Sengoku Youko

Episode 3

One of the most common observations about Mizukami's stories is that they move unusually fast. Planet With crams what feels like 50 episodes of story into 12, and Spirit Circle manages to work through multiple lifetimes of character arcs in just half a dozen manga volumes. Compared to many other stories– especially shonen battle fare – it can feel positively breathless, as he's never one to linger on spectacle or draw out emotional beats longer than absolutely necessary. It's a brutally efficient approach that can, in aggregate, work out well. It can also leave individual chunks of the story busy and aimless simultaneously. Such is the case here, where we sprint through multiple fight scenes, character introductions, and some key flashbacks in the same span of time it would take a Demon Slayer character to tell us the color of their sword changed. It makes for an interesting but haphazard viewing experience, where the individual elements are engaging and thematically linked, but don't quite fit together with the precision you'd want.

Take Jinka, for starters. While much of his backstory is still a mystery, we learn two key elements during his ultimately failed attack on the Dangaisyuu: his end goal, and the origin of his hatred for humans. As a child, he saw humans attack and kill the friendly spirit that seemingly raised him, and in vengeance, he slew one of those men with his own sword. Now, years later, and after a lot of mysterious training under the "Phoenix Killer" sage, he's hunting for a way to transform into a Katawara and abandon his humanity outright. It's a reasonably standard backstory – again, one you'd expect from a story's villain – but I appreciate the texture it gives Jinka and his burning misanthropy. It re-contextualizes his attack on them as one of strategy rather than petty vengeance, wanting to find and exploit the other humans' experiments to his own ends, which brings his strange, strained alliance with Tama further into question.

The desire for power is quickly becoming the central idea concerning our main cast. It's what drives Jinka and what brought Shakugan to accept the devil's bargain that eventually led to her slaughtering her village – and it's interesting to see the apparent moral the series is starting to build. Shakugan sees herself as a monster forever coveting that power, for wanting the strength to fight back against those who hurt her. Yet, in this very episode, that monstrous body is the only thing that saves her and the others. Shinsuke, meanwhile, is obviously jealous of what she has gained and befuddled at her guilt. His entire goal in life is to achieve enough power to escape oppression, be it through spirit powers or pure swordsmanship, and to him, there's nothing more human or innocent than what Shakugan chose to do. That's an extremely empathetic perspective and a worldview rife with dangerous potential, but for now, it offers the pair a sweet bonding moment.

The only character here who isn't preoccupied with the search for power is Tama, who witnesses all of this with compassion, but also attempts to use it as a teaching moment, imploring Jinka to start wielding his powers to bring the human and spirit worlds together, rather than contributing to the strife. Notably, the episode ends before he answers her plea, and given everything else we've seen, I have severe doubts that he'll answer that call with anything but snide dismissal. Still, it's a key thematic idea being laid out for her. Tama is the only member of the party who doesn't seem to want power, and also the only one capable of doling it out to others. It's unclear if she can use her spirit abilities as potently as Jinka, but based on how she tried to negotiate with the bandits in episode one, it doesn't feel like she'd want to exercise that strength even if she can. Knowing that Jinka does have that drive, her plea almost feels like the narrative itself begging its protagonist to wield his might with compassion and break down the cycle of violence that's led everyone else to desire power in the first place.

That's all well and good, but it's also jumbled together between Jinka's battle against multiple monks, a scene where he gets punched by a castle, and several sequences of the rest of the cast stumbling through the mountains in a way that feels aimless. The speed of all these character moments ensures that everyone in the cast is consistently getting developed and building on their prior material. Still, it also means none of them get the time to land as hard as they might. That's not too big of a problem right now, as we're still in the early phases of these characters and have only just established a new plot thread to follow, but it's worrisome when thinking about when these arcs will hit pivotal or punctuating moments. I hope the story will be willing and able to let moments sit when they really need to or better structure its episodes to make those moments hit harder with the time allowed, but it's a big, lingering question mark right now.

Rating:

Sengoku Youko is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.