And so the second phase of the not-the-hunter exam comes to an end. I wouldn’t quote T.S. Eliot exactly here, as there were certainly some bangs in despatching these hollow men (and women) once and for all. There was an air of whimper to it too though, for reasons I touched on last week. It just felt like this was all made to look a lot harder than it was, for drama’s sake. And that someone was always going to miraculously have exactly the right ability needed to move the plot along when push came to shove.
For all that I certainly thought the second test was better TV than the first, if for no other reason than the relative absence of Lawine and Kanne, easily the most annoying characters (well, them and and Übel) Frieren has introduced in 26 episodes. And the increased presence of Denken of course, who elevates this material quite a bit. I did enjoy seeing he and Frieren being deferred to in the end, once most of their comrades realized how much flailing they were doing. And while Frieren is the stronger mage, Denken is certainly the more natural leader. If they’d listened to him in the first place almost all of the examinees would have made the cut and this would have been over relatively quickly, but of course you don’t have an arc that way…
Of course the main event is Frieren and Fern vs. Fauxrieren, and that can only end one way just by the math of it. But we have to have preliminaries, as there are a lot of replicas out there. Denken essentially exposes the plot hole in all this by pointing out that as long as the candidates get their matchups right they basically can’t lose (and Méthode champenoise conveniently makes that easy to do). The one wild card is – as discussed in this space – Sense. She gets called out for it being “unfair” (which I pointed out) but her response is what I’d have expected – being able to handle this sort of adversity is nothing to ask of one who wishes to be a first-class mage.
Fortunately (and inevitably) there’s someone who’s a perfect matchup for Non-Sense, and that’s Übel. Her magic can cut anything she imagines it can (which is pretty silly as shounen abilities go – even Sense admits it’s basically a superpower). That included Burg, the examiner when she Hisoka’d the previous first-class mage exam. All anyone really had to do was stall for time until Frieren and Fern could take out Fauxrieren, but Non-Sense was the biggest obstacle to doing that. I would have just ignored here, but again – that’s not really narrative fiction.
Madhouse spunked most of the budget on the Frieren-Replica Frieren fight, that’s for sure. It looked great and that spoke for itself, but the mechanics of the fight are sort of interesting too. If you can get past the suspension of disbelief factor given that in practical terms the two of them couldn’t lose, it’s a bit unclear how this went down. It looks like Fern takes advantage of the aforementioned “weakness” and lops off one of Fauxrieren’s arms in a sneak attack as Frieren leaves herself open to elicit an attack on her. Then Frieren launches some kind of weird move against Fern that Fern can’t detect, and using the distraction that causes, finishes off her replica.
I just want to point out that when the manga did its first character poll (long before the anime premiered) Mimic finished third (behind Himmel and Frieren in that order). That’s glorious of course, and it leads me to believe that the whole mimic thing is going to be a running gag, as this was only the second time we’ve seen it and third place is a lot of votes…
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