel or wish-granting genie instead of a girlfriend, and the story tackled all the same themes and hypotheticals from that base.

Leila Hann · Mar 6, 2025

This review was commissioned by Aris Katsaris.

For the most part, the first act of Arcane's second season is exactly what you'd expect. This is an intentionally double-edged description.

Where the first season left off, it seemed like most of the dramatic questions had been answered, and the themes brought to their conclusion. With Silco dead and no provisions in place to keep the undercity together without him, Zaun is essentially ungoverned. Piltover, likewise, has lost most or all of its chief governing body in Jinx's attack, and any surviving leadership will find themselves unlikely to trust Zaun with independence even if they still had anyone to negotiate with. Vi and Powder are probably irreconcilable now, if Powder is even capable of reconciliation with anyone about anything now that she's gone fully "Jinx." Catelyn and Heimerdinger learned their lessons too late. Councilor Medarda's warlord mother, Ambessa, is perfectly poised to de facto take over Piltover and turn it into her private arms manufacturing complex after crushing Zaun for them.

And, at least for the first act of season 2, that's pretty much exactly what happens.

There are some curveballs. Some interesting character arcs that don't flow purely from the initial premise. There's also one developing subplot that is mostly independent of the broader politics (which is a mixed blessing in practice). But, for the most part, this feels like an extended post-credits sequence after Jinx blows up the tower. There being a lot more long, artsy stretches that are high on visual interest but low on story progression adds to this impression.

I like the long art shift interludes, to be clear. They're very stylish and evocative. Some of them are outright music videos, and quality ones at that. But the much, much higher concentration of them than the previous season's - combined with the very extended scenes of people sitting around mourning the deaths of characters who died in the S1 finale that partially overlaps with it - feels like filler in an act that just doesn't have enough story to go around.

I don't want to overstate these misgivings. There are still two thirds of a season left to go, and it's possible the creators just struggled to fill out this transitional phase of the plot. The substance that is present is generally up to the high standard set by the previous season. It just feels like there's not enough of it.

There are four main plotlines going on through S2A1, some of them much more closely interwoven than others.

The Politicians

The hex-rocket attack ended up killing a lot fewer people than one might have expected. Three members of the ruling council, including Caitelyn's mother, were killed in the explosion, and several others wounded. Medarda Junior (I think her first name is Mel?) looked like she was standing in just the right spot for the warhead to detonate inside of her literal skull, but apparently it went over her shoulder or something, because she survived. So too did Jayce, and (unfortunately for everyone else) Medarda Senior, Ambessa.

In the wake of the attack, and with Jayce preoccupied by both a grieving Caitelyn and a dying Victor, Mel suddenly finds herself in a truly unfamiliar situation as the one voice of reason within what's left of Piltover's government. The other remaining councillors really don't want to hear that this was all the work of a single disgruntled ex-legbreaker of Silco's and that there's no big enemy they can bring their full forces to bear against. It doesn't help that her mother has basically bought out one of the other surviving councillors, a previously unimportant character named Salo, and is using him as a native frontman for her attempts to use a military-adjacent crisis to take over Piltover and begin full-scale hexweapon production.

Well, she uses him as a "front" for as long as she can help herself. Even moreso than her daughter, Ambessa is the type who has trouble staying out of the spotlight.

When things don't go their way quite fast enough, Ambessa and Salo get some help in the form of a Zaunite terror attack on the memorial ceremony for the lost councilors. A pretty big attack too; multiple shimmer-berserkers using Silco's old battlesuits, infiltrators in police uniforms to kick things off, and a weaponized civilian blimp. Jayce, already barely functional with everything he has going on, has his most painful moment yet when one of the terrorists turns out to be the mother of the little boy he accidentally killed during his abortive raid on the shimmer labs, and she's gunning for him in particular. She even manages to injure him before going down.

While a lot of the successful defence was done by Vi and Caitelyn (who happened to be in attendance in honor of the latter's mother), the final mopup is done by Ambessa and her retinue who arrive in the most perfectly dramatic moment to make themselves look imposing and impressive.

The show treats the revelation that she helped orchestrate this attack as a big reveal at the end of episode 3, but...come on seriously lol. It was so obvious that I was half-convinced the shocking eleventh hour twist would be that she wasn't involved.

