Akuma no Riddle, Ep 1 & 2: Riddle Story of Lesbians

And so the token yuri show of the season is…dark and edgy?

This blog post is mostly going to be about episode 2, but I say “1 & 2” in the title so no one gets confused by me starting to blog this with episode 2 instead of 1.

But here’s a brief summary of my thoughts on Episode 1: I didn’t’ really know what to think about it, since all it did was briefly introduce the premise and characters with not much else happening. And since there’s wasn’t anything too interesting about the characters yet, there wasn’t really much for me to write about. It’s a show about teenage girls who are a bunch of assassins, and that always requires some suspension of disbelief. More because they’re teenagers rather than girls.

Though if there was one thing about the episode that irked me, it was just how weird and creepy the characters were. Between the stoic and always angry protagonist; the super sinister professor guy, and the clearly mentally unstable chick with the scar—among other characters, it seemed like Akuma no Riddle was trying way too hard to be dark and edgy, but in a hip anime sort of way. It didn’t help that all of the assassin girls seemed to have an intense grudge and want to kill each other all the time. You would figure that assassins would, I don’t know, try to blend in as normal people? Even if everyone but the target knows they’re assassins anyways.

 

Episode 2:

• Maybe a bit off-topic, but this blog post about riddles by Ryhzuo might be a little relevant here. Riddles are dumb because they don’t rely on logic or intuitive thinking; they’re just glorified jokes in that a good riddle is reliant on how clever the answer sounds. So that’s why the riddle that Kaiba gave last episode is particularly asinine: “The world is full of _____”. It’s so open-ended that the answer could literally be anything; I rolled my eyes upon seeing it. Which is why I’m glad that Kaiba laughs at Tokaku’s answer of it being “forgiveness,” exclaiming “Like hell there’s an answer to a question like this.” Touche, Akuma no Riddle.

• Hm, after laughing about the riddle, Kaiba assumes that an answer like “forgiveness” must have come from someone other than Tokaku, and wonders if she’s finally “let someone in,” adding “How long will you stay asleep? It’s long time you woke up. Hurry up and realize that everything Mr. Kaiba is telling you is a lie.” He says all this mockingly, though the words make me wonder what Kaiba’s intentions are here. Does he care about Tokaku, or is he just laughing at how dense she is? Either way, good to know everything he says to her is a lie.

• Rumors run abound about what the Class Black is. Maybe I missed something last episode, but I wonder what the purpose of this Class Black is myself. Is it like, just some weird game to have a dozen assassins share the same target within a classroom? And besides that, what’s the official purpose of the class that the public is told?

• And four more girls transfer. I thought the classroom seems awfully empty last episode. These girls seem better at hiding what abnormal assassins they are too.

• Looks like the uniform dress code for the school doesn’t quite apply to these special children. And they’re…all watching a video about the science of dice rolling on their fancy tablets? Must be a physics class or something. And the kids just text each other and invite each other to lunch, and sleep! This is why tablets are inferior to teachers and good ol’ textbooks.

• Tokaku is understandably paranoid about her other classmates, wondering why they’re all pretending to be so friendly. Though I wonder, was it lie from Kaiba that they’re all assassins? Obviously some of them are, but I wonder if some of them are just normal people mixed in?

• Oh, never mind, they all really are assassins. After spying on the final transfer student to Class Black, The girl with the annoying :3 and shark face announces to all the other students, save for Tokaku and Haru, that they must all meet on the roof later to learn more about their mission.

• While looking down from the roof and brooding, Tokaku says to herself: “Wouldn’t blowing things up solve things once and for all? The rewards irrelevant anyways. I don’t give a damn how I’ll be assessed by Kaiba.” Then a minute later, we see Haru say to herself: “Have to keep smiling, or Haru will get yelled at.” Dunno what to make of it yet, but these two girls sure have some issues to deal with.

• Gee, from Haru’s perspective, Tokaku must be a total asshole with how she brushes off invitations to drink tea. Or maybe she thinks she’s just shy or something.

