Try not to let those poor homeless little girls ruin your date with your loli!
• New story-arc time! I wonder if this will be six episodes long or if we’ll get two smaller story-arcs.
• We open with some sort of soldier patrolling a base around a monolith, when comes across a giant Gastrea. Then a bunch of smaller ones come crawling up the monolith and kill him. So at least one of the monoliths is unaffective against the Gastrea, or a certain kind of Gastrea.
• So Rentarou and the old guy from episode 2 have opened up an unofficial elementary school for all the homeless Cursed Children. And it’s just a demolished building right out in the open too; talk about ghetto. You figure they’d at least try to find a building that was still intact, or at least rent some trashy building on the outskirts of town. This is just out in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of other ruins. Perhaps a couple of teenagers and a old man just don’t have enough money to rent a building, but this just seems like a weird place to hold a school lesson.
• When given the opportunity to ask their teachers questions about themselves, Rentarou and Kisara are met with questions such as “Is it true that you live with Enju and plan to marry her?” and “Is it true that your boobs are so big that you can’t see your feet?” These kids ask the best questions. Interesting though how all the kids just act like normal, happy children but with red eyes. Perhaps it’s because they’ve been under the care of that old guy, but I would imagine children living under poverty and discrimination all their lives would have a more, I don’t know, jaded attitude?
• Seitenshi arrives at the school, and then takes Rentarou and Kisara elsewhere to explain the situation with the Gastrea and the failing monolith. Apparently a stage four Gastrea has somehow managed to begin deteriorating a monolith, and a huge swarm of lesser Gastrea are accumulating near it,waiting for its collapse in nine days. To help solve this crisis, she asks Rentarou to assemble a team of civil officers to work in conjunction with the JASDF in holding the Gastrea threat back. I guess this is how we’re going to meet the other two pairs of civil officers we see in the OP.
Seitenshi says that they’ll do what they can to keep it a secret from the public so there’s no panic, but I don’t really see how there’s much they could do. Even if they’re a bit out there, you can still clearly see each of the monoliths from the city. So if a giant-ass Gastrea was next to one I’m sure the public would be able to see it too. She also says that it would take them nine days to rebuild the monolith, but I find that hard to believe considering just how massive those things are, and also because of how small the Tokyo government is.
• Have I ever mentioned that it’s kind of funny how the whole Tokyo area seems to be just like it was prior to the Gastrea taking over? Like here we see Rentarou walking through some downtown area near some bars, and we see a bunch of drunk businessmen, and the scene looks just like you would expect any other such anime scene to look like. I would just expect things to look a lot different when Tokyo becomes more of a city state in the middle of Gastrea territory. For example, with the collapse of a nationwide agricultural system, wouldn’t we see much more farmers instead of businessmen in suits?
• They even still have magical girl cartoons in this world! But okay, to be fair, it could just be re-runs of a cartoon from pre-Gastrea Japan that Enju is obsessed with. But still.
• Tina makes Rentarou and Enju some delicious, but the latter too are unimpressed by her ability to only make pizza. Come on you two, even if that’s the only thing she can make it’s still impressive for a ten year old to be able to make pizza like that. Be more grateful!
• I know at this point it might not be too surprising for Black Bullet to have some lolicon subtext, but eh, I got to point it out anyways. So in this next scene we see Rentarou and Enju sharing a futon while Tina sleeps in a bed, but she turns out to be awake and she and Rentarou have a nice conversation with each other. But then she starts calling Rentarou “onii-chan,” has her pajama sagging over her shoulder again, and leans against Rentarou; and the two of them express surprise as Enju exclaims something in her sleep, as if they don’t want to get caught for something. To be fair I could just be nitpicking again, but it just comes off as more of an intimate lolicon moment than anything else.
• “The Tina Sprout that was ranked 98 has already died once fighting you, Big Bro. This life I now live is a new one. Do with it whatever you wish.” I find it little irksome that Rentarou doesn’t object to that last sentence at all, and instead just starts talking about how he and Kisara founded Tendo Civil Security Agency. Like, Tina’s life shouldn’t belong to anyone but her own. It’s understandable why she might think otherwise due to her upbringing, but Rentarou should be letting her know that it shouldn’t be his choice do do whatever he wishes with her life.