I'm also kinda narrowing my eyes at the fact that nobody besides her own daughter seems to suspect her, despite their being an openly acknowledged mystery about how they could have pulled something this big off without inside help and Ambessa being both a) the one person best positioned to benefit from it, and b) a literal foreign despot who's been throwing her weight around and openly expressing frustration at not getting the civil war she wants yet.

Yeah...

I did enjoy watching Mel engage in spycraft and politicking trying to prove her mother and Salo's meddling over the following episodes, at least. The subplot stemming from this is engaging and well-written, and it's a big ironic enjoyment watching Mel get pushed into a redemption arc in reaction to her mother's awfulness being right up in her face again.

We also get a few glimpses of the enemy that Ambessa is desperate to tech up against, and with it an answer to one of the worldbuilding questions I asked in my season one reviews. The Medarda homeland of Noxus is apparently a semi-balkanized Holy Roman Empire kind of place, and they're just one of several dominant families. The people who Ambessa and her late son foolishly picked a fight with are a magic-using Noxian faction called the Black Rose. So, I asked where are all those dangerous wizards that we've heard about are supposed to be in the present day, and now I have an answer.

They make a failed assassination attempt on Ambessa during her stay in Piltover. And then, near the end of episode three, they manage to abduct Mel, presumably under the mistaken impression that they can use her as leverage against her mother.

The Black Rose is portrayed entirely from an external, adversarial perspective, and to all appearances they're exactly the kind of ruthless, power-mad wizards that Heimerdingger warned us about. On the other hand though, this is almost exactly what the show did with the Firelights before revealing who and what they actually were in S1A3 in the wake of them abducting someone, so I'm reserving judgement on the Black Rose until we see what they're actually doing with Mel.

The Poison

Catelyn. I wanted to like you, Catelyn. I really did want to like you. The sad thing is that I don't know if I can actually call what happens to her in these episodes a corruption arc, because it increasingly seems like this is what she really was all along.

Scratch this girl:

And this one bleeds:

Yes, the final scene of this act literally has Catelyn putting on an ersatz SS trenchcoat as she assumes leadership of Piltover's now Noxus-aligned police enforcers.

Catelyn had my sympathies for the first episode. Her mother wasn't a character the audience was ever given a chance to sympathize with, and her family as a whole has been portrayed as thoroughly unpleasant, but still, she just lost her mother to both a) the same criminal she'd been failing to arrest and b) her lover's precious little sister. But with her family and government's social pressures all pushing her to process it a certain way, and Vi not doing the best job at being a mitigating influence, everything she'd been learning about Zaun goes out the window. The unaccountable violence and brutality that her fellow enforcers have inflicted on Zaun for decades vanishes in the face of the personal pain she's suffered now. When the not-even-remotely-suspicious terror attack strikes her mother's memorial service and she has to be one of the people fighting for their lives against souped-up Silcoists, she can't understand what sort of animals would do this. She wonders that right in front of Vi, and only barely backs off when Vi reminds her that enforcers killed her parents and burned her neighbourhood to the ground in front of her.

Catelyn feels the base violence necessary for change, but she won't see the base violence necessary for preventing change. Even when she starts enthusiastically performing it herself.

As for Vi, well...her role in this arc is weird. Largely as a consequence of her role in the previous arc being weird.

In S1A3, Vi was the one agitating for the council to send an army at Silco's infrastructure, accompanied said army, and then got mad at Jayce when he got cold feet from the collateral damage. I said at the time that I had trouble believing this coming from her at this point in her life. And...it seems like the story ALSO had trouble believing it, because come the beginning of season 2 she's suddenly acting the way I'd have expected her to act all along. Pushing for a light hand with minimal disruption to the Zaunites' lives. Advocating for surgical assassinations over military raids, and for careful consideration of the facts before action period. When Catelyn asks her to join an elite strike team going into Zaun after her sister, Vi reacts with the outraged disgust at the prospect of joining a police enforcer operation that I *thought* she was going to have at Jayce's proposal in the last season.

