English Dub Review: Golden Kamuy “Blue Eyes”

High-tier comedy.

Overview:

The plot deepens with Tanigaki and Inkarmat.

Our Take:

The sea otter meat is probably one of the frequently parodied scenes from Golden Kamuy, and for good reason- it’s hilarious. Everyone becomes affected by the aphrodisiac emitted from the meat, but they don’t go at it the traditional way like a fanservice anime would- they instead decide to start wrestling. In the case of Ogata, he flops down comatose onto the floor instead of participating. It’s set up like a comedic fanservice scene, but instead of the typical cute girls that are the topic of the scene, it’s a bunch of beefy dudes. That alone subverts the scene and makes it funny, but even more hilarious is that they solve their problem by engaging in sumo wrestling- and it works. They end the session claiming that nobody will ever speak of what happened again.

On a more emotional level, the same happens with Inkarmat and Tanigaki later on, but there’s no sumo involved for that one. Inkarmat later denies any sort of emotional attachment to Tanigaki, but it’s pretty clear that she’s fairly attached to him. We haven’t been shown too much of them, but hopefully, we see more down the line. Inkarmat has been alone this whole time, as her story shows, and if she is able to open her heart just a little, that will surely mean something good down the line.

Most importantly, Asirpa and Inkarmat are able to talk privately. Inkarmat tells her story about Wilk, Noppera-bo, possibly Asirpa’s father, and that she knew him since she was a child. Asirpa’s very signature big blue eyes are because Wilk is actually from outside of Japan, so Asirpa has mixed blood. Interestingly, unlike the rest of the characters, Inkarmat doesn’t believe that Noppera-bo and Asirpa are related and that some other person must have killed the Ainu for their gold. She vehemently believes that Wilk doesn’t have that kind of character and that instead of a perpetrator of the events, he was the victim. She is so willing to go through with her conviction that she siphoned information from Tsurumi, to get concrete proof of her suspicions. What she says is something surprising but not entirely- that Kiroranke, one of Wilk’s old comrades, was actually responsible for murdering him. Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell, as they haven’t made their way to Noppera-bo yet, but this muddies something that was already pretty unclear…