English Dub Review: Black Clover “The Wizard King vs. The Leader of the Eye of the Midnight Sun”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

The Royal Knights continue their assault and the Black Bulls recover from their recent battle as we shift focus AGAIN over to Yami waiting for Vangeance to meet with him at the Golden Dawn’s headquarters for a formal apology about his vice captain mortally wounding Finral during the tournament. Only Vangeance isn’t there and is really meeting with the Wizard King, Julius. He begins talking how Julius inspired him to become a Magic Knight and overlooked his disfigurement, even making him a captain. But then he starts cryptically mentioning about not being able to choose between the will of Julius or the will of his secret “partner”. That partner turns out to be none other than Licht, leader of The Eye of the Midnight Sun! What a surpriiiiiise!

…assuming you didn’t watch the OP this week, which basically spoiled this less than five minutes before. Anyway, Licht has been hiding in William’s soul somehow, being able to inhabit his body and undo his scars when Licht takes over. Now Licht is here to retrieve the last two Magic Stones, which Julius has in his possession, in order to bring his plans to fruition. He also plans to kill Julius as vengeance for the crimes humans committed on his people so long ago.

That won’t be done so easily, as Licht’s Light Magic is easily neutralized Julius’ Time Magic, which allows him to predict attacks. Licht does manage to get one hit on him, but even that is undone by using time to reverse the wound. The Wizard King soon takes the lead, predicting his opponent’s future is defeat.

OUR TAKE

We can’t even stay more than a couple episodes on one setting, can we? We’re only a few episodes into this arc and the focus has been so scattered that I can’t get invested in any subplot long enough to care what’s happening, but at least this episode seems to be setting up what should be a significant battle. Seems almost obligatory for the main villain of the series (so far) to face off against one of if not the strongest mentor figure the story has shown us so that they can die to highlight how bad the situation is. I might be getting ahead of myself calling Julius’ death, but his full name is the title of the next episode and that doesn’t usually happen unless something significant is about to happen to that named character. And more often than not, it’s them dying.

Not that this show seems particularly concerned about you knowing this stuff ahead of time even if you haven’t read the manga, because it seems just fine showing us spoilery bits in the OP for no reason. Granted, they didn’t exactly spoil the details of Licht being in William’s body, but they had no reason to add these bits when they’re about to switch this OP out in a couple weeks anyway, so this is on them. I guess they already made the animation and didn’t want to waste in when the fight had already passed?

As for the revelations here, I haven’t the foggiest clue how Licht and William made this arrangement to share a body, but I don’t think there’s as much blame being put on William for allowing this to happen as there should be. The way he phrased this decision was that he was torn between the mission of the guy who gave him a chance (which is basically another formulaic example of all the obligatory flashbacks most of the Black Bulls got when they were recruited by Yami) and that of his friend, but really he’s just giving someone with a plan to kill a bunch of innocent people the power to inact that. He’s pretending he has no responsibility here, but he’s basically handing his body full of powerful magic to a terrorist. So regardless of how this fight goes down, William is definitely at fault for letting it happen in the first place. But this show has a weird way of having people avoid responsibility for their actions, so who knows if he’ll ever get a proper punishment for this betrayal. Guess we’ll have to stay tuned.