This week has been dominated by Disney now owning pretty much everything now. Crunchyroll will no doubt be next, and then the studios themselves will come later…but now is not the time to worry about multi-nationals taking over the world and eventually reaching out to the stars and buying planets, galaxies, or whatever. Now is the time for the holidays.

While we (as in our family) celebrate Christmas, we also celebrate Yule, which is coming up at the end of this week. We used to make some weird stuff back then; not anymore though…call it lessons learned. Well, to be frank, I quite fancy an mandarin orange hot pot right now.

Sadly, I think the Aqours show is just killing time at this point. This filler episode consisted of the entire school putting together a closing festival before the remaining students either transfer to new schools or it merges. Then again, I have always been extremely hesitant in praising ‘school festival’ episodes in any show, as they all seem to blur into one now.

There were many opportunities in this episode for any of the 9 girls to show off something new…something about themselves that we had never seen before…but we didn’t get anything new at all. Girls get permission to host the festival, preparation for festival, festival takes place, a couple of kids cry, the end. Sorry for being cynical with Love Live! Sunshine!! this week, but with 2 more episodes to go, their plans for the Love Live finals had better hurry up. Either that, or an Aqours movie might be on the drawing board, which is actually quite likely, considering their ‎μ’s counterparts had one (which I still have not seen).

Land of the Lustrous is beginning to get weird in its own way. Last week’s Lunarian monster that left Dia a mess ended up breaking into tiny pieces and consuming the jewel people, with pure joy and emotion but given Master Kongo’s reaction to the monster that arrived (along with the tiny pieces it broke into), we are left with one big question that may or may not be answered in this show: what does he really know about the Lunarians, and what is his relation to them? This is a question that is now firmly on Phos’ mind, and as Bort is too battle-focused to be influenced by the cuteness of these tiny pieces that take over the other jewels, I think they are beginning to question Master Kongo’s judgement when it comes to dealing with the Lunarians too. There’s a good chance that that question may not actually be answered, and that it’ll either come in any future season this show gets, or not be answered at all.

This week also introduces us to a new character, who is currently in recovery: Padparadscha. If you don’t know what the real thing is, it’s a orange-pink sapphire, with a Mohs scale of 9. In real life, it is one of the rarest gems known to us, and the most expensive too. In the show, meanwhile, Padparadscha is being slowly pieced together from other parts by physician Rutile, their former patrol partner. It is also a side character in Steven Universe, as a gem who can see into the past; because Homeworld did not see this as an adequate talent to have, they were considered ‘defective’ and outcast. Something tells me that Padparadscha will have a semi-big role to play in the final episodes, but this is just pure speculation though.

 

I only recently found out that Land of the Lustrous had acquired a home video license in the UK too (Sentai have it for North America), so I’m very happy that this show will stretch out further than Amazon/HIDIVE, because it deserves a big audience. Some will, of course, immediately draw comparisons with Steven Universe, which is, in my opinion, ridiculous; here’s hoping that said people will see more than the fact that both shows have talking gems.

Through looking at fan discussions, people got confused by this week’s episode of Kino’s Journey; not by the content, but by the order. You see, in the original show and in the light novels, this Kino origins episode is told much earlier on, and so to have it right towards the end of the show has left people a little stumped. Personally, after watching this week’s episode, this should have come earlier too.

Here we learn that Kino actually named herself after a traveler who came to her birth country before she was due to have an ‘operation’ to become an adult. When the young girl questions the idea of 12-year-old child undergoing brain surgery to become a robo-adult, the country’s population immediately label her as defective and attempt to dispose of her, only for the traveller to fall on their sword to save her so she can escape the country via a motorrad (Hermes).

Watching this after last week makes me think of how Kino tried to do the right thing for a little girl in a kind country, only to fail. Almost seems like there is doomed to be a cycle of ‘Kinos’ that will exist in the show’s world. The fans will shower praise, I know, but I thought that the tone of this week’s episode was a little messed-up. We are shown that Kino had an oppressive childhood where condescending adults and foreboding red crosses are frequent, and where her country’s population think removing a part of the brain as an adolescent makes you an adult. this is another episode of Kino’s Journey that shows us that humanity does really suck…

…just in time for the holidays then.

This post will be published just before the big days, so happy holidays; I’ll still be carrying on with watching as normal, but now I have to plan for next season. I already have a couple of ideas in mind.