10 Second Anime - Owarimonogatari - Episode 9

Araragi's group meets up with Gaen after a quick confrontation with an aberration. Izuko shows again that she does know everything.

"Shinobu Mail"

Heh.

How nice to hear again Shinobu's cute little laugh, "ka ka." That's the stuff.

That battle was pretty quick, but having a vampire with an aberration killing sword makes things pretty easy too.

Ah. Shinobu doesn't eat just donuts.

I think Shinobu picked up some arguing skills from Araragi's little sisters.

This is a SHAFT show, so head tilts and references to Zetsubou Sensei are going to be flying everywhere.

All of Gaen and Oshino's ghost busting club from college appear to have some weird quirks. Yotsugi's master Kagenui can't touch the ground, which is why she's always standing on other things and Yotsugi too. Gaen might be a rainbow colored hurricane.

You can see the same cloud pattern back when she helped Mayoi escape the nameless darkness.

Gaen started dropping hints that she was controlling all the girl aberrations around Araragi.

Cute cutouts.

I thought Shinobu's test to see if the samurai really was who he said was pretty funny. Not just to hear Araragi's impression of something that used his own voice to laugh that way (so meta), but mainly because it reminded me that Shinobu doesn't remember people's names.

I wonder if the resemblance Shinobu thought she saw in Izuko to her "brother" Oshino Meme was the same ghost busting attitude the five club members had.

Hmm.

Izuko's revelation that the samurai really was the revived ash cloud of Shinobu's first underling, the aberration hunter from 400 years ago, was the key connection we needed to see how the nameless darkness is related to everything happening now. It made me think of a few possibilities about how Ougi and Araragi are related, especially with how Izuko said that there are no coincidences with how all the girl aberrations are connected to Araragi.

Some key bits - the ash cloud had been trying to collect all its pieces together as it "healed" from walking into the sunlight 300 years ago, but Izuko said something happened to the reviving cloud 15 years ago. This is roughly the same age as Ougi, who is younger than Araragi by two years. But if the cloud is part of Ougi, what is the armor wearing thing? Did several pieces of the cloud coalesce into different beings? Is Araragi one of those beings too?

Some things not mentioned yet are how the nameless darkness consumed almost all of the aberration hunter except his hand, which is what Kiss-Shot used to resurrect the aberration hunter. Perhaps it absorbed its personality and will too. Also, the aberration hunter had two blades. The aberration killer, whose replica is used by Shinobu and Araragi, and the aberration raiser. If Araragi is somehow related to the samurai's ash cloud, could he have somehow taken on the power of the other blade?

Things are never as simple as they could be in this story. I never even considered that Shinobu's minion could actually still be "alive," so that was already a great revelation. It's not too much of a stretch to consider that the ash cloud didn't just form into one entity after 300 years. Stopping her story right at the point where she would tell us who the baby was 15 years ago was a great cliffhanger making me impatient for the next episode.