Only a small amount of events happen each episode. But that gives the anime a great opportunity of building up to these events, and the events that do happen are just awesome. Apart from that, characters change, relationships change and the whole world is just living its life.
This episode was the second episode of the aftermath-of-Ovan-getting-captured-arc. The major purpose of this arc is to get rid of a number of characters, to break up certain relationships, and to create new ones. So far, Goad has quit the game, TaN has been disbanded. B-Set quits at this episode. Naobi and Ender return in some new forms (interesting note: this means that they’ve returned to beginners, or they must’ve had some kind of backup-account). Sakisaka and Tabby have left the Twillight Brigade. Shino changed her clothing and the only one staying the same is Phyllo.
Ovan’s disappearance really broke up the world. It appears that the only reason Goad and B-Set played the game was because of him. B-Set also thought about things a bit, which resulted in her quitting the game as well. It’s very interesting to see characters just being gone, like that. Phyllo makes a nice comment about this. The fact remains that if today is the same as yesterday, and tomorrow is the same as today, this cycle won’t be continuing forever. That means that the world will change. Even the side-characters can make this happen. That’s also the problem with the anime who refuse to kill off their characters. It just limits the change that can be possible in the world. I’m not saying to the creators to let all kinds of persons go berserk and commit genocide, though the right balance has to be found, in order to make for the best development.
Naobi seems to have secured some kind of place, which even the administrators don’t know, most probably a lost ground, in which he’s keeping Ovan. It seems that Naobi finally gets what he wanted, as Ovan’s left arm seems to have been cracked (pun intended, by the way). Now it’s up to the next episode to determine whether Naobi’s plan was a success, or that he won’t be able to control the thing that came out of Ovan’s arm. We also have to take into account that Ovan knew about what was going to happen, so he had a reason to do this. Still, I never even once saw a smile on his face while getting hacked. Either this means good acting, or it means that things aren’t going as he had hoped to, which makes you wonder how much he can predict.
Tabby begins to get more interesting by the minute. Yay for the fact that she’s not a little brat after all! First, when she talks to Haseo, the two get in a bit of a fight. Haseo, as he’s not good in dealing with other people, doesn’t really know what to say, and eventually Tabby walks away angry. The discussion mainly was about Tabby getting jealous that Haseo was around with Shino all of the time. And that Shino was her reason to enjoy the game. She also comfirms that she indeed doesn’t want to be with Sakisaka because she wants to. This actually means three things:
1: Haseo’s incredibly thick-headed.
2: Tabby actually likes Haseo, but she realize that she’ll never be able to reach his heart.
3: She’s using Sakisaka in order to make him jealous. This doesn’t quite work, because of point one.
4: This means that she’s actually quite an actor, able to lock away her true feelings, and pretend to be someone else.
I like this. For some strange reason, I like this conflict, while most love-triangles like this one actually totally bore me. First of all, we only got our first hint only at the previous episode. Only at the end of that episode there was a moment in which Tabby’s feelings lost to her acting. Apart from that, she’s been concealing her feelings all along. Normal anime would feature some kind of suspicious close-up, in which the character looks to the ground, rather unhappy. I find this kind of buildup better, though. It’s way more integrated with the storyline than just that simple, suspicous close-up. These close-ups are like putting a big sign on the character, saying “Hello, I am in love with the main character but I’m too afraid to confess, what should I do?”. Or something in that direction.
Sakisaka indeed is a pityful character. if the above indeed is true, he’s being used from all kinds of sides. He was right about one thing, though: leaving the guild. We finally get told the exact reason why Goad and B-Set left the Twillight Brigade (after all, being used is kindof a vague description, isn’t it?). It seems that when there was no sign of the virus cores yet, they used to skim through every single inch of certain fields. Or they would stay at a lost ground for a whole day and see what happens. I could so understand that you want to leave the guild who only does things like these. Sakisaka had enough beliefs in Ovan to last till the end, though his attitude quite changed when Ovan was gone, which drove him to the wild theories of Ovan who had actually been working together with TaN and they finally managed to get their hands on the Key of the Twillight, so they ran off with it. Eventually, this resulted in him leaving the Twillight Brigade.
Shino also came as a surprise. Not only because of her new clothing, but also because she mentioned Aura. Apprantly, the rumors of her have scattered around the net. It also seems that Aura ran away for some strange reason. Shin doesn’t plan to. She’s been gloomy for two entire episodes, though as expected, she got stronger out of it. She still wants to wait for Ovan, though she definately changed. It was also surprising that she got crazy enough to disband the Twillight Brigade, though Haseo managed to stop her.
Speaking of Haseo, the fact that he’s not good with dealing with people gets another major role in this episode. One reason for Tabby and Sakisaka to leave the Twillight Brigade was because he, as the only one who still wanted to continue the guild, never was able to stop them, or cheer them up. He didn’t know what to say, which only made Sakisaka’s anger greater. On top of that, his attempts at doing this only worked the opposite way, not to mention his thick-headedness. Only with Shino, he’s able to say a few words, and for some reason, these few words are the right words.
Phyllo has a busy day, it seems, as a lot of people stop by at the bridge (I loved Haseo’s joke about Phyllo’s reasons to be in the game. ^^). An interesting fact is that he was the one who brought the two of Shino and Ovan together. I really like his character, at the moment, although I’m getting annoyed by his voice-actor. He seems to know exactly what’s going on. Overall, the big thing still hasn’t happened yet, as the previous episodes decided to focus on character development, and on shifting the relationship with each of the characters. With a bit of luck, the supernatural thing will happen at the next episode, and decide the second half of the anime. Episode 10 showed a bad day of .Hack//Roots, though it managed to recover itself pretty nicely. I still have no idea what the second half of the series will be about, but it promises to be a lot different from the first half. I can’t wait for it. đ