In the end, Catelyn talks her over by convincing her that joining her spec ops team and hunting down Jinx ASAP will be the only way to prevent Ambessa and the Council from going full Netanyahu. And Vi reluctantly puts on an enforcer uniform herself, after being made to think that seeing a Zaunite wearing it will be the best way to convince the Piltover government that there are still some good ones out there.

...

If this sequence with Vi and Catelyn happened before the one with Vi and Jayce, Vi's character arc would make a hell of a lot more sense to me. As it is, the best justification I can give for it is that Vi just couldn't think about anything besides killing Silco until he was dead, and now that he is she's able to actually think about things. It's not a great justification, but it's the best I've got.

...

Where this subplot goes really dark is in the tactics Catelyn employs for her little killteam. After her mother's death, Catelyn was given access to some family secrets only known to its current heads, and she learned about a massive public works project her ancestors undertook back in the days when Piltover actually cared about its progressive principles. A system of massive airducts connecting most of Zaun and Piltover's industrial centers and shunting the worst of the air pollution out of the city. The air quality in Zaun isn't good, but without these ducts it would be a hell of a lot worse.

Catelyn's mission objectives are 1) kill Jinx, 2) stop the production of the "shimmer" supersoldier drug, and 3) eliminate all remaining Silcoist leadership figures. Most of those objectives happen to be clustered around the industrial zones. Thus, the team is heralded by a cloud of toxic waste that paralyzes and blinds their victims before the enforcers in enclosed hardsuits can murder them or drag them off to the dungeonlike hell prison, and in their wake the streets remain choking and hazardous for some time. During the first couple of killteam scenes, we aren't told what's going on at all; there's just a sudden grey cloud all over the place, and then we see monstrous silhouettes and hear screams.

The first such scene actually uses camera angle tricks to make Vi and Catelyn's hair blowing around in the toxic fumes look like the tentacles of a literal monster. For all the audience knows, this is literally a demon released by Victor's hex-computer experiments or a monster created by rogue alchemists, until the following episode reveals the truth. Catelyn has literally weaponized her ancestors' philanthropic legacy to poison the people they built it for, and she's doing it in their name.

Vi goes along with this by convincing herself that the toxic eruptions are the least dangerous way to get the nearby streets clear of civilians so they don't get caught in the crossfire. I'm not sure how much paint she had to chug in order to convince herself of that, but hey, she was motivated.

The killteam takes down a number of the chembarons as they claw at each other for dominance in the power vacuum left by Silco. Eventually, they also manage to catch up with Jinx.

Splitting it here.

Leila Hann · Mar 8, 2025

The Pursued

After spending half an episode mourning Silco in much the same slow, filler-y manner as Caitelyn mourning her mother, Jinx starts off on a new adventure. A surprisingly positive one. Or maybe not so surprising, given that there's really nowhere for her to go but up. She was already a wanted woman even before blowing up the Piltover capital building in front of living witnesses, and now bringing her in alive or dead is probably the single most lucrative thing it is possible for a person to do anywhere in the land. Chembarons, enforcers, and even just rando bounty hunters are all participating in the manhunt.

And yet, she manages to find companions for herself. The first being Sevika, previously a very minor character who now starts coming into her own.

Sevika was one of Vander's cronies who jumped ship to Silco early in season one. She helped him beat down some uppity chembarons at one point, and served as a miniboss for Vi during the latter's abortive attempt to go solo vigilante at another. She was one of the underlings of Silco who (justifiably) kept telling him to do something about his adoptive daughter's behaviour only to be repeatedly brushed off. She's feeling pretty vindicated right now...but ironically, one of the only people she can feel vindicated with is Jinx herself. They're two of the only surviving people who got to know Silco as a man rather than just a leader or a boss. They toss a metric ton of well-deserved shade on his memory during their mourning session together, and discuss how his mismanagement of Zaun is what caused everything to fall apart into warring gangs the instant he was no longer in the picture. But they still mourn him. They still believe he was (sadly) the last best hope for the Lanes, and that without him that hope is dead.

I'm not sure if Sevika knows the exact details of how he died, heh. If she did, she might not be as willing to reconcile with Jinx.

