Custom Toonami Block Week 175 Rundown

The Witch from Mercury: So IMMEDIATELY after Sul’s duel with Gaston everyone goes ‘wait aren’t the suits that suck the life out of you banned because our war chief is a bloodthirsty dictator?’ and she immediately gets arrested and kicked out of school. Meanwhile Mio’s been told that she’s no longer forced to marry the school’s top pilot and her father is cutting out the middleman and just arranging a marriage for her which she’s like what 16 even for a high business monarchy style thing it seems a little early to lock that down that hard. Also just kinda wondering what the point of even playing at the ‘oh it’s whoever the best is’ if you’re just gonna immediately cut the façade whenever it’s someone you don’t want like why not just force a marriage from the start. Anyway Mio’s like ‘bitch I wanted to marry the gay girl how dare you take back your orders and give me new ones’ like she doesn’t like being told what to do but explicitly seemed a lot more chill about it when it was Sul. Gaston gets beaten by his father for losing and we allude to him being slightly less shitty than we were initially led to believe since he did send some people to clean up Mio’s garden. The bigwigs are all having a NERV-style meeting of shadowy figures and our resident obligatory Masked Gundam Character Prospera is like ‘yeah it looks and functions exactly like a Gundam but it didn’t suck her soul out so it can’t be one, right?’ and no one’s fucking buying that and also it’s a bunch of old men high on their own power so they’re just like ‘well you’re under arrest for building something that functions exactly like the thing we banned then’. Meanwhile Mio shows up, redicrecting her escape attempt to Earth to save Sul and telling her father off and basically having a badass teenage tantrum in a shareholder’s meeting, like it’s kinda cool how blatantly petty and personal her grievances are that it takes some balls to bring it up the way she does surrounded by the most important people in the world that just sentenced a masked lady to jail for technically not breaking the law. She challenges her dad to fight the Aerial and reinstate her engagement to Sul which he has absolutely no obligation to accept given idk if Corporations should really work on Klingon rules anyway and if you’re gonna take shit from him say if you win you get the whole company, go big or go home. But the group discusses that the illegal suit is pretty dope and they wanna get some more data out of it so they agree to let Sul fight to save her Gundam and her lesbian fiancée so that’s good.  

Inuyasha The Final Act: Inuyasha and co. are still soaking in Kikyo’s death and Koga gets an admittedly nice sendoff where he gets to leave on good terms with Kagome as well as get enough out of a rise out of Inuyasha to snap him out of his post-Kikyo coma and get him to resolve to make Koga’s sacrifice worthwhile. I like how Koga intentionally says the most triggering shit just to piss him off at this point like he’s really become self-aware as a character and knows what his role is. Also as another character that embodies the ‘the power to achieve your dreams is inside you’ moral of the story he started out seeking the jewel to obtain the power to unite the wolf demon tribes and ends up so strong that losing his jewel shards is basically just a minor inconvenience and ends up in a relationship that does in fact unite the fractured parts of the tribes. Meanwhile Sesshomaru is talking to his mom about trying to master Meidou Zangetsuha and ends up getting Kohaku and Rin dragged into the underworld during the training. I feel like Sesshomaru’s mom is such wasted potential like she has so little screentime and is basically a plot device they could’ve done so much more with. Once she reveals that Rin can’t be revived again by the Tenseiga Sesshomaru’s grief and compassion evolves both the healing and the meidou side of Tenseiga so he can purify a hundred souls as it was originally stated and create a much larger Meidou Zangetsuha, though Rin still has to be brought back with Mommymaru’s necklace of convenience. It’s really funny that Jaken takes it upon himself to be Sesshomaru’s emotion translator at this point since he knows he’s stoic enough not to cry when Rin dies despite wanting to and also won’t  thank his mom for saving her despite being thankful. Last but not least she tells Kohaku he also can’t be saved by Tenseiga in case people were starting to think that now that he and Sesshomaru are together, apparently you only get one free get out of death free card regardless of the source so yeah. Inuyasha’s group make it their new mission to hunt down and protect Kohaku so they can figure out what to do now that Naraku has 99.9% of the jewel.  

