English Dub Review: Black Clover “Devil Megicula”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The mysterious figure that Asta struck at the end of the previous episode turns out to be a decoy for the real Queen, Loropechika, a clumsy, absent-minded young woman. Gaja is impressed with Noelle, Mimosa, and Finral and introduces them to Loropechika, who reveals she was cursed by the Devil known as “Megicula”. While I purposely left out this plot twist in a past episode, Megicula was the very same Demon who actually killed Noelle’s mother with a curse and eventually died after giving birth to Noelle, but because the mere mention of Megicula’s name gives anyone a death curse when spoken out loud, this was kept a secret and the Silva family being the upper-class assholes they were, blindly blamed Noelle which made her the target of cruelty and abuse for years by her own siblings growing up. Now that very same curse has targeted Loropechika who will die in a year unless Asta and the others to help defeat Megicula, who is reportedly in the Spade kingdom, as Loropechika inherited the power of all previous Heart Queens and is too precious to die at such a young age.

As Vanessa, Magna, and Luck scout the Diamond Kingdom’s border they witness a Spade knight defeat a Diamond army, which even scares Luck. Loropechika explains Heart mages are limited to natural magic like water and are incapable of truly killing a devil, whereas Clover mages invented unnatural magic, such as Spatial and Time magic, and certain mages born in such an unnatural environment can kill devils, such as Yami, Asta and Secre, who Loropechika classes in the Arcane Stage, above Stage Zero. which leads to Mimosa contacting Julius and he agrees the Clover kingdom will help.

Loropechika reveals that Megicula is more powerful than Zagred (the Devil they fought during the Elf Arc) because he is siphoning power from Spade citizens, preparing to invade all the kingdoms, thus Loropechika is planning to invade the Spade Kingdom before she dies and asks Asta and his friends to grow stronger and gather other Arcane mages for the invasion in “6 months”. After filling Yami in on this info, Yami who deduces the Spade knight must have been possessed by Megicula, the episode ends when Yami orders every Black Bull member to make a life-changing decision that could affect them for the rest of their lives…


Our Take

Loropechika is just a cute design with a clumsy nature only adding her charm, but her magic is still insane thanks to Undine. And I do love how straight she was with them when they were talking about their chances against Megicula. Also, we could be seeing lots of filler since this is leading towards the obligatory “forced training for six months arc” which even the first season of Dragonball Z was kinda guilty of but at least made sense in context. I can appreciate that they’re willing to accept that beating the that killing the previous Devil during the “Elf Arc” was a herculean task unto itself and to even face another one at this point is a potential suicide mission as the mere mention of even saying this fucker’s name out loud leads to a slow painful death-curse which is represented by a black spiral symbol on Loropechika’s abdomen.

The curse itself leads to another plot hole in Asta’s court situation. If just the queen of the Hearts could give a testimony about the Megicula curse, wouldn’t that be enough to make Asta free of all charges? She doesn’t even need to talk about her own curse, just about it in general. It would’ve provided the evidentiary support to prove that the Devil species exist and establish Asta’s innocence but it just feels so fucking contrived and maddening that neither Asta nor anyone else within his circle actually thinks about how this could also be beneficial to Asta in court, because the Manga writer wants to display how imperfect & broken their justice system is. I really hope they follow up on this in a future episode because it’d be stupid if they didn’t…