English Dub Review: Black Clover “Pursuit Over the Snow”

There’s snow way out of these love triangles, is there?

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Rebecca continues worrying about the kids, but Gauche is still on his incest-driven rampage against Asta until Noelle shows up. Asta introduces her to Rebecca, both as friends, which irks them, though they quickly turn their attention to the missing children. Sister Theresa arrives and deduces the snow is actually a spell that attracts those who haven’t unlocked their magic yet. Gauche, knowing his Magic Knights handbook, decides to go with step one of always punching the elderly, with Asta getting in front to block it. His handbook was probably one of the newer white-washed editions.

The group heads out, following the mana in the magic mirror Gauche gave to Marie, while Noelle stays behind to have awkward tension with Rebecca. In a cave, the kidnapper, Neige, looks over the kidnapped kids when Marie wakes up thanks to the mirror, so Neige fulfills his requisite villain requirement of smacking a child. But he’s also pretty so in comes his much less attractive older brother Baro to both abuse kids AND Neige with their plan to sap the kidnapped children of their untapped magic. See, now you’re allowed to want Neige to become good because you can blame his behavior on a bad influence!

Noelle gets word out to the Magic Knights through Sekke when Asta’s group makes it to the cave and question Rebecca’s brother, though it’s clear Gauche only cares about protecting his sister. The music and tone seem to be implying we’re supposed to think this is good? I mean, I guess it’s endearing that he’s dedicated to saving her, but they really don’t play it in a kosher way. He seems to do fine against the bad guys in a fight, so that’s something. Asta and Teresa show up to help too, though mainly to set up even more siscon jokes that are just…ugh. And of course we can’t begin a big fight without someone underestimating Asta because he has no clear magic power, but at least this might mean the arc will reach a swift and painless end.

What’s that? Five more episodes? At LEAST? Joy…

OUR TAKE

First off, I’d like to touch on Gauche as a character, seeing how he’s the deuteragonist of this arc because his entire literary makeup just raises a ton of questions, and none of them good. Of ALL of the Black Bulls, who range from slightly interesting to painfully boring, he has got to be the most unsettling by far. His SOLE DEFINING CHARACTER TRAIT IS THAT HE IS ATTRACTED TO HIS KID SISTER, so that’s not a great first impression right off the bat (and if it’s not the kind of love they mean they better clarify and stop using anime shorthand of bloody noses to point to that). Though apparently, the author thought it would be best to add some extra layers once we got more focus on his backstory later in the series…and one of those was that he openly threatens the more competent caretakers of his sister. I guess it’s not THAT much worse than Asta constantly harassing Sister Lily to marry him, but it IS what we’re forced to focus on and still think Gauche is in any way a redeemable character. And let me tell you, no one thinks that.

And now we’ve also got insufferable love triangle antics between Noelle, Rebecca, AND Marie. Fun times aheaaaaad. I cannot fathom what’s supposed to be the believable attractive feature that draws any of them other than “Determined Shonen Protagonist Pheromone”. It’s times like this I truly wonder if Black Clover was actually written by a Shonen Jump story algorithm, as I don’t think ANY of Asta’s predecessors had this much of a harem by this point in their stories, and none of it is actually going anywhere worth a damn for ANY of the characters involved. Noelle just gets to awkwardly dance around the subject with Rebecca, Rebecca will likely NEVER have relevance in this story again and probably have a scene showing her resigning that Noelle has a better shot, Marie will only ever make me want to call Chris Hansen on this show, and Asta is typically dense about all of this and will never respond to it in any meaningful way until he is forced into hooking up with Noelle in the time skip at the end of the series.

But at least the animation is good, right? No? Studio Pierrot’s still cutting ALL of the corners as usual until the cutting room floor looks like a war zone? Yeah…yeah, that’s what I thought.