Castlevania: So I’mma be honest, this is where the Internal Vampire politics get kinda frustrating, like I’ve had it in the back of my head that all this infighting may just be a way to ruin Dracula’s otherwise impregnable plan and have a heroic victory while both evil sides are fighting each other and I’m still worried about that considering we’ve spent more time with them than with Trevor this season but in this episode we even find out that all the shit Carmilla wants to do Dracula would’ve just let her do anyway like he doesn’t give a shit, she wants to usurp his armies and the one move that she’s been gunning for since she walked in the door they’re just like ‘sure go nuts’ and the planning of the past like three episodes has basically been for that. I’m getting ahead of myself, Trevor’s group stuff first since we actually make some progress on that this episode. Basically Alucard gives Sypha the reverse speech that Trevor gave her last time about how he’s a dick and they can’t really trust him and like 75% of this show at this point is untrustworthy vampires telling people they can’t trust people. Sypha wisely asserts they’re both morons and they’ve gotta suck it up and get to world-saving or else everyone’s fucked. But yeah back on Carmilla’s weird warpath they don’t know Godbrand’s dead and Isaac is called by Hector to get him to sign off on going to Braila and get in on the Carmilla cult. Isaac is not down for Carmilla but he is for the Braila plan since it means everyone can shut up about it and Carmilla can stop whining so the politics of it don’t functionally matter, like it’s been such a long fight for this and it doesn’t functionally matter because they just do it anyway. Granted Isaac does it because it means their traitors are all in one place with a name and a face and Hector does it because everyone that talks to Carmilla is like ‘Carmilla is always going on about how she doesn’t trust or respect anyone but I’M DIFFERENT, I’M THE SPECIAL ONE’ like Godbrand was a fucking moron so that was fine but geez she’s not even being seductive enough for them to be thinking with their dicks they’re just idiots, she’s not even good at the manipulation considering if she’d just asked Dracula to do it he’s so done at this point he prolly would’ve. She doesn’t even bother to pretend this was Hector’s independent idea and follows him into the room coaching him and shit. Like the only functional thing this does is make Carmilla the Commander in Chief for this fight for… some reason, and like it’s not even a good argument because the two sides are ‘do something’ and ‘do nothing’ and Carmilla has the balls to be all ‘haha now you’re in too deep Hector so I don’t have to pretend to like you anymore’ like BITCH AS LEAST WAIT TILL YOU ACTUALLY HAVE THE REINS like holy shit all you did was convince Dracula to do something he wasn’t all that adverse to doing in the first place you’re not exactly Sosuke Aizen and she has this weird girl power bent to some of her speeches and I’d really rather girls just do the badass girl power thing instead of talking about how girly and empowered they are all the time. Long story short I don’t really like Carmilla and this plot had a really weird end to this section of the season for basically taking up half the runtime. Meanwhile, actual girl power girl Sypha found a way to trap Castlevania in one place as long as she can jerry-rig an ending to the spell that’s like 80% done but she doesn’t have a lot of time because the castle just showed up like… five minutes ago.

Jujutsu Kaisen: It’s Mahito versus Nobara time and apparently Mahito’s clone can’t transfigure souls and can only do the Clayface body warping shit and Nobara actually figures this out and uses the clone’s body as a substitute Straw Doll like she did with the other guy’s arm cause semantically the clone is basically Mahito’s arm and she wrecks him up from long distance, saving Yuji from an ambush in the process and giving him the opportunity to beat the shit out of Mahito while he’s stunlocked. Rather than keep going through that shit, Mahito employs the Joestar Family’s Secret Technique and books it the fuck out of there. The two Mahitos actually meet up and switch, the real one attacking Nobara while Yuji beats the other one’s head in. Mahito gives Nobara’s face a quick tap and isn’t sure if he killed her, like this whole exchange is excruciatingly vague about whether she’s dead or not but we jump straight into her backstory which isn’t a good sign. It’s basically a fleshed-out version of the story she told in the beginning of the series. I feel like this happens a lot where characters in long-running series have simple backstories at the beginning and then have a secondary supplemental flashback to beef up the tragedy or reframe the original flashback, half the cast of One Piece has done this at this point but for Nobara it’s an interesting retelling of her story through the eyes of her friends and giving a ‘this is your life’ type deal about who she’s loved and why she’s done what she’s done that gives a lot better of an idea of who she is than her original introduction. But yeah her eye fucking explodes which is weirdly not how we’ve seen Mahito’s powers work anywhere else but it was just a light tap while he was in a hurry and maybe her energy resisted it or something. Given that and the vagueness where even Mahito’s not sure if it was enough to kill her I’m tempted to say she’s not dead because usually you don’t want to be ambiguous about that shit unless you’re gearing up for a big return but as far as I know the manga’s already fighting Sukuna at this point and she’s yet to make a comeback so who fucking knows.

