Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress
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leatherhead333
 Posts: 1187 Location: Kansas |
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I think that scene specially would have been fine if they actually left him. Because honestly everything he said was moot after the badass loli rescued him. That whole emotional moment of him acknowledging what he was becoming and why he couldn't leave were kind of wasted due to the fact it's pretty much resolved in less than a minute. Now I'm certain the next episode will have miss badass loli giving everyone some good old exposition talk time about how they aren't completely turned yet. Completely undercutting everything we just saw. At least I thought so.
Anyway back to the rest of the episode. “Are you human or Kabane?!!” Kind of proof they aren’t avoiding Attack on Titan comparisons huh? Seriously what was the point of that? I mean recreating that specific scene isn’t some kind of coincidence. There are other things in this episode that I could point out but I’d rather not get into “kind of a big part of the story” spoilers territory so I’ll hold off. I don’t exactly blame these guys for being trigger happy of course but shouldn’t they know exactly how long it takes for someone to turn into a Kabane? They apparently detain people for 3 days while keeping watch but we know for a FACT it takes people take much less time to turn than that considering Ikoma almost turned in less than the span of several minutes. I feel like they should have a better idea of how this whole process works. I mean they SAW Ikoma being bitten several times and nothing was happening to him. Yet the Samurai guy thinks that he was Kabane since the day before when he was locked up which stupid as all hell. We’ve seen that he’s the most composed out of the other fodder so I kind of expect a bit more intelligence out of him is all. He doesn’t even ask questions like “How the fudge are you still alive don’t look like a zombie fest right now?”. The opening points to him being a good guy on the zombie slaying team later so kind of not liking his intro so far. Regardless I’m semi-enjoying the show as of now and am interested to see where it goes. I’m kind of wondering what’s with the zombies sometimes though. I mean sometimes they slowly walk around and others they run like Speedy Gonzales. When attacking sometimes they are slow and easy to predict and other times they seem to actually use their zombie heads thinking “These guys and their wimpy guns can’t hurt me…………soooo I’m just going to bum rush them!”. If only they did that every time huh? I mean are like traditional zombies that respond to sound? We know they smell blood but does that cause them to go on a frenzy? Or is it just the trains? And did the show forget about all the zombies that latched onto the train? Because don’t tell me they all went to fight Ikoma because I’ll punch in the face if you do. I mean sure he WAS bloody and everything but there is no way he could have defeated them all and we saw a BUNCH of zombies haling ass from the forest toward the train before that (which happened after most of the ones in the village were killed by our badass loli). Is this going to be a convenient zombie placement for the sake of the script zombies series? I think it’s going to be convenient zombie placement for the sake of the script zombies series 
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I'm kind of surprised at how divisive the samurai character's actions vs. Ikoma's in episode 2 have been. To me, the show was very obviously going continually out of its way to prove Ikoma right in his view that the people in power have been rendered mostly incompetent by their fear and paranoia (a significant thematic commonality with AoT). At the beginning of the episode the samurai's self-possession is contrasted with the panic of the other nobles trying to flee the city, while the direction of this scene makes it clear that his resolve is provided by the close proximity of his female charge. The viewer is meant to have have fresh in their mind his lack of compunction upon seeing an innocent human executed in episode 1.
