10 Second Anime - Blade and Soul - Episode 4

Blade and Soul - Episode 4

Aruka's fevered dreams show informative flashbacks. Bad things happen to those who use the sword for themselves.

Heh.

Elle Karen is pretty good at dodging rice buns.

The kids who were taking care of Aruka had the running joke of stealing food from the butcher, but that string of thefts will end at 16.

Eh?!

Aruka's master is a little old dog-type person?

Geh.

Two of the Pleasure Gang dudes survived, and one of them was the biggest, dumbest one they had.

Hmm.

We had quite a bit of exposition through Aruka's fevered flashbacks of her master, the butterfly mark, and the blue flowers. We still don't know exactly how the pink mark works, but it is effective against dark powers. The master had said that one can't fight the darkness through the sword alone, and I found it interesting that the mark finished curing Aruka of the Impurity only when she picked up her sword to defend the kids from the local mafia.

The master also called the blue flowers poison, but a poison that can be used to show or identify demonic powers. There might be an illicit trade in them because they make people high by altering their perceptions. We know the Flower Monks are using them to juice up their own mercenaries.

I appreciated the ambiguous handling of the two kids Seto and Pia. Seto may have always had a dark streak in him, or perhaps he was traumatized by seeing someone cut down in front of him and then having to kill someone in self-defense, but whichever the case, holding the sword changed his personality, or revealed it. This tied in neatly with Aruka's dreams of her master explaining that one must use the sword to live, not to kill. That Seto died trying to protect his sister offered some redemption for his actions, or perhaps just added another layer to his tragic story. I like that. Sometimes bad things happen, and it's up to the observers to make their own sense of the events.

Also, Pia showed that she was the stronger of the siblings, by mourning her brother, and immediately changing her circumstances by asking Karen for a job. Maybe Seto was always holding them back from rejoining civil society, and now Pia can have a chance to shine. This was all good. You don't see this kind of straightforward storytelling in anime very much, with inner dialogue, or long scenes of outer dialogue, being very much the standard practice. Perhaps having a laconic hero without a lot of lines lets the other characters also tell their stories by doing stuff, instead of standing around talking to themselves.