The two of them get one of the best fight scenes of the series thus far as they repel a group of bounty hunters, with Sevika using a prosthetic arm that Jinx remade in Harley Quinn style to garish effect and representing her new affiliation (she still had both organic arms when she was with Vander, and Silco gave her a chembaron-chic prosthetic after she lost one). Jinx also gains a second companion in the form of an escaped child laborer who she rescues from the thugs of whichever chembaron she'd been slaving in the mines of.

The kid tags along after them, and forces Powder to bemusedly take on the role of adult protector for someone that reminds her of her younger self. Even though she warns the kid from the beginning that she's called Jinx for a reason.

...

This actually makes me wonder a few things about Zaun's economy. And about its relationship with Piltover. Apparently there's mining going on in Zaun, but even before Silco and his chembarons took over the profits apparently weren't doing much for the place. Either just very low-value minerals, or there was always someone funnelling the profits away into Piltover through one means or another, whereas now the profits are being funnelled away into the local narco-aristocracy.

Yeah. I'd like to know more about what Piltover was actually using Zaun for. It must have needed it for *something,* if it was so reluctant to cut the place off, but so far the show has been pretty vague about what. The mining and perhaps some bulk manufacturing are my best guess.

...

I'm also glad that the cutesy little MPNG hallucinations in Powder/Jinx's scenes are mostly gone. This season's tendency to indulge in art-shifted asides seems to have lost out to the desire to treat her character with something closer to the sobriety it merits.

Well, mostly.

Anyway.

The act one climax comes when - after a couple of near misses - Catelyn and Vi's team manage to track Jinx to a lair just off of the ducts. Turns out that Jinx and her new buddies were sneaking around in unused parts of the vent system themselves this whole time. Jinx reacts pretty much the way you'd expect to seeing Vi in an enforcer uniform. And also (very satisfyingly) throws the fact that she's become *literally the poison that is killing Zaun* in her face and runs roughshots over her pathetic rationalizations about "clearing the streets" or whatever. There's a climactic battle that ends with Vi very nearly killing her sister, only for the little slave girl to put herself between them.

Caitlyn tries to take the shot anyway, heedless of the child in harm's way. Vi comes back from the abyss to block the shots, saving the child even though it means letting Jinx get away again. Aided by Sevika setting off a bomb in the airduct mechanisms nearby as part of a plan they'd been working on to send toxic smoke backfilling up the pipes and into Piltover.

Turnabout. Fair play.

Vi and Caitlyn have their most serious falling out so far. Leading to Vi leaving the force, no longer able to delude herself into thinking that the enforcers could ever be the lesser evil. And also leading to Caitlyn convincing herself that her mistake was in ever trusting a Zaunite to put the greater good over petty tribal affiliations, and becoming Ambessa's biggest fan and supporter once she gets back to HQ. Cue trenchcoat and fashy salute as she's promoted to sheriff and prepares to lead the classicidal crackdown.

A noblewoman, and a cop. It was always going to be a steep uphill battle. Oh well. At least Vi might have finally learned her lesson. What happens next with Jinx (who even Vi has learned to not call "Powder" anymore) is anyone's guess.

This is far and away the best subplot of the act, even if it's also the most depressing. Vi's characterization suffers from the late previous season's missteps, but judging these episodes on their own merits she's great. Seeing Jinx forced to finally mature into something broadly adult-like now that she's without an outside parent figure - even while continuing to struggle with mental illness and personal trauma - is a treat. Honestly, she actually seems saner now than she did at the end of the previous season; getting rid of Silco might have been better for her than either she or myself realized at the time. Or else blowing up the Piltover high council just did wonders for her peace of mind, that could also be.

The Pwuhhhhhh?

And now for something completely different.

Victor - already in poor health - was badly wounded in the explosion, and Jayce ran him to the laboratory containing the weird hextech-AI thing that he seems to have been slowly integrating with. Victor had instructed Jayce to destroy this "hexcore" after an incident with it resulted in the death of a lab assistant, but a) that's stupid, and b) contact with the hexcore seems to have been strengthening Victor in a weird way before, so Jayce didn't do it. Now, he lets the hexcore expand to wrap itself around Victor's comatose body completely.

