I can’t be the only one who was sad that the opening didn’t play for this episode. I mean it’s great we get more content but that opening really does get you in the mood for Drifters. So on to our episode and Oda has a plan to take on the soldiers coming to slaughter the elven village. And that plan is shit. I mean literally, the plan makes use of fecal matter quite a bit. For one he’s throwing the bodies of the dead soldiers into a pit in order to make Saltpeter which is likely so he can produce gunpowder. They buried the heads to pay respect to the dead but the bodies are nothing more than raw materials to them, a fact which causes the Octobrist official to be revolted. All things considered it’s fairly practical to make use of your enemies corpses as well as prevent disease by leaving lying around. But it is fairly morally repugnant to make use of human bodies like compound fertilizer. This does show that while the show is rooting for our protagonists, they are not necessarily heroes. The Drifters for the most part are the lesser of two evils and while there actions are right for the moment, who really knows just how much of an effect the Drifters will have on this world over time. Though this was undercut by the comedy which really doesn’t know when to come on screen. I think trying to make boob jokes after discussing how you were using corpses as compost is a bit too much of a segway.
We also have Oda getting the Elves to make a makeshift barricade and to anyone who knows their history will recognise just what Oda is talking about when he says he stole the idea from Hideyoshi. For one standout moment of the warring states period was when in an effort to take over a stronghold, Hideyoshi constructed a castle in a day right beside it. Oda’s is significantly less impressive but it suits the need. When the soldiers mentioned the shit in the well I thought Oda was aiming for some kind of methane explosion. But as it turns out he was planning way dirtier tactics. The method of covering arrows in shit reminded me of a old Warren Ellis Comic I read quite a while ago that was called “Crecy” and that really showed me just how crap can be used as a weapon. The comic was about the battle of Crecy which was battle between the English and the French.
According to the comic the English covered their swords in shit with the basic logic that if a sword wound doesn’t kill them, then the infections they get afterwards most certainly will. As a tactic it’s pretty solid though ungraceful, in this case it really helped to kill the moral of the troops here. People are much less willing to fight if getting hit with one arrow will lead to a slow agonising death. As the commander said, if they all rushed Oda’s makeshift barricade then they would win but people aren’t quite so brave to rush something when it would mean a large majority of them will die. Yoichi doesn’t seem too keen on Oda’s use of tactics but he seems to be from the oldest age where honor was more prevalent. On a side note I wonder if anyone else didn’t actually figure out that Yoichi was a man by this point. Honestly I was seeing him as a woman up until episode two as his design is fairly effeminate. Most likely on purpose.
So the village subjection team is slaughtered and our main characters use the armour to fool the lord into letting them into the castle. Thus the Elves run to rescue their women. Alls well that ends well? Well…I will be blunt in that upon hearing that the army takes away the elven women once a year that I had suspicions of what they would find. Quite frankly I doubted those girls were sitting back and knitting tea cosies. But I was at least had a tiny hope these guys would be racist enough that they wouldn’t have sex with an “inferior” race. You know then the women would be a bit beat up and a little worse for wear but at least they wouldn’t be…this. It looks like I give them way too much credit. Master Race huh? I say if you can do this kind of crap and still walk away without shame then I say it proves you aren’t some superior race, instead you lot have forfeited the right to call yourselves human. So Toyohisa I agree very much with your judgement. Killing an unarmed man is a moral shame, but these things are not what we can call men. So I hope there’s a nice bloodbath next episode and lastly, I hope that the episode title isn’t some cheap joke on the ending scene. For that would be in bad taste.