Delicious in Dungeon: After Laios’s sword gets busted he tells the story of how he got it fighting a bunch of living armor in the dungeon and how he fucked up and died the first time, confirming that death does indeed have no consequences which explains Marcille’s dialogue in the first episode and why no one seems too worried about rushing to get Falin. Still I’d say if death has no consequences in your series that’s something you’d want to establish right away because that is kind of an investment breaker, something like how DBZ put limits on the dragon balls at first and made loopholes harder so death isn’t just meaningless like it is in the Buu Saga. Still I kinda like this episode since it’s mainly focused on one thing and the food stuff doesn’t get in the way of the storytelling too much. They manage to sneak past the living armor colony and Laios fights Ornstein and it turns out it’s a bunch of mollusks living in the layers of the armor and doing weird goopy Alphonse Elric shit. They cook them and Laios gets Ornstein’s sword but it has a mollusk living inside it still so he’s basically got a living weapon which is pretty neat.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End: Frieren confronts Aura and surprisingl the Autistic Elf Power Hour has its second encounter with Living Armor this week, what’re the odds? Aura basically has the Millenium Scales except instead of summoning a demon to eat a Musuem Curator she weighs their power level and just instantly controls anyone weaker than her with the caveat that if someone stronger than her shows up she just automatically gets controlled instead. I’m kinda sad this means Aura doesn’t actually have a demon army like this was just a plot by four guys and not a whole organized force but I guess it’s fine. She uses an anti-spell spell to dispel the control instead of blasting nameless husks into the ground and desecrating their corpses because Himmel yelled at her last time for disrespecting the dead. Aura asks her why she cares what a corpse thinks and oh it is ON now. Meanwhile Fern and Stark are preparing for Stark to book it out of dodge and try and get Frieren back to fight the other two demons when they get caught in an ambush by Blood Sephiroth and the little girl. Turns out the little girl’s powers are Unlimited Blade Works/Sharingan shenanigans where she can create a weapon and mimic a fighting style by watching it enough and she’s just so happened to have copied Eisen’s style during the first war and decks Stark with his own moves but better. Meanwhile it seems Fern’s ability is Quick Draw and she can just fire off spells crazy rapid and puts the push on Blood Sephiroth in a really cool fight that creates literal fireworks. Stark takes Eisen’s words of “Just don’t die, stupid” to heart and does that thing from Samurai Champloo where if you leave yourself wide open enough it leaves the enemy wide open for their counterattack and destroys the little girl so yay, two down two to go.

Vinland Saga: War has reached Ketil’s farm and he’s got about 300 farners with pitchforks versus Canute’s 100 Jommvikings and Royal Theigns so yeah it’s basically the coughing baby versus the hydrogen bomb. Luckily Thorfinn’s met up with Leif and Leif’s a fucking chad and agrees to take on all of Thorfinn’s extra baggage he’s gathered over the past season and transport Arnheid out of there while the fighting’s going on. Snake tells his men that Ketil is a fraud and was never a war hero because he knew the guy his name was actually based on and came to him for help but at the same time he feels indebted to the family that’s taken care of him all this time and it’s really funny to watch his speech about how Ketil’s a fraud and not worth dying over right as he goes out to die for him fires his men up more than anything, like actions really do speak louder than words. Ketil’s kinda bought into his own hype at this point and isn’t listening to the dozens of people telling him he’s going into a meatgrinder and yeah it’s a fucking massacre, I imagined Thorfinn would be more upset watching this or trying to actively broker peace talks but I guess he’s got other shit on his plate right now since Arnheid’s on death’s door and got her ghost husband’s permission to go say her last goodbyes. Meanwhile Thorgil’s just gonna pop out of the ocean buck naked with a sword and try and cut Canute’s head off behind enemy lines so that’s… a plan I guess. I have no clue how he intends to get out of there even if he succeeds but okay, you do your naked regicide.

“Historical Accuracy” Nope.

