C&C - Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon - "Farewell Under the Lunar Eclipse" [10/9]

[Nobodyman]

With this episode, I guess now might be the best time to bring up my biggest issue with this show (so far).

As a story about these three girls going around having adventures and fighting monsters of the week, I guess it works fine enough. But the big issue for me is that, from a meta-perspective, the show seems to have been building up this mystery of "Where are Inuyasha and Kagome? What's Sesshomaru doing? And who is Towa and Setsuna's mom?" But the problem is that, in the context of the show, no one seems to care or be interested in it. Moroha doesn't seem to care where her parents are. Towa and Setsuna don't seem to care that much. Even Miroku and Sango showed up for an episode, and they didn't talk about it either. And with this episode, the show finally gives us the answers in a...really arbitrary way, honestly. There was barely any build up to this flashback and no reason to show it at this specific time. They may as well have told us in episode 1. And even now, it's still weird. Again, why doesn't Moroha care about where her parents are? Does she know they're in the jewel? Do Miroku and Sango know? Shouldn't they be doing everything in their power to rescue their friends?

In short, it really just doesn't feel like this show was thought out in terms of character motivations. To say nothing of the awful dream butterflies that Setsuna is afflicted with and she doesn't even care about.

 

[Light Lucario]

I didn't really get the impression that the series was building up to this mystery of Towa and Setsuna's mother. Maybe it was because neither of them showed any interest in their parents before and they just dropped the answer here with no real buildup, but that seemed more like something fans were speculating on more so than the series was. They definitely have been hyping up the mystery of what happened to the original cast though, particularly with Inuyasha and Kagome, even if it was more on the back burner instead of one of the main plot points of the series.

That's probably part of the problem a lot of long time fans have with this series, especially with the first episode being featuring the original cast. They just don't have a huge role in this series thus far and none of the characters seem interested in learning about their families. I assume that Miroku's long isolated training is partly due to what happened to Inuyasha and Kagome, but it is still weird for both of them to be featured and neither of them bring up losing their friends.

Despite the setup, I think that the series is more interested in having the girls fight demons more so than anything else at the moment. Towa wants to find the Dream Butterfly to heal Setsuna, but no real progress has been made to find it or learn about it thus far. I think that's one of my biggest issues with the series. It doesn't feel like they're padding or stalling exactly. Most episodes do work in showcasing more of the world, the girls working together or hints of some developments like Setsuna remembering a bit of that fire, but it does feel a bit too minimal for roughly halfway through the season.