He spends at least the better part of a day or so cocooned in eldritch mandelbulb shit before it revives him, having given most of his body an HR Giger makeover in the process of healing it. When Victor wakes up, he's mad at Jayce for not destroying the hexcore even after it proved itself deadly, which...bro, it was a lab accident, that shit happens. He also tells Jayce that he's been too corrupted by power and politics, and that their ways truly parted a long time ago, both of them were just in denial about it. Victor then rectifies Jayce's mistake by...erm...walking out of the lab and leaving the fractal coccoon shit behind him, and then disappearing into the deepest ravines of Zaun. Where he heals the shimmer addicts who try to mug him, turns them into more Giger pieces, and lets them start worshipping him.

Yeah I have no idea how any of the things Victor says or does in this sequence relate to any of the other things he says or does in it.

Meanwhile, in the Firelights' solarpunk oasis, Heimerdinger and Ekko notice that the big tree that the community relies on for food and air purification is having health problems. Its leaves are getting weird fractal patterns on them before wilting, and it reminds Heimerdinger an awful lot of the similar growths exhibited by the hexcore. Honestly, the hexcore fractals, the infectious veins of shimmer addiction, and the Black Rose magic all look way too similar to me, so I wouldn't have made that connection, but okay. Heimerdinger brings Ekko back to Piltover with him, breaks into his own lab (the neccessity of which Ekko calls into question, only to be comically brushed off), and runs into Jayce. After spending thirty seconds wondering where Victor went and what he turned into, the three of them form a Scooby Gang to start puzzling out the mystery of the hexcore fractal shit.

You know how it seemed like Heimerdinger was going to have to confront the socio-political realities of the nation he founded, and possibly even join in an uprising against it in an ironic reprise of how he once led an uprising against the tyrant magi? Well, maybe he's still going to do that. There are still two acts left in the season. For now though, he and his two human sidekicks are off to handle this totally abstract magi-technobabble problem that has fuck all to do with the main conflict.

Okay, I'm overstating my point a little bit. It's not COMPLETELY out of left field. It turns out that the hexcore - either on its own, or because of its new fusion with Victor - is reaching out through the arcane plane and infecting hextech devices.

The largest and most energy-intensive such devices are the teleportation towers, and the main working parts of those are located underground, near the pipes that bring clean water into Zaun, including the water that the Firelights' big tree feeds on, leading to its Colour Out of Space situation. When Ekko calls Jayce out on this, Jayce responds that they made sure to keep the experimental superengines away from populated areas, it's not his fault that no one told him there was critical water infrastructure running nearby.

So, in that aspect, this does tie into the main themes and political tensions of the series. Yet another kind of poison that Piltover's elites are pumping into the veins of its underclass even while punishing them for the spasms it causes. And I'm sure that once they start having to tell the trade princes that have come to rely on those towers about this, we'll have a nice climate change denial allegory. But even so, most of this plot is spent on virtually apolitical urban exploration and lab tinkering, and it snatched Heimerdinger and Ekko away from the much more interesting things that the story could be doing with them.

Also, when they poke at it a weird thing happens and they get the impression that the hexcore is either alive, or has become a conduit for some preexisting life form that resides in the arcane realm and is now reaching out into Piltover-Zaun.

Yeah, Colour Out of Space is right.

So I guess Victor was right, but like...not for the reasons that he said? I really don't know what the show wants me to think about that.

I guess this is why the series is called "Arcane." But like...I really just don't care about this eldritch abomination invasion plot that only tangentially overlaps with the Piltover/Zaun conflict. If the series is really supposed to be about this, then it should have been about it from much earlier on.

Like I said, this is act one of three. Maybe everything is going to come together in a satisfying way, and the hexcore shenanigans are going to resonate and integrate more elegantly with the rest of the series. I hope it is.

Also in the last postcredit's sequence we see that shady alchemist dude who Silco used to consult creating a cyborg werewolf.

Um. Okay?

So far, I'm really not sure how to rate season two of Arcane. The plotting and writing are mostly good, but they're either (depending on the subplot) too thin on the ground, too predictable, or too disconnected. A lot of it feels like a story that didn't need to be told, even if it's being told well. Other parts of it feel like a completely different story altogether.

I'm holding out for the creators knowing what they're doing here, and the rest of season 2 coming together. S2A1 will still have been the ugly duckling of the series if so, though, even if it had to be so to make the rest work.

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