So... Did my eyes deceive me, but is there a female villain dressed like an oiran (Edo period prostitute, which means AFTER the Sengoku period) from Yoshiwara in Yashahime? Really? We’re having yet another villainous oiran-look-alike? Is female sexuality so horrifying that we must make villains that look like indentured prostitutes all the time? RWBY did it too...

TL;DR: Whether or not Sunrise switches and baits this STOP trying to justify this children’s fantasy cartoon as “historically accurate”. It’s not even biologically accurate.

CW: Yashahime timeline, Rin’s age and puberty, child prostitution, ~*historical accuracy*~, if you’ve gone through the whole “medieval fantasy historical accuracy” thing in other fantasy fandoms, you get the idea...

Y’know, officially according to the laws governing Yoshiwara, girls sold into prostitution weren’t allowed to begin sexual work until they were 18 years old (the age was lowered later in the hopes that brothel owners would comply with the laws, they didn’t. However, the 18-year-old law was in the 1600s, just after the Sengoku period, when organized prostitution took off). Even if sleazy brothels started them younger (though still usually, but not always, started them in their mid-teens, which by their reckoning, would be a year or two older than Rin).

Let that sink in when you go “Japanese people did not know it was wrong back then!”

They made literal laws to prevent prostitutes, who were considered of a subhuman caste, from having to work before they were late-teens/adults! If a procurer picked up Rin in the Edo period and sold her to a brothel she would have had sexual experiences later in life than she did as a supposedly beloved and free girl!

Also, if we are being historically accurate and the official ages (one year old at birth and a year older at every new year) are counted like in medieval Japan then in the spirit of being historically accurate... Rin was in that case biologically 6-7 years old in the original series; 10 when Sango gave birth to the son and Kagome returned and thus, at most, 12 years old when she gave birth to the Yashahime twins and 11 years old when impregnated...

Except that back then, the vast majority of girls didn’t go through menarche before the age of 14-15... It’s quite a conundrum to be historically accurate, you see... The modern equivalent of getting your period at 11-12 would be something like getting it at 7 years old, which, while not impossible, is considered really early and would stunt growth and very unlikely to happen on a village peasant’s diet.

Especially in Japan who banned meat between the years 675 to 1868 (yes, 1193 years, it’s not a typo) except for medicinal purposes. Meat is one of the things linked to early puberty, after all.

Which meant that very, very few women married before the age of 16 unless they came with a long contract that needed to be fulfilled beforehand, but then, it was usually with the understanding that consummating the marriage was to be put off to a more appropriate age. Most women married in their 20s because if they survived that long, they were likely to survive into their elder years.

You see, the low life expectancy in medieval lands were because infant deaths and childhood mortality rates. Once you reached adulthood as a woman at 20 years old? You’re likely to live into your 50-60s, if not longer, barring accident, injury or serious illnesses.

Also, it is possible that due to Inuyasha’s introduction in the first chapter/episode (arson, murder, theft of enshrined artifact) he is considered of an unclean/impure/untouchable caste (eta/hinin) and not allowed to marry outside that caste. (In the Tokugawa era, certainly he cannot marry outside the caste, but I haven’t looked deeply into the Sengoku equivalent. Also, any children would inherit his caste under Tokugawa laws.)

Kagome is outside that caste. In fact, as clergy and miko she’s the opposite of that caste. There’s no way she would be considered his wife in Kaede’s village, no matter what Kaede says, and as a girl brought up in a shrine in 90s Japan and likely traditionally so, she likely would refuse extramarital intercourse (not even modern Japan has a strong hook-up culture compared to, say, USA).

Luckily, she’s a miko and hopefully exempt from yobai, though. Yobai means “night-crawling” and it actually means “men have needs so let them crawl into women’s beds at night, also she might never have met him before”. It is nowadays considered part of rape-kink. It was originally a Heian period tradition that was somewhat different...

Oh and weddings were not a thing for peasant villagers. Noble weddings would have the precursor of the modern san-san-kudo ceremony in a formal reception room, but the white kimono/headgear and modern ceremonies done after the Meiji period were not a thing in the Sengoku period.

Geez, did Kagome even know what she gave up (Oden, a meat dish, is her favorite food!) when she went back in time permanently?

Okay, I’ll stop now.

But, y’know, little girls getting fucked is the sacred cow needed to be protected in the name of ~*historical accuracy*~ like always. And having recently been in the ASOIAF fandom, I have literally no patience for that bs. So this flow of consciousness rant was born.