Wouldn’t YOU feed a drowsy loli?
• Oh hey, almost halfway into the series and we’ve finally got a proper OP. It was alright I guess.
• The episodes starts off where the last one left off, with Rentarou and Tina speculating who their enemy could be. Then after the OP, we see both of them hanging out together at a park and eating together, like best buddies. So of course, Rentarou and Tina are going to develop some meaningful friendship, only for it to get tragically torn apart once they eventually find out who each other really are. But you know, I think it’s pretty odd for a little girl to be calling an older man and asking him to hang out with her and show her around town. I mean, wouldn’t Rentarou try to contact her parents or legal guardian and talk to them about that sort of thing first? After all, Rentarou’s just an older dude, and almost a complete stranger to this little girl.
• “I like you Rentarou.” lolicon pandering.
• As Rentarou walks through the highschool hallway towards the student council’s office, two normal girls notice him and hurry away quickly, frightened. This is telling for how some might see the civil officers in a similar vein as the cursed children. The Promoters may not be monsters in their eyes per se, but I’d bet a lot of people seem them as ruthless thugs, or otherwise scary military-type people. And even if people respect Rentarou for dealing with the monsters (though we haven’t even seen much of that,) they can still be afraid of him as a monster-slaying cyborg. The girls’ reactions could also be a result of whatever reputation Rentarou has as a student of the school.
• So Kisara wants to shoot Miori, “two to the chest, and one to the head.” In other words, shoot both of her boobs and then shoot the head. Even if they’re playing this for comedy, Kisara and Miori letting out their grudge on each other through literal gun fights seems pretty extreme, to the point of just being unbelievable. If they really wanted to settle things through fighting, can’t they just use wooden swords or airsoft guns instead?
• After taking him into a secret room with just the two of them, without Kisara, Miori explains to Rentarou how the sniper fire came from an impossibly long distance away, and that only the most skilled sniper could have pulled off shooting from there. We of course already know that it was a cursed child. Rentarou then explains that he suspects Saitake of hiring the assassin. Okay, we already know that Saitake is the some super evil dude who plans on threatening other countries with the Stairway to Heaven, but I wonder why he would want to off Seitenshi? Since remember, he would have hired Tina before Seitenshi found out about his diabolical plans. Maybe he just saw her as an obstacle beforehand too. Either way, it seems a bit rash for Rentarou to be so certain of this, since after all, it’s just an assumption.
• And then Miori tries to seduce Rentarou, just before Kisara explodes the door and comes rushing in at the wrong (or right) time, and “misunderstands” whats going on. With a couple of well-endowed women and some lolis wanting to get into his pants, Rentarou sure has a nice harem going on. He’s getting the best of both worlds!
• Next Rentarou visits Sumire, who tells him “Though you’re rude, you are quite the gentleman… but you lack the nerve to push through a woman’s hesitation and make her yours.” How eerily rapey. I mean, it’s true that the typical male lead like Rentarou could stand to take more initiative when it comes to women, rather than just waiting around and passively letting some harem hijinks revolve around him. But I’ve still got her advice to him from episode 1 in my mind: “If you like her, you should just make her yours by force.” So with that in mind, “pushing through a woman’s hesitation and make her yours” just sounds like a more polite way of saying “make her yours by force.”
• So Sumire was one of the four “prodigies” who worked on “The New Humanity Creation Plan”, which set out to create an army of mechanized soldiers to fight against the Gastrea; Rentarou being one of the people who was experimented on. (Notice how the American prodigy is named Ayn Rand, lol.) But then the project dissolved after the people behind it realized that superpowered lolis were much more effective against the Gastrea.
However, a lot of the most high ranking civil officers happen to be cursed children paired with these mechanized soldiers as their Promoter. I wonder why they wouldn’t just combine the NHC plan with the whole civil officers project if that proved so effective.
• Haha, Tina is standing in a street receiving information on her target, but drops her phone just before he can say the name of the Promoter in Kisara’s employment—Rentarou.
• Gee, Tina just walks into Kisara’s office, asks if she’s Kisara, and then start pumping lead with a gatling gun. Wouldn’t it have been smarter if Tina’s promoter actually showed her a picture of Kisara, and then Tina could just start shooting away without giving Kisara a chance to escape. Albeit she barely had time to dodge the bullets anyways, but hey, this is some expert martial artist we’re talking about here. Or why not just off Kisara with a sniper rifle like she tried to do to Seitenshi.