The samurai focuses on protecting his lady, and the show tries to make it clear that this devotion trumps everything, including any possible duty to other human beings unique to his position in society or any general empathy for his fellow person (indeed people other than his liege are therefore distinctly sub-human; they're stripped of the moral import which he reserves for the girl, a point brought to cartoonish levels of explication when he screams "stop talking like a human, you kabane" at Ikoma). This results in a default of paranoia toward and lack of compunction with regards to the fates of everyone around him who isn't his charge, and were they all to die for his ability to protect her, he would likely view it as justified. His devotion allows him to pass the deaths of innocents off as "necessary measures" for protecting his charge, narrowing his sphere of moral-feeling to an intensely personal proximity. The point of Ikoma's perspective is that the samurai's behaviour represents a particular paradigm wherein people in power have the luxury of indulging their paranoia by narrowing their sphere of moral responsibility to a completely personal realm: the samurai is only superficially less fear-driven than those panicking idiots that Mumei had to defend at the beginning of episode 2, or the bushi who murdered an innocent man at the beginning of episode 1. This artifice of rational nobility is provided by his possession of a duty to protect the girl and the power to do so without fear of the consequences, both of which are afforded by his class. Ikoma recognizes that a combination of paranoia on the part of those in power, and the disproportionate efficacy of the power that these people wield over their fellow humans when compared to the efficacy of that power over the kabane, results in a highly self-destructive situation where the people whose job is ostensibly to protect the lower classes are a significant threat to those classes and ultimately themselves. The implicit point made by juxtaposing Ikoma's ingenuity and eagerness to understand the disease (an eagerness which importantly results in Ikoma's violation of social mores) is that the fear based-dogma of the nobles not only makes a joke of their ostensible duty to defend the people, but makes for a very poor self-preservation mechanism by blocking their ability to understand and thus deal with the actual threat of the kabane. This psychological conflict obviously culminates during the climax of the second episode when Mr. Samurai shoots Ikoma off the train on suspicion of being a kabane. Of course what he's actually worried about is that Ikoma will kill everyone, especially his charge, and it is that intense fear which completely inhibits his ability to rationally process the situation. Had he been less driven by paranoia and retained a modicum of morality-induced restraint, he would have seen that Ikoma literally could not have been a kabane: Ikoma possessed the glowing kabane heart without the accompanying transformation of skin colour, implying what the viewer already knew and precluding the possibility that he was going to undergo the normal process of transformation into a kabane (since the skin colour transformation, as the viewers and everybody in-universe knows, precedes the formation of the heart as the purple-tinge first radiates from the wound): that he was a hybrid. So when Mr. Samurai sees Ikoma's inhuman heart, sees him covered in blood and rags and yelling that people should listen to him and that he isn't a kabane, the only thing going through the samurai's mind is the possibility that Ikoma is lying, a possibility which carries consequences that define the fear which motivates all of the samurai's interactions with people other than his liege. And so rather than asking Ikoma to explain, he shoots him off the train, knowing that his actions are justified by the "possibility" that Ikoma was a kabane and the moral immunity afforded by the samurai's position in authority. The point is so obvious as to verge on cliche, and that it remains ambiguous in viewer reactions regarding whether the samurai was behaving rationally is really mysterious to me. All of this thematic work crystallizes in the notion of a hybrid in the same way that it does in AoT: the only way to properly defend yourself against a monster and the paranoia which it causes is to reach a profound understanding of it and thus normalize it. This is metaphorically embodied by the literal internalization of monsterhood that is being a kabaneri/shifter: understanding/literally becoming a monster simultaneously grants you dominion over your fear and the power to overcome the monster, because the power of the monster is partially but importantly embedded in its ability to induce fear, and fear is diminished by understanding. This is further emphasized by the weakness of the bushi and their guns vs the kabane compared to Ikoma's steam gun and his presumably increased physical prowess now that he's a kabaneri: the show tries to link ability to kill the kabane with mental ability to overcome fear of the kabane, so the samurai and bushi have neither (since they're motivated by fear) while the hybrids have both (since, at the very least, they aren't afraid of themselves). |
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magvis
Posts: 47 |
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For me what is driving my interest is the acting. Of course the art is exquisite at times, and the story is much better than average. It's all overshadowed by the seiyuu's performances. You'd think that they'd been playing their characters for a year or more. Superb!
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Animechic420
 Posts: 1730 Location: A Cave Filled With Riches |
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Wouldn't it have been responsible for Mumei to explain what comes with in being a Kabaneri, like the blood thing?
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meiam
Posts: 3442 |
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Look, it's definitely fun, despite being incredibly stupid (this week could have been subtitle "plot progression trough stupidity"), I completely agree. But don't you sometime think "gee what if all these resources went into a show that was also smart and not a zombie remake of his previous show?"?
Also, gotta love that someone turn into a zombie after something like a day, way to completely justify the villager extreme paranoia and make the main character many act of trying to protect people who have been bitten seems extremely reckless. Of course no one will bring that up in the show, can't deviate from the message of "trust is more important than logic". |
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Valhern
 Posts: 916 |
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I didn't think that the fact that they're some sort of vampires is particularly stupid, it's not too far-fetched, but I do think that this episode was composed in a very messy way.