• So they set up the agency as a way to get revenge on the Gastrea, and initially all three of Rentarou, Enju, and Kisara were jaded kids. But then Rentarou and Enju became best buds, which helped Kisara become the nice tsundere she is now.
• I spoke too soon with the lolicon pandering. As Kisara walks in the next morning to pick up Tina, Tina crawls out of the futon blanket near Rentarou’s crotch, and says sleepily: “Wasn’t last night fun, Big Bro? It was a bit scary sometimes, but I’m happy that you taught me new things.” We also find out that she’s not wearing any pants, as she stands up and gives Rentarou a good look at her genitals. Way to drop the bomb there, Black Bullet.
• For a second I thought this news report was going to be about the police responding to Kisara’s call, but alas, it wasn’t. So a politician pushing for the expulsion of all Cursed Children was murdered, apparently by a cursed child, which decreases the chances of the new Cursed Children bill to pass. Though since this is a city-state under martial law, I wonder how the legislative system actually works here. Since Seitenshi is the supreme ruler of Tokyo, couldn’t she just pass whatever law she wants?
• Whilst on a train, Rentarou explains to Tina that he’s searching for civil officers to add to his team, and that he brought Tina along so he could show her around the Tokyo area. “A date with onii-san…” Tina whispers to herself upon hearing this; I guess Rentarou really does have two little girls trying to get into his pants now. Rentarou looks around nervously though when Tina clings to his arm, but that’s a sure way to raise suspicion. I mean, seeing a little girl cling to her “onii-san” isn’t weird at all, since people would just assume he actually is her older brother. But if he acts like he has something to hide that just makes him look suspicion.
• Then instead of searching for these civil officers, we proceed to see a montage of Rentarou going on a date with Tina showing her around the area like he said.
• Wow, I guess whenever Rentarou goes on an outing with one of his loli waifus, he’s bound to run into some tragedy involving a Cursed Child, like with the child that got shot in episode 2. Now as he and Tina walk through the mall, they come across a blind-folded, obviously homeless Cursed Child who’s singing in a very adult-sounding singing voice. “What happened to your eyes? I thought that the Cursed Children were immune to disease,” asks Rentarou. Good question! It turns out this oh so poor loli poored lead into her eyes.
God, this is too much; I couldn’t stop laughing. They’re just trying so hard to shove tragedy into our faces to make us sad, and it’s even worse than they’re attempt from episode 2. And of course, in the background is a protest from the civilians wanting to throw out all the Cursed Children, even though again, they’re the ones protecting them from the Gastrea.
• Rentarou arrives at the Katagiri Civil Security Agency, and is immediately greeted by a loli shouting insults about how he’s a pervert. I wonder what sort of history Rentarou has with the Katagiri agency, or if this loli is just a brat.
• Wow, this Katagiri dude lives in a total pig pen. So this tough, buff blonde dude, guesses correctly what it is Rentarou is doing here: he’s recruiting people for the eminent destruction of the monolith (which Katagiri somehow knows about,) but everyone he’s asked so far has rejected him, and so know has no choice but to ask Katagiri for help. Wait, hold up, Rentarou’s actually been asking other people? And they rejected because he’s a “young upstart” who everyone in the area hates for some reason. But why would they reject him when the whole fate of the Tokyo Area is resting on these people’s willingness to help? And if Rentarou’s reputation is so bad, why wouldn’t the government just have someone else do the recruiting job?
• Katagiri insists that he won’t work for anyone weaker for him, and so the two pairs of civil officers have a duel with one another. It’s pretty silly how it’s practically a fight to the death though, with the use of actual weapons like chainsaw brass knuckles. Kind of underwhelming for a fight too, since it’s less than a couple minutes before Katagiri and Yuzuki lose to Rentaoru and Tina. Gee, what wimps.
• Huh, so it looks like these monoliths are really giant slabs of concrete with a relatively thin layer of varanium around them. Okay, that makes a little lot more sense for why they’d be able to rebuild it in as quickly as nine days.
Anime Is (Not) Dead 