• So Isuke has two dads and “doesn’t share a drop of blood with them,” or in other words, she’s the adoptive child to two homosexual men. I guess you gotta throw in some mentions of yaoi in this show about lesbians amirite. But really, note how Isuke tells Haru all this amidst slow, ominous music, before the room turns red as Haru collapses from being drugged.  It kind of seems like the show is trying to use the story of the two gay dads to make the scene creepier, which I don’t really like. Maybe they’re even making a connection between Isuke’s upbringing and her life as a assassin. Maybe the writer didn’t mean anything by that, but then it’d certainly be bad timing to bring up that information now.

• Nio explains to Haruki that Haru’s “got quite the body count,” and has murdered her parents and all her siblings; of which we see a split interjection of a girl (presumably Haru) holding two bloodied knives. Well, gee, so Haru might be the most dangerous assassin of them all? Well, that’s quite the twist. Didn’t see that coming.

• Ah, so when Kaiba says that Tokaku needs to “wake up,” he meant that she needs to unleash her “feral” side. Well, apparently we haven’t quite seen Tokaku’s true ability as an assassin yet.

• So Tokaku finds Haru in her room being undressed by Issuke, and we get a nice look of all the scars all over her body. A fight then ensues between Tokaku and Issuke as the former protects the unconscious Haru, until Tokaku finds herself unable to kill Issuke because she’s never actually killed anyone. Then Issuke gets the upper hand and knocks Tokaku out, and then just walks away…wait, but why not kill Haru after knocking out Tokaku? Oh, but then the whole series would end I guess.

• It’s funny how Issuke mocks Issuke about her “virginity” as a killer, as if it was gossip about someone’s actual virginity.

• Some things are explained with Haru and Tokaku’s dramatic discussion atop their beds. For one, Haru is part of a gigantic clan,  and for some reason a lot of people have a problem with her being alive; we still don’t know why yet. And she didn’t kill her family, but the assassins targeting her have (Phew! It’s okay guys, she’s not a yandere.) This explains why she feels the need to smile all the time; not because of abuse or anything like that, but because of some pretty bad survivors guilt.

Here’s something I don’t understand about the setting: if Haru knows that everyone is out to kill her, then why would she stay in Class Black? How exactly is this her “final test,” and why wouldn’t she just run away instead of risking her life—especially since she doesn’t seem to have any combat abilities of herself. Perhaps she’s being promised freedom and protection if she can survive Class Black.

After all that Haru asks Tokaku why she saved her, but they’re discussion is interrupted by a knock on the door before Tokaku can answer. Come on, we all know it’s because of her romantic feelings for Haru-chan. We all know these chicks are going to bang each other at some point.

• So there are actual rules for this upcoming assassin game. Well, I guess you couldn’t make this into a 12 episode series otherwise. At first I was wondering why they would even have such a complicated game of pitting a dozen assassins against one measly moeblob, but then I remembered that there’s rumors of Haru being some sort of master assassin because of her history. Well, it sure is a good thing Haru has Tokaku! And lol, it’s so dramatic with how Tokaku rips up her notice card.

 

Thoughts:

Well, some characters act weird, a bit of action happens, some things are explains while other things still confuse me… It’s an alright series and I’m sort of liking it, but nothing too great about it. The only thing that really makes it stand out is the prospect of having yuri within an edgy thriller like this, so I almost feel obligated to give it a chance. I wonder though if I’m just taking the show too seriously. The premise itself is pretty silly with lesbian assassins, but I don’t know, the show doesn’t seem that self-aware to me.

Between this and Knights of Sidonia, it seems unlikely that I’ll blog about this weekly, especially since it’ll probably just be an action thriller anyways. Not much to speculate about except why these characters are so messed up or what the deal is with this convoluted set up, and that doesn’t really give me much to write about. I’m a bit late with posting this five days after episode 2 aired, but oh well; I was determined to write at least one blog post about the lesbian assassin show and I didn’t want to wait until episode 3.