English Dub Review: Golden Kamuy “Trickster Fox”

There’s a fox on the loose.

Overview:

The team meets another Ainu member, who seems to carry the secret of luck with her.

Overview:

Here we’re introduced to a new character- Inkarmat. She’s another Ainu, and is mysterious all around.

The fox motif that surrounds Inkarmat is all over the place, from the foxy expression on her face to the bones that she uses for her fortune telling. Foxes are notoriously signifiers of tricksters, and so Inkarmat remains such throughout the entirety of the episode. She makes her livelihood divining fortunes, but her fortunes are still vague, as many fortunes are. The most accurate one is that Asirpa is looking for her father, something that she guesses because she has prior knowledge of the situation. She appears when luck is down, and brings people hope through results- although whether those results are eternal is a different story.

In the end, we’re never really sure if Inkarmat had powers or not. She at the very least is extremely lucky, but she does seem to have somewhat of an otherwordly perception. Considering that Golden Kamuy is not a supernatural series, it’s doubtful that she’s actually magic- but she is very attune to her environment. Her fortune telling comes from her Ainu roots, and there is power in belief. It’s a little hard to tell, but this is less of a key component, aside from the fact that Shiraishi gets swindled, again.

There’s also the fact that it ends up with the fact that Inkarmat used to know Noppera-bo. She’s a key hint towards the hunt towards Ainu gold, but she vanishes before she can give any more information. While this fits her trickster archetype, it also seems like she’s running from something. It’s hard to tell, as the series doesn’t exactly lend itself to answers, but hopefully that will be confirmed or denied in the future. At the same time, she doesn’t seem like a malicious character, simply withholding information. Then again, we have to wait until she comes back to affirm this.

It’s the last episode, but Golden Kamuy has already been confirmed for a season two, so the abrupt ending doesn’t seem that off-putting. Had it truly ended there, that would have been a pretty terrible end, but the story is bound to continue. This I’m honestly pretty happy about, because the story is honestly wild, and so much has yet to be revealed. Here’s to a season two!