English Dub Review: Blue Exorcist – Beyond the Snow Saga “Hometown”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Rin and Yukio try to reconnect while looking for Shura, and learn of her family connections to an ancient snake deity.

OUR TAKE

We’ve had a couple episodes about our regular cast of characters and their ongoing arcs and struggles, and while we have more of Shiro and Yukio’s development here, I didn’t really expect us to take a swerve into a Shura story. I mean the Opening did hint at it being of focus at least somewhat, but I guess I didn’t expect it to be this soon or suddenly. But yeah, after four seasons of Shura being a mysterious kid in a hoodie who was actually a busty twenty something who wore a bikini all the time, we finally know WHY she looks like that. And it’s because…the artist just liked drawing her that way. But IN-UNIVERSE, the reason IS…because her ancient ancestor was also like that, and was cursed by a snake deity to have only female descendants who will ONLY look like the exact same busty twenty-something, and will all die at the age of thirty, all in exchange for getting to pull a sword out of their boobs sometimes. Honestly, not a bad trade off, at least in terms of weird contracts with animal based spirits. Taken on its own merits, it is actually pretty insane and I don’t know why anyone would agree to that.

And frankly, it’s kinda gross that this spirit, Hachirotaro Okami, stipulated that all of them had to die AT thirty and after giving birth. I guess the logic is that he’s preserving the image of the woman he loved(?) but that just makes it worse! So yeah, we’re dealing with this thing with Shura now even after the past couple episodes have mostly been about Rin and Yukio, so I guess we’ll be spending a good portion of this arc saving Shura from this curse and allowing her to live long enough to…I dunno, have her knees start going bad like everyone past the age of thirty. Though we do work in some more stuff with the brothers, as Yukio gets called out on for his crazy training by Mephisto (you know you’ve got a problem when a demon spawn is saying you need to stop) and a little moving forward on the whole Shiemi love triangle thing. But for at least the next few episodes, it’s Shura time. But hey, I like Shura well enough, and not just because I was a teenage boy when I first watched this show. Let’s see where it goes.