Libra of Nil Admirari Episode 10: Every Character Face Your Demon

With every character seemingly facing their tragic back story nemesis in one episode, it is hardly surprising that this episode feels a bit shallow as we jump from confrontation to confrontation with a pause in the middle for a cup of tea (not joking).

I had the interesting experience of watching this episode when someone else was around. Interesting because they listened to the overly boppy opening with the smiling dancing characters and grimaced. Then the episode started and we have the villain essentially ranting about how he was going to force himself on Kuze and get her pregnant before he tried to do that. At this point I had to pause the episode because the sheer volume of questions getting thrown at me made watching impossible. And once again, it reminded me so clearly how totally wrong the OP is for this anime. We then got on with watching.

And what we watched were various pairs of characters confronting issues they’ve had for awhile. So Akira saved Kuze having finally decided to be on her side, though not really because he tells her to run while he does the hero thing, leaving Kuze wandering around the mansion that is both on fire and full of enemies and so naturally she stops for tea with the mistress of the house. Clearly Kuze isn’t actually interested in being rescued and Akira could have saved himself the time. Later on Kuze catches up with Akira and Hayato, or they catch up with her being dragged into the subway, and we get a moment where it turns out Akira is the half-brother of the villain, etc, etc. It was a pretty flat revelation and when Kuze points out it doesn’t matter, I had to wonder if anyone had ever thought it did matter.

We also get a confrontation with Migiwa and Shougo facing down the guy who was a writing pupil at the same time as Migiwa and who was an author Shougo liked, who also happened to write the book that ended up cursing Shougo leading to him attempting to kill himself. This was a more interesting confrontation but ultimately solved fairly tritely by Shougo pointing out that he wanted to read more books by the author. So sweet. Can we remember this guy writes books that kill people?

Lastly, we have Hisui confronting the crazy professor guy who throws in the ‘I killed your mother’ card to send Hisui’s weird flame power a little out of control. I don’t know what he was hoping to gain from that but it was all a little cliche and then he ran away.

Meanwhile, the mansion is still on fire, no one has actually been arrested, as far as I can see not one villain is even detained yet, and the third party running around in the mansion hasn’t actually done anything except set things on fire.

In fairness to the episode, all of these elements make sense as part of the grander narrative, but the episode itself was pretty messy and unresolved and we’ll all just have to wait until next week to see what happens next.

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Thanks for reading.

Karandi James