English Dub Review: Drifters Episode 5: “Bring Back Love”

 

While episode 4 was the “calm before the storm”, episode 5 is where it gets crude, brutal and unapologetic but for all the right reasons.

Spoilers Below

Toyo, Oda and Yoichi along with Octoberist member Olminu and the Elf Village they liberated formulate a crude yet a shockingly effective plan that involves feces… lots and lots of feces.

“Bring Back Love” shifts between flashbacks leading up to the current events of the Elf forces hiding from the Orte Troopers and a montage of them being trained by the Toyo, Oda and Yoichi with a boosted morale.  Much to Olminu’s disgust, Toyo and Oda explain that they made a ditch and used the decomposed corpses of the first Orte wave from episode 2 in an effort to make saltpeter while the severed heads were the only body parts that were given a proper burial out of Toyo’s Samurai principles. Oda asks Olminu to search for Sulfur at a nearby volcano and to accumulate what she can.

The episode is thankfully balanced with comedic and badass moments like a scene where Yoichi helps  the elves re-learn the use of their archery skills while showing off the extent of his skill before it shifts back to the present when we see the Elves unleash hell with excrement-laced arrows & weapons upon 2nd orte wave whom aren’t as well trained or experienced as the first wave.

Surprisingly the Elves despite how disgustingly crude yet effective the tactics were managed to achieve a small victory however, they still need to rescue the elf women who are still held prisoner…

And this is when it slowly leads to a difficult and serious direction for me to talk about…

The Elves and Three Drifters infiltrate the Orte Castle using the “Trojan Horse” tactic of disguising themselves as Troopers returning and just when they enter, they storm the castle to rescue the elf-women.

At first when they enter the tower they’re supposedly kept,  Toyo tells an Elf to spare the life of a random Orte trooper because he was unarmed which shows the degree of honor that he has, but that’s until he opens the door where they’re kept and much to his shock and horror, the Elf women were forced to be unwilling sex-slaves in a dark unsanitary chamber covered in dirt, with half of them nude yet tastefully obscured by shadows while some are covered in blankets. it’s an exploitive yet effective scene that clearly shows how despicable the Orte Empire is and once Toyo see’s this he ends up ordering the Elves in his own words to Kill all the Orte Troopers without mercy as they’re undeserving of it and the episode ends.

On a more personal level, I’m not a fan of rape in fiction but if it actually makes sense to the plot and characters I can understand but this moment even when I read it in the manga years ago left a bad taste in my mouth and it’s just as effectively cringe-worthy in this anime adaptation…

Overview:

The scene near the end with the Elf-Women being forcibly subjected as sex slaves was what made me cringe the most but if you know anything about Kouta Hirano, this isn’t the first time the manga creator has delved into rape or sexual assault in his works. (His previous job was making Hentai before he struck proverbial gold with Hellsing but even Hellsing had two particularly infamous flashback scenes.)

This Dub cast consistently gives solid performances and although the episode was crude and disgusting the tactics Nobunaga used in poisoning the arrows with shit, it reminded me of those stories regarding the primitive death traps that were utilized during The Vietnam War where Vietcong Insurgents would lace bamboo spikes with feces to ensure their enemies suffered from gangrene. (Yes that really happened.)

The episode as a whole was brutal, cathartic and got the point across when it delivered the emotional scenes effectively. Hirano is a master at mixed emotions and I wouldn’t want it any other way. 🙂