Mumei apparently smells a Kabane, which would be our pregnant mother, but she ends up retreating without saying anything about it, not even "Huh, I can't feel it anymore, maybe I got it wrong". I know it was supposed to foreshadow the impact of the mother becoming a Kabane, but it felt oddly placed. And then when the gossiping guy and his friends threathen Ikoma and Mumei. Mumei apparently just walks off and she's suddenly into the camp, no transition there, nobody even tried to stop her to get their ass handed down to them, just plain weird. Finally, it happens the same thing as the first problem. For the sake of a cliffhanger (destroyed by the episode preview, just saying) Mumei never tells the princess or whoever that she needs to drink blood and she awkwardly reveals it in the camp, while Ikoma is about to eat the princess. Maybe she should've said that earlier in the episode. Anyway, my favorite part of this was Ikoma's flashback. It wasn't original but, as the reviewer says, Hatanaka's voice just delivers a lot of emotion. But also, I'm glad the green stone isn't any sort of magical, unexplained thing. Yes, the fact that his choking kink saved him is tremendously stupid, but among the realm of absurd, it makes sense. |
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Pipoko
Posts: 165 |
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"While Mumei does his darndest to stand out with her hyper-competent combat abilities"
A typo in there! It was a good episode. I'm really sick of the villagers, though. Yeah, I get it, particularly something like the funeral thing, but I feel like they could be handled a little better - they're the most generic, standard horror movie mooks and they are constantly there. Kurusu is the same way. A little more dimension to him would be nice. I mean, they did it with Ayame. |
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Vaisaga
 Posts: 13230 |
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This would go double if you remember what happened the last time Okouchi wrote a scene like that in Valvrave. |
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Pierrot.
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A- ??
Ah yes I forgot Jacob will be pleased as long as there are some pretty colors and fancy animation. Never change. This episode was probably the worst and no I won't forgive the stupidity here even if there was "a-lot-of-style" factor there. From mustache twirling villains to characters continuously acting like idiots for no reason just to create some drama. I didn't expect this to become like Mayoiga. Last edited by Pierrot. on Mon May 02, 2016 10:16 am; edited 1 time in total |
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nightjuan
 Posts: 1473 |
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Given the rest of the episode and especially what was happening with Mumei at the same time, I wouldn't really jump to make such a comparison at this time. There's no real indication this will be anything more than an attempt to drink blood out of hunger, which will probably be interrupted right at the beginning of the next episode. Otherwise, they wouldn't have made it into a cliffhanger.
While I can see the lack of a full transition feeling a little odd in both of those cases, I'd argue it wasn't strictly necessary to be so explicit about it. Let's just say that I can't see any normal person on that train effectively stopping Mumei from doing anything. Especially after she jumped right into the middle of things and was far more ready to fight than any of her potential attackers. For that matter, Mumei has been portrayed as generally whimsical in terms of personality and not exactly the most methodical individual. As for why she didn't tell Ikoma about the need to drink blood, I guess she simply doesn't care all that much about him at the moment and probably didn't expect that he'd just let Ayame hurt him with a knife either. That seems to have accelerated the process.
I don't know if you've carefully studied any real viruses before, but different organisms can easily develop symptoms of infection at relatively different rates. It doesn't always happen at the same speed. Evidently, the show did slow that particular case out of convenience here, but it's not something inherently impossible nor totally unrealistic. In other words, it's not evidence of a logical flaw. |
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Themaster20000
 Posts: 863 |
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I didn't see the point in the ticking time bomb with the pregnant women. They set that up as if it's going to lead to another outbreak or the Bushi killing a bunch of people of them panicking.Instead Mumei kills her with no problem whatsoever;I get they wanted to show they she felt some guilt having to kill a baby too(not sure why considering it was probably infected). It's obvious that Araki's just throwing all his ideas at the wall (vampires,really?),and I honestly see it ending in a train wreck,
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Vaisaga
Posts: 13230 |
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Yeah, I know it won't be an exact repeat of Valvrave but I couldn't help but have a flashback to it.
My theory is that infected pregnant women give birth to Kabaneri and that Mumei was born in this way, hense her shocked reaction. |
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Engineering Nerd
 Posts: 898 Location: Southern California |
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To be fair, Kabane's bloodlust was mentioned in episode 1 and that's how Ikoma got his first kill In the Kabane hunt, as stupid as it is, it is definitely not a last minute idea as you suggested. Also, since this is a steampunk you know  there will be "real" train-wreck anyways so your prediction kinda becomes unintentionally punny. If preview of ep4 is any indication, yeah, the iron fortress will crash, although may not be in the way you expect
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FilthyCasual
Posts: 2218 |
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I dunno about that, he did lose it right before he started going BRAAAAIIIIIIINSSSSSS on Ayame. |
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Hameyadea
 Posts: 3679 |
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Actually, have you forgotten the 1st episode already? The reason why they are on the move in the first place is due to *drum roll* a highly-explosive, physics-defying train wreck. |
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