English Dub Review: Seven Mortal Sins “Love Your Enemies and Pray for Those Who Persecute You

We’re going through all 9 rings of hell and rings of sexual torture today.

Spoilers Below

It’s closing in on the bitter end of Seven Mortal Sins. Now that Lucifer has whooped every last sin in their own episode, time for the big bad Vanity to come in and whoop every last sin as well and torture them too. This episode greatly benefits from a lot of the exposition being dumped on us last episode so now Love Your Enemies has full reign to go wild on just showing visuals of the 9 rings of hell and the ways Vanity tortures the sins for betraying her. This comes after so many other sexual torture scenes in this show and this episode really trounces them all in terms of presentation.

Lust is bound and cut up by an eternally raging tornado. Gluttony is force fed Vanity’s sausages which both is and isn’t better than it sounds considering she’s our residential loli archetype demon. Gluttony is stripped and bound to a golden horse, with bags of gold strapped to her legs to pull her down, which is hands down the most painful looking of the tortures. Sloth is forced to run on a treadmill behind some hell fire which is hands down the laziest throwaway torture to choose from. Finally, we have Wrath being encased in the black remains of the dissolved departed. Each ring of hell and methodology of the sins torture reflects the nature of each of the rings they inhabit, except for Sloth and the 7th ring which were throw away jokes.

It allows for a much more visually appealing episode as more than anything else, the show excels at visualizing the concept of the deadly sins. However, where in previous episodes where that visualization also had the context of describing the personas of the Sins themselves to better describe the visuals the rings are glossed over. Unless you truly know your hell lore you as the viewer will only vaguely feel a connection between the sin and their circle of hell they reside in when they face Vanity.

Now as for the backstory of Vanity and how she became the leader of the mortal sins… at first, I couldn’t give a demonic rat’s ass. Look, if her biggest accomplishment was winning the loyalty of three apathetic demons and three pushovers then she’s gonna need to be very vain to delude herself as that is not impressive. In a way, the inclusion of her backstory feels a bit tacked on as there really is no context to really understand where she came from. Before this point, Vanity was just the glasses wearing demon with stupid boob coverings and shoulder pads who just really hated Lucifer. She isn’t deep and this last-minute backstory inclusion just feels like a hand wave away as to why this is more important than it actually is.

And you can’t have a Seven Mortal Sins episode without Lucifer utterly sucking ass as a badass demon lord. Always being fashionably late to stop all the sins from being tortured, complaining about getting gunk on her shoes and getting beaten by some giant ice monsters which to be fair would be a difficult fight but she ends that off with passing out at Vanity’s feet in perfect stabbing Lucifer through the brain position. I try every week to give this show credit because if I don’t then this just becomes a mindless demonic fetish show but I do feel that it does have a mind but it does not flex it properly. Trying to make it a story about betrayal at the end here just makes it overcomplicated and dull when what contextualizes that betrayal is scantily clad women in stupid outfits. It’s just harder to be invested until the show finally loosens up and just has fun with itself and tries to convey its story more through emotions. In those instances, it can shine as something worth watching. Overall in terms of this episode, it was solid if only slightly below that, able to show some really visually stimulating scenes but with contextual background info that’s really hard to care about. Come for the weird sexual things and leave for the plot things.