• So Tina and Kisara fight a bit, until the former corners Kisara, but Rentarou enters in the knick of time to stop her. Drama ensues as they find out who each other are. For a girl who Rentarou has only had like, two weird conversations with, he seems awfully torn about finding out that Tina was an assassin. I’d figure your first assumption would be that she was just using you or something. Or maybe that is what Rentarou feels torn about, being so betrayed by this loli who he thought he was having a deep, totally not-pedophilic friendship with. Either way it’s hard to feel attached to this girl when we’ve only really seen her munch down caffeine tablets and be fed food by Rentarou while half-asleep, plus a few conversations with her boss.
• Pffft, Kisara somehow cuts the whole floor around Rentarou and Tina from a distance with just with a single slash from her sword. Nothing short of magic there.
• Tina escapes from the clutches of Rentarou and Kisara, and shortly thereafter Kisara collapses due to her kidney disease. Later whilst at the hospital and she’s hooked up to a machine, feeling better now, and explains to Rentarou how she’s decided not to try and get a replacement for her kidney due to the shortage of kidney doners, and how she’s vowed to commit the rest of her life “to rid the world of the Tendo name.”
She then rises from her bed and says that she’s “learned something from watching Miori,” and closes the curtains blushing… for a second I thought these kids were actually going to do something lewd, but Kisara ends up just offering to let Rentarou hold her hand. That’s pretty uh, underwhelming given how embarrassed Kisara acts about it, and in an empty room too. I can understand why such a thing might be embarrassing in public, but in private there’s not really anything to it. You’re just holding hands.
We can at least count on Enju to properlly lewd things up, as she appears out of nowhere and starts to grope Kisara’s breasts, acting as a cockblock to Kisara and Rentarou’s intimate hand-holding.
• I think Rentaraou is being a little pushy with his insistence that Seitenshi shouldn’t meet with Saitake just because he thinks he’s behind the shooting. It’s a meeting between two major politicians, so Seitenshi’s right that she can’t really refuse when she doesn’t have any actual proof that Saitake is involved in any way. Rentarou also comes across as overbearing with how he just shouts at Seitenshi about this. Like, gee, anime need to stop equating aggressive shouting with caring.
• When Rentarou and Seitenshi arrive at Saitake’s place, four eyes comes storming out and chastises Rentarou for putting his waifu in a normal secret service vehicle rather than the armored limo, to which Rentarou explains that the limo had a higher chances of being shot. But speaking of vehicles and defense, did you know that in the U.S., when transporting the president it’s customary for his fleet of cars to contain not one, but two presidential limos? That way if someone ever targets the president while he’s riding in a car, there’s a 50/50 chance that they’ll hit the decoy vehicle instead. I mention this since there’s not anything wrong about Rentarou’s idea, it wasn’t a bad idea actually, but I’m just pointing out that that could have possibly been a better way to handle the situation depending on what Seitenshi’s budget is for armored vehicles.
• Predictably, Tina shoots at them, and Rentarou and Seitenshi quickly escape. Rentarou in fact takes a bullet for Seitenshi and gets injured in the shoulder, though for an explosive sniper fire it seems like it’d do a lot more damage to him than what he got. Once they’ve driven to safety into an underground parking lot, Rentarou sends Enju off to go hunt down Tina and take care of her, while Rentarou tends to his arm wound.
But then Seitenshi comes up to him out of safety to inform Rentarou herself that Tina “is ranked 97, an Owl Initiator, and one of the mechanized soldiers!” Geez, no wonder this kid doesn’t need the assistance of a Promoter. Before the episode ends, we find out that Enju has already fallen to Tina (at least apparently.) I wonder though how they would have that much information on the girl. Why would an assassin cursed child even be registered in the civil officer’s system or database, and be ranked with everyone else? Wouldn’t you like, want to have a few information about yourself in the system as possible?
Thoughts:
Another relatively alright episode of Black Bullet. Looking back at these notes I’m realizing that much of my annoyances with the show are being relegated to the characters and their behavior, which I find awfully asinine and well, anime-ish. Of course that’s a major element of any story and enough to keep my opinion of Black Bullet low, but putting that aside the actual plot isn’t too bad. There’s less wonky world building and dumb plot holes. Probably because there’s less need for exposition, and the the scope of the narrative is less ambitious. It’s easier to pull of an assassination plot in three or four episodes than to cram a story about saving the world from an evil masked man in the same amount of time.
Anime Is (Not) Dead 