English Dub Review: Sorcerous Stabber Orphen; “GATHER IN MY FOREST, WOLVES”

 

 

 

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Orphen mounts his counter-attack against MacDougal and the Deep Dragon. 

Our Take

After what was a competent and thorough introduction, it’s a bit of a shame that MacDougal doesn’t make it past the first five minutes of this episode. It was obvious he most likely wouldn’t make it past this episode, but still, he exit is rather unceremonious. He and Orphen engage in a battle of gun vs. magic, which, again, is something I wasn’t entirely expecting to see in this anime. Obviously, the talented Orphen wins, but not before making all of MacDougal’s plans literally blow up in his face. 

Salua is another character who takes his leave far sooner than expected. He doesn’t do very much; he goes along with Orphen’s plans because they happened to line up with his, gives a handful of pithy lines of dialogue, and basically just says, “Peace out.” His exit isn’t as anti-climactic, though, as he’s almost certainly a character who will be showing up later down the line. 

The villagers spend precisely a single moment whining and crying about MacDougal’s demise before they suddenly decide the next moment to take up his mantle and go take down the Deep Dragon. These villagers aren’t so much a group of people as they are a concerted plot device. Orphen wastes no time calling them out on their bullshit and telling them they should knock it off, to which they respond by running after him on a needlessly wild goose chase. Orphen is hiding under houses, futilely teleporting short distances across roofs; it’s very underwhelming. Before the chase ends though, Orphen manages to swipe a revolver from one of the villagers. This prompts a legitimate question: “What possible use could a powerful sorcerer such as Orphen have for a gun?” The answer comes in about ten minutes. 

Before long, the Deep Dragon shows up with a giant blast of magic, indiscriminately killing off villagers. Orphen reacts to this by launching his own big magic attack, sacrificing his dragon pendant in the process, but to no avail. That dragon pendant seemed fairly important since it was kind of a central part of his outfit and character design, but it seems like it didn’t matter that much. Claiomh also shows up, carrying with her the Deep Dragon’s baby that she found. 

Orphen tells the Dragon to stop killing people, eventually threatening to kill his baby in front of him. The Dragon doesn’t bat an eye at this, saying he can just revive his child with sorcery. A little extreme, but fair enough, I suppose. 

This doesn’t deter Orphen, who continues his rhetoric assault, continuing to demand the Dragon not kill people. Orphen certainly has the moral high ground here, at least from a human’s perspective, but as he argues, he sounds less like a valiant hero and almost more like an annoyed mercenary who is doing this out of obligation. He obviously couldn’t give two shits about what happens to these villagers, but as soon as the Dragon threatens them he turns into an impromptu paradigm of morality. He’s certainly not wrong, but he never sounds like he believes in the spirit of what he’s demanding, which turns him into a disingenuous hero. 

After a battle of wits, Orphen discovers that the Dragon can only cast magic on things he can see. That’s a fairly large weakness, especially for someone who is supposed to be an ancient, wizened being. Orphen casts a giant ring of fire around the Dragon and tosses the revolver he stole into it, causing it to explode and severely damage the Dragon. An explosion like that taking up all but the last of the Dragon’s strength, though thoroughly ironic, is still a little anti-climactic, but I suppose we did learn that this thing is weaker than we thought. Even supposing he’s not that sturdy, we’ve seen that the Dragon is strong enough that he should’ve been able to do something about the ring of fire instead of just stand there like a moron. 

The Dragon vows to use the last of its strength to take the villagers down with him, and it’s at this point that Fiena finally decides to take action. We had learned that she is actually the familiar of the Dragon, a dead girl he revived out of pity to spy on MacDougal. Even with her gratitude for him, she still opposes him and stands firm to her moral beliefs, which is admirable. The entire intrigue surrounding Fiena has completely vanished at this point, making her less interesting of a character, though still a more noble one than Orphen. 

Orphen and Fiena continue their heated exchange of moral semantics with the Dragon, who, at this point, has ceased to give a shit anymore. Understandably frustrated with all of the indignant squabbles, Claiomh pipes up and sics the baby Dragon on its parent. The infant’s eyes glow and a tremendous pillar of light erupts, engulfing and obliterating the Deep Dragon.  That’s probably the last thing anybody expected. We’ve seen all sorts of strange, powerful magic thus far, but a baby wolf-dragon delivering orbital laser spells on-demand takes the cake. Before the Dragon fades away, it spews some more cryptic lines, warning that humans have gained power far beyond what they can control. 

And that’s it for the forest. As Orphen leaves, he complains about how all of that was a waste of time. The sentiment isn’t completely wrong, but this short arc did serve some purpose. It was long-winded, but effective expository detour. We learned a lot about this world; it’s origins and some of the forces that hold sway and oppose sorcery, both human and otherwise. 

As for this episode, there’s not a lot that’s new or terribly interesting. Most of the information dumping happened in the previous episode, so this was mostly just to tie up those loose ends. Orphen’s party does obtain a super-powerful baby dragon that they’ve named Leki, though, who might act as nice and convenient deus ex machina again in the future. But with how quickly this show likes to change gears, the baby dragon might become just as irrelevant soon enough.