Interesting romantic build-up here, in which people start mistaking the brother-sister relationship between Rikuo and Yuki-onna as something more. Still, I liked those small details of holding hands, and how Yuki-onna’s loyalty was portrayed. This mostly was a build-up episode so this was the thing that stood out the most, but it definitely wasn’t a chore to watch the rest of this episode.
A lot of the build-up went into some followers of Nurarihon, who apparently don’t like Rikuo becoming the third heir (speaking of which, we haven’t seen Rikuo’s father, have we? Same for his grandmother: what happened to them? My guess is that the creators are saving those stories for somewhere in the future), and therefore try to kill him along with his friends. Now, with the overwhelming power that Nura has, they really must have come up with something that can actually kill him. After all, the rats were simply underestimating Rikuo’s power. The same can’t exactly be said from the people of the Nura clan, who pretty much saw the guy grow up.
I think that the evil youkai are a bit too stereotypically evil here (as in, they have no other sides than those evil ones), but apart from that I’m surprised how I didn’t really get annoyed by this episode even though not a lot of stuff happened and there were a lot of teenagers being typical teenagers. The fact that there was at least some plot here also probably helped, but as far as build-up goes I’ve certainly seen much worse.
Rating: * (Good)
explanations for his father come way later in the series. As for his grandmother, it was talked about in the manga as an extra story. I don’t think the anime series will get far enough though to explain either one of them
I wouldn’t say that Nura’s classmates are entirely off-base about Tsurara.
I am afraid that you won’t see anything about to Rikuo’s father and grandmother until 2nd season (we all hope will come eventually).
Well about his father and grandmother that in manga comes around chapter 80 + if i remeber right and if iam right wont be included in this season actually the current arc has a lot to do with his grandmothers history and father
Spoiler Alert
His Father is dead , he was 1/2 yokai or something unlike rikou and his grandmother was human that we have this ridiculous 1/3 and 1/2 fiasco ^ ^
SPOILERS (Nothing major, though)
@jak: [spoiler]He is the third heir of the Nura clan, and he is 1/4 youkai. As a result he can only assume a demon form for 6 hours, but is able to achieve a more powerful “Demon Shroud” technique later on, allowing him to surpass his father and grandfather.
As for Yuki Onna, her clan has a history of trying to seduce the current heads and failing, however I think Tsurara might eventually be the one who hooks up with Nura since he definitely needs to get more demon back into the bloodline in order to maintain the ability to use ‘Fear’ to control other youkai, since I doubt 1/8th demon blood would cut it.
/SPOILERS
As for this episode, I really enjoyed it. I thought it was a shame Ao was not shown with his biker gang chasing the bullet train, but I guess they had to cut some things off to allow for time constraints. Since they have been dumbing down some of the violence in the anime as compared to the manga, I wonder how they are going to handle the next episode, which has a hot spring scene as well as a battle taking place there. They may just have each of the girls wrapped in towels instead of being al naturale.