No Game, No Life, Ep 7: Searching for a secret porn stash

^Me after working on blog posts all day.

I may be six days late in posting this, but between finals, a highschool bonfire, FanimeCon, and blog posts about Fanime, I didn’t have much time until now to edit this.

• I’m grateful to the maido servants chucking wood into the fire so we viewers can get some nice bathing scene fanservice. Fun scene here in general; I like the tentacle-like, phallic-like shampoo, and seeing a loli crush it brings up some pleasant imagery. “She already has dominance over Jibril”, Sora says while crying as he overhears this scene, with the text “Your brother is very impressed! I wanna be like you!” floating over his head. I know Sora, I’d have the same sentiment if my loli imouto showed such skill.

• Steph is such a tool. Jibril shows Steph a cool kitchen with abstract floating shapes everywhere, bearing a message from Sora and Shiro that within is all the sugar and butter she’d need to cook all sorts of sweet goodies. Steph quickly realizes that her benefactors just want her to cook for them, lamenting that “they’re always taking advantage of me!” But then all is forgiven once she remembers the praise that Sora gave her at the end of last week’s episode, (“If it weren’t for you we’d have lost,”) even though that was right after they made her experience a horrifying death. Ugh.

I’m not necessarily complaining, as I do find it sort of funny myself how she’s the butt money and all. But it’s worth pointing out that Steph is in some sort abusive relationship, since she even said herself that Sora and Shiro are taking advantage of her all the time. I think I’d prefer if her character was used for something more than just a punching bag for us to laugh at, especially since they’ve already made a point to show that she’s a smart and capable person herself.

• Now we’re back to Clammy and her elf friend! I figured we’d see them again given their presence in the OP. The elf friend brings Clammy up to speed about how Imanity is getting much better with the new laws enacted by Stephanie and Sora, and how Sora and Shiro have got themselves a Flugel. Clammy scoffs at Steph’s achievements though, saying “A puppet of a puppet. She’s as shameless as her grandfather was foolish.” Well, aside from Clammy’s assumption of Sora is a puppet himself, I can’t argue with that. Clammy also turns out to be a lot more tsundere; practicing how she’ll apologize to Stephanie and getting flustered when her elf friend points this out.

• lol, Sora doing a Gendo Ikari impression as he asks Jibril for information on the “animal girl paradise.” He also continues this delusion despite all those visuals of humanoid animals we get while Jibril explains the background of the “Eastern Federation.” According to her, the werebeasts were originally a bunch of seperate clans which were at war with each other—some obvious parallels with Sengoku era of Japan here. They were eventually united by the Shrine Priestess though who ended the war in under half a century. I bet she’s going to be an actual animal looking thing just like these visuals, causing Sora to be dissapointed. Though then again, another moe character is always a possibility.

• Back to Clammy and efly again, and they speculate that Blank must have the aid of the Eastern Federation at their side, since who else could defeat a human backed by the elves? I think it’s interesting that the werebeasts are being portrayed as more powerful than the elves here, since usually with these sort of fantasy settings you would expect the elves to be much smarter with a higher aptitude for magic than the dumb beast-people.

• So because no one can figure out how to beat the Eastern Federation, no one has bothered to challenge them or has accepted any challenges from them in recent history…save for one country, Elkia, and that’s precisely why they’ve lost a large chunk of their territory. At this Sora starts to complain about what I’ve been saying before, how the old king must have really been a huge baka to gamble like that for absolutely no reason. I would hope there’s more to this back story than that, but really it’s difficult to see how this king should be respected at all. I understand how Steph would get her feelings hurt from seeing someone she respects (Sora) speak so poorly of her father, but really Sora’s just speaking the truth here. Steph just seems to be in denial about it, really.

• Hm, so Steph’s grandfather entrusted her a key to something “very important,” which she must give only to whom she can entrust the future of Elkia too. Steph insists she won’t give it to Sora, but of course we know she will eventually. On another note, I like how it’s implied that Steph’s grandfather had a resemblance to the kings of poker cards; with their faces never explicitly being seen by us, and their portraits being these poker kings.

• Seven of the territories that the late king wagered had little to no value to Elkia, and so in terms of resources and economy they weren’t losing much by wagering them. Though I find that kind of hard to believe; if they were a significantly large plots of land, they’d likely still be useful for agriculture and business, right? But eh, now my interested is sort of peaked for whether this crazy king really did have a logic to his mad gambling.

• Ha, Sora explains to Jibril that it was eight years ago that he first met Shiro, when she was three; implying that they’re step-siblings. I guess it’s only incest in name only now, what a relief!

• Sora then goes on a spiel about how he doesn’t believe in humanity at all and considers even himself to be some dumb ape in the grand scheme of things, but he believes in the potential of humanity; using Shiro and her genius as a prime example of the potential he sees in humanity. Honestly though, I’m not too big of a fan of Imanity being portrayed as some underdog in this sense, since it just sort of shows that this show really is deeply entrenched in fantasy. I mean, in reality we’re far from the underdogs of the world; we’re the most intelligent and technologically savvy species on planet Earth by far, and in the whole universe for all we know, and certainly the most dominant force on the planet. We’re also killing all the ecosystems of the planet, so we’re greatly abusing our power too.

I’m not saying it’s bad for No Game No Life to present a story about an underdog group of people overcoming some mean ol’ bully races, but this whole philosophizing about us being an underdog race in general just comes off as the writer stroking the human race’s ego. It’s irrelevant to the issues of the real world; which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it certainly makes me care less about Sora’s rambling.

• Just before Steph gives them the key was where I stopped watching this on Friday before I had to go somewhere. Sora and Shiro speculating that it must surely indeed be the key to the former king’s porn stash was a nice point to return to. It’d be awfully anticlimatic if they’re right, though, not to mention it wouldn’t advance the story.

• “I am not a wise king. In fact, I expect that I will be remembered as one of the most foolish.” That was a nice ending to the episode. Within the secret chamber they find a diary from the old king, and with that Sora figures out the mystery behind his odd gambling with territory. The werebeasts decided to allow him to keep his memories of their games, knowing that that would make him feel more encouraged to keep challenging them to figure out the secret behind their game. And that’s precisely what he did, gambling with useless plots of territory each time. He then wrote down what he found hoping someone like Sora would be able to pick up where he left off.

Gambling off territory like that is still incredibly reckless of the guy, but at least now we know there was some logic behind it. Though like the king said, there was also a close to zero chance someone like Sora and Shiro would even come along, so it still comes off as some dumb gambling on his part. I also think it’s kind of funny the implication that he didn’t trust Steph to figure it out herself; or maybe Steph just couldn’t figure out where the secret room was. Either way though, this closed the episode on a nice emotional note.

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Question for my readers: Do you all actually like me describing each scene in these bullet-point posts, or should I tone that down and just assume you’ve all actually seen the episode and know what I’m talking about?