English Dub Review: Blue Exorcist – The Blue Night Saga “Satan Awakening”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Nine years later, Shiro and Yuri are adults and continue to get closer, but Satan finally manages to inhabit a vessel. He quickly grows attached to Yuri but soon after gains intelligence and becomes a threat.

OUR TAKE

Well, Crunchyroll, that was sure weird how you didn’t upload this episode yesterday and made me think I got a week off but then put it up today for some reason! Damn you to hell for thinking you having a monopoly on the anime dubbing industry means you can pull shit like this! And speaking of hell, now we’re cooking with gas. And you can tell we’re using gas because the flame is blue! But yeah, with the set up stuff about Shiro and Yuri’s history and meeting out of the way, we can now get into the stuff we truly came here to see, namely how Satan truly, finally, enters the picture. We know he’s been around in the form of little blue flames that Yuri has been calling Renka, which is apparently the name of apparitions like that, but now he’s got a body. Specifically, a body from the batch of clones (of which Shiro originally was) that were made for the Demon Kings to inhabit. Amaimon, the King of Earth, also makes a brief appearance in this, I guess to give us some extra context about when important present day stuff is happening, but his feel’s pretty incidental other than to show how Lucifer is really losing his goddamn patience about getting his own body. Tough luck for him since we know how that turns out, but I care about him and Amaimon about equally, which is to say not very much, so let’s just focus on the Satan stuff for the moment.

From the start of the series, Satan has been characterized in his few appearances as basically the big boss of the demons and described as the father of the Demon Kings, as well as Rin and Yukio. That then makes it a bit strange that none of his kids, Mephisto, Lucifer, or Amaimon seem to recognize him, but do seem to see him as “being the universe itself”, whatever that means. Also, to be fair, he’s in a new body that’s probably not his original one, and up until the closing moments of the episode, he likely isn’t acting like himself. And while we do know the tragic way all of this shakes out, we can also predict a bit of how the remaining parts of this story will go. Shiro, once he learns about him being Satan will very likely want him killed on the spot (though that will be quite a tall order), while Yuri will want to protect him because of her stance on demons in general. And then somehow she’ll become pregnant with two demon babies so…I guess Satan will be somewhat grateful for the assist. Either way, things are heating up, pardon the pun, so we’ll see if they reach a light broil next week!