Karneval - 05

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Karneval 05

Continuing from last episode, a mysterious bad guy appears, Tsubame’s win brother begins to turn into a Varuga, and Gareki comes close to exacting his revenge, but not quite. Oh, and Nai gets kidnapped. Again.

Jeez, Nai, just when I put some faith in your growing survival skills, you shoot me in the foot. I suppose it says something about my confidence in a character when I’m actually impressed that he can successfully push someone over, a scene that was perhaps unintentionally rather funny. However, even that came to naught as he was captured soon after. At this point, any time he splits up with Gareki or a member of Circus I just know something bad is going to happen.

Speaking of bad things, Gareki finally meets the guy responsible for Tsubaki’s death, although unfortunately he doesn’t manage to exact his revenge. As a villain, I’m not really buying his cheesy speeches. He was far too generic for me. I believe someone once said that the best villains don’t believe that they are villains; they think that they’re the hero. However, this guy wasn’t even able to play the “I’m evil and I know it” card successfully, let alone any kind of complexity beyond penting his fingers and chuckling. All in all, his character felt very shallow.

And while I’m on the topic of shallowness, I’m afraid that I just didn’t know Yotaka long enough to feel for his death. I didn’t really connect with him. Yes, he loved his sister and liked Gareki in a grudging sort of way, but I think it was obvious from the get-go that he was not going to live long. I’m more surprised that his sister survived too, actually. All in all, the entire scene from the bad guy showing up to the death was rather uninspired.

I’m disappointed to say that Gareki’s past hasn’t been as interesting as I hoped, though perhaps we’ve only scratched the surface of it. In any case, I’ll be glad to leave the slums and its horrible purple colour palette. However, since it was a Hiroto who killed Yotaka, I’m interested how they’ll proceed from here, if Gareki will be angry or if he will accept it as something that was inevitable.