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

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Ban and Lightning talk to Mephisto, who uncovers some previously unknown details of a secret project that happened prior to the Blue Night.

OUR TAKE

Okay, it seems we have taken a bit of a turn into a weirder cross genre territory, as this episode is basically just a deluge of exposition, some of which goes places that you really could not possibly expect, even if you’ve been watching this show from Day 1 like I have. This portion of the story is, at least in theory, meant to be a mystery, with Ban and Lightning as detectives on a cast, but also with them playing good cop and bad cop respectively, and Lightning even saying that he’s so unhinged that he needs someone like Ban to keep him in check. Their investigations take them to the former school of the True Cross, once known as “The Asylum” which is a great name for a school, no notes. Apparently just beneath it were experiments to make clones of the Demon Kings like Mephisto and Lucifer, though almost none were successful. This discovery is then soon followed up by Mephisto himself, who starts willingly handing out dark secrets like they’re candy, including that demons like them originally had no physical form and gained it because humanity itself started advancing at a surprising rate and gave them forms due to their concept of the supernatural, leading to a difference in opinion between the sons of Satan about how to go about this.

Apparently Mephisto, whose body preserved the longest, wanted to keep things going as is, while Lucifer had the weakest and most unstable body so he wanted to just do away with everyone and everything. I guess it’s somewhat good we got any of the Illuminati in this season at all considering they are apparently a major threat that is just off in the background somewhere. Anyway, this schism is what led to the creation of both that organization and the Knights of the True Cross, which resulted in the conflict of the main story. But that’s not how the Blue Night happened, as apparently one of the clones that was meant to appease Lucifer ended up being possessed by Satan himself, who would then go on to father Rin and Yukio. There’s obviously some bits still missing here but I assume we’ll get more info on that next time, especially since it’s at least partially about their birthday, which is on December 27th, and so gets lumped in with Christmas. But hey, even though the sub version of next week’s episode came out in November, the dub is coming out actually right next to Christmas! Funny how that works out, huh?