English Dub Review: Blue Exorcist – The Blue Night Saga “Shiro and Yuri”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Shiro begins his journey through time and sees the way his mother Yuri met both his birth father Satan and his foster dad Shiro when she was a little kid, as well as how she was taken in to the Asylum to become an Exorcist.

OUR TAKE

Hey, we’re back with the second half of the season! And it’s off to an interesting enough start, though I’m not without my reservations. I’ve brought this up before, but this whole matter about Yukio feeling insecure about his lack of demonic abilities (which he sure doesn’t lack NOW, haha) and this investigation into his and Rin’s parentage specifically has actually been touched on before…but it was in the anime original filler episodes from the first season, which had to be straight up ignored in following seasons once they realized they would be able to adapt more of the manga. And yeah, that happens all the time in these situations, with Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood being a prime example, since they even remade all the relevant parts of their story to lead into the manga material they hadn’t adapted. But what’s weird about what’s happening with Blue Exorcist is that we’ve ignored that anime filler plot…just so we can lead right back to it, more or less. I need to go back and rewatch those episodes to be sure but there are just so many similarities jumping out at me already besides the Yukio stuff, like how their mother Yuri was apparently kind of a wild child who bonded with the weird blue flames who were apparently a person.

As for what’s different, the exposition of this was told in regular flashbacks in that first season, as opposed to Rin being given a tour through history by Mephisto as is what’s happening here. Also different was that we didn’t have this odd backstory for Shiro about him being a CLONE OF ONE OF THE DEMON KINGS which I am still kind of scratching my head about in terms of what the hell that adds to the story, but we’ve got eleven more episodes to find out, I suppose. Though that’s another thing, how are they going to fill eleven more episodes of this with a story that’s a foregone conclusion and doesn’t seem to involve Rin in much aside from being a time tourist? That said, while I guess I had more issues with this than I thought, I am actually pretty curious about what we’re going to learn here about Shiro, Yuri, and Satan, but I am absolutely going to make clear when I think this part of the plot has outstayed its welcome, which will probably be sooner rather than later.