Ron Does Stuff

I am an old person who isn’t updated about what the hot new anime is, so the last anime I’ve actually watched from beginning to end is Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood. I guess you could also count Spy x Family? But that one is still ongoing.

Anyways, Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood is still one of my top animes, so finding out that there’s another anime currently being aired with a story by Hiromu Arakawa, the same mangaka behind Full Metal Alchemist? Well, of course, I had to watch it too. I’m late, yes, but I’ll catch up by the time episode four airs!

The show starts with a pretty ominous scene: a grandmother telling a woman giving birth that she should hold off until dawn as the twins she’s having are going to “command the daemons”. The twins are born, and this guy — not identified yet — calls them “the children who sunder day and night”, and would you look at that, one of them’s blonde, and one of them has black hair.

We then jump to 16 years later, with the blonde twin still living in the mountains and apparently not knowing what an airplane is. So at least we know that we’re in modern times and not in a facsimile of post-Word War I Europe. The blonde twin is named Yuru, while the black-haired twin is…unaccounted for. I don’t think the Danji guy waiting for him is his twin.

Honestly, I can’t place which time period the anime is set in because it looks like Yuru’s town is still stuck in…at least Edo period? I hope I’m saying the right period. We then see here Yuru’s twin sister is. She’s locked up, and her name is Asa. The two of them talk about the state of the town and how the adults might have to leave for “the outside world” to find work. So are they trapped in a bubble or something? Are they aware of how different “the outside world” is from their own town? We also find out that Yuru and Asa’s parents have left the town as well, and it seems like they haven’t returned.

BUT MAYBE THAT’S NOT TRUE, because there are people who have come back from “the outside world” bringing goods from “the outside world”, and they’re aware of the pandemic. Interesting. So they’re in the same timeline as “the outside world”. And there are people in the village who want to go to “the outside world”, since people rarely come back once they’ve stepped into it. Asa isn’t going to be one of those people, though, as she performs an important duty for the village. What that duty is exactly isn’t expounded on just yet.

THEN the show makes a fool of me because the village is under some magical bubble, a bubble that is burst by someone coming in from a helicopter. With the bubble burst, Yuru now sees the airplane up in the sky and the helicopters circling their village. What he doesn’t see are the soldiers killing the villagers, who all look like they haven’t seen helicopters before either. And these soldiers have modern weapons, specifically guns.

This is all so exciting. I mean, it’s bad for Yuru, who is just getting his worldview destroyed, but as a viewer? Exciting. I feel like I’ve been transported into another new and exciting world. Exciting and violent, because this new character Gabby just ~gobbled~ up these villagers, and from what I can discern, those are pretty accurate internal organs.

While all that is happening in the village, Dera, the trader from the outside world, is calling another character named Hana from his mobile phone. Either he’s originally from “the outside world”, or he’s from the village and he’s adapted pretty well to “the outside world”. He’s telling Hana that they need to change their meeting point and that Asa has come. So the locked-up girl isn’t Asa! And that locked-up girl is also dead. Damn, my mouth has been agape for minutes now. Real Asa is here to kill everyone but her brother.

Elsewhere in the village, Dera finds Gabby, and Dera can also see what I assume is Gabby’s daemon, which is essentially a big mouth with a lot of eyes. He gets past Gabby and snatches Yuru away from Asa, who by her own admission, is still not in full control of her daemon. But so is Yuru. In fact, Yuru doesn’t even know what daemons are, but Dera does slam Yuru’s face into the ground to awaken the daemons that Yuru’s supposed to control.

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