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

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Rin continues his journey through the past, this time following his foster dad Shiro’s early Exorcist career while he dealt with numerous inhuman experiments.

OUR TAKE

We’re back with more of Blue Exorcist’s prequel but not a prequel arc and…damn, I don’t really know what else to say about this premise. Rin is still going through time and not really able to interact with things so he’s the audience POV character but…I just don’t get why we’re doing this and not just doing a straight up flashback. I guess so we have someone who knows the present situation like us who can have reactions to it? And I already was not a big fan of this reveal about Shiro being a clone body made to house a demon king, but…at least we’re getting some fleshing out of that? But Shiro’s been dead since the second episode of the first season so I’m struggling to find out how exactly this changes the context of his character. Like it was all fine and good when he was just a regular old priest who was secretly an exorcist and took Rin and Yukio in because he was a good person. And hey, don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to retcons on principle. On the topic of retcons involving father figures, Darth Vader being Luke’s dad wasn’t something they wrote in until his second appearance. Changing stuff retroactively can absolutely lead to good things sometimes.

But uh…what does this add for Shiro specifically? We’re still waiting to find out how his relationship with Yuri really develops, but even then, she’s going to somehow be impregnated in some way by Satan, who is currently (and probably has remained) a bunch of blue flames, so what is Shiro’s role here? I really hope he doesn’t end up as the third wheel in a love triangle but maybe that’s just the only way this story knows how to have these kinds of relationships? And then there’s the brief focus on Lucifer, who is a character that IS still alive and that we do need more information on, but even that doesn’t get anything NEW this week. He had a weak body and was resentful towards Mephisto about it, so he swore vengeance. We knew all of that already. We’re still in the pretty early stages of this arc so perhaps this is just set up for the bigger revelations down the road? But we’ve also only have ten episodes left here, so let’s get a move on already, alright? After this we’re not gonna be back to this show for a long time so let’s make this season count.