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Chaos Dragon
Episode 8

by Jacob Chapman,

How would you rate episode 8 of
Chaos Dragon ?
Community score: 1.8

This week on Chaos Dragon, Ibuki continues his journey to prove himself the dumbest sack of hammers on planet earth. Or at least on the island of Nil Kamui.

Last week, when Ibuki's twin sister Inori was revealed to be hanging out in Nil Kamui's capitol, I had the sneaking suspicion I had never seen her character before. Well, I was right; she's supposed to have been dead before the story started. When Nil Kamui was first conquered, the Imperial manor burned to the ground, leaving Ibuki the only survivor—or so he thought. In truth, Inori survived too, but she was quickly hidden away from the rest of the world, as a trump card in the rebellion's slow-burn scheme. Ibuki's status as the "last living Imperial" was simply meant to be a distraction for Kouran and D'Natia to pour all their manipulative efforts into, and it worked beautifully. Kouran's desire to control Ibuki eventually led them to Ogani Volcano, where they met a catastrophic, zombified end. Now that Kouran is only a tiny shade of the army they once were, the Nil Kamui rebellion decides it's time to go public with Inori's survival and put her butt on the throne ASAP. Inori and Ibuki are twins, but Inori is technically the older twin, and I guess Nil Kamui doesn't do the typical patriarchal-monarch thing of skipping to the next boy, because she has seniority in ascension order. Our Red Dragon-appeasing party was just a decoy from the beginning, and Ibuki quickly realizes that he's pretty okay with this. All he wants is peace, so maybe after everything he's been through, he doesn't have to become king after all?

Honestly, I love this twist in theory, and I think it could have made for a really solid ploy on audience expectations, if not a cutting statement on the politics of war, if only it was in a better-written show. In Chaos Dragon as we know it, however, this is nothing but a wet fart. Continuing the pacing problems of previous weeks, it comes out of nowhere and isn't allowed to have any of the gravitas or game-changing resonance that it should. It still feels like Ibuki's journey with his party has barely started, because nothing enthralling ever really happened in it. Ibuki himself shows little to no emotional conflict at all of these revelations, and he formed no compelling relationships with his party members, either before or after the destruction of Kouran's army, to bounce his reactions off anyone else's. (Heck, we barely had time to realize that was Kouran's most powerful armed force before they become zombies. It only hits home in this episode because we're told directly!) So this game-changing revelation just feels like another event in a fantastical history book, one of a list of bullet points that could make for a great story, if someone put the legwork into writing characters with arcs and feelings and sympathetic conflict into any of it.

Oh, but what about D'Natia? They're just as big a threat to Nil Kamui's sovereignty, right? Well, the rebellion has their number too. Just as they successfully used Kouran's reckless aggression against them, they've also seen right through D'Natia's typical tactic of feigned alliance in pursuit of their own power. As queen, Inori will simply be a figurehead for D'Natian forces to speak through—or so they've been told. Inori seems a lot more wicked than her public pretty princess demeanor would suggest, so I don't think D'Natia realizes who's really playing who. Since Inori has the full backing of the D'Natia-hating rebellion, and D'Natia's puppeteer priest is already being played up as a complete buffoon, I'd say D'Natia is really the one dangling from Nil Kamui's marionette strings. (Sweallow playing around with a matryoshka doll that literally contains red and black dragons wasn't exactly subtle either. Yes, there's a little black dragon underneath the big red one, but no matryoshka doll contains only two dolls, D'Natia.)

This all goes from "eh" to "what" when Inori embraces her brother and drags him over to see who else survived the calamity. It's Mashiro, back from the dead. That would be Mashiro, Ibuki's sacrificial girlfriend from the first episode of the show. This would be the Mashiro he killed with his own two hands. She embraces him, whispers "Ibuki," and he's instantly okay with all of this, fully trusting his sister to take the throne while he shares butterfly kisses with his miraculously returned (I said miraculously returned) lady love.

So, there's a major psychological difference between processing the death of someone you lost versus someone that you killed. (Even if it isn't 100% true to real life, we're all inured to this situation enough in fiction that we can tell what feels right and what doesn't.) I might buy this immediate acceptance of impossible happiness from Ibuki if he had simply lost Mashiro in an accident beyond his control, but that's not the case here. He killed Mashiro with his own two hands and then he buried her in the cold, cold ground. You don't get over that kind of internalized guilt and trauma that fast, especially not without asking any burning questions! Ibuki doesn't ask her how she survived, or if she hates him for sacrificing her, or any of those things you can't imagine him not asking. Later that night, it only takes Eykha a few minutes to determine that Mashiro is literally only capable of whispering "Ibuki" with a kiss and hug to anyone she interacts with. This should have taken Ibuki himself less than ten seconds to figure out, followed by a pained rejection of this insulting shadow of Mashiro, but that doesn't happen. Instead, Ibuki sits around in gleeful acceptance of his newfound uselessness, making kissy-face with an undead Mashiro and trusting his sister to rule the kingdom in his place despite all his (admittedly recent) speeches about the need to become king himself. This makes Eykha's later assertion that Ibuki should be king (instead of the clearly-evil-but-at-least-capable Inori) tragically ineffectual. I like Eykha, and I admire the story's attempt to give her an arc of newfound ambition inspired by love, but the boy she's in love with does not deserve her faith at all, which makes her speech ring hollow.

Ugh. Let's move on to some less asinine developments before I wrap up here. We learn a little more about how magic works in this universe when Lou sells her Golden Kouran MacGuffin to Ka Grava, in exchange for a new artificial arm constructed from the technology that keeps Ka Grava immortal. Just as D'Natia's artifact gave dominion to the black dragon, this artifact gives power to Kouran's yellow dragon (who Kouran does not worship I guess, he just sort of lives there and controls his dominion of magic). The reason these artifacts work the way they do is because each dragon controls the flow of magic in their own country. Someone born under the reign of the red dragon could have incredible magic power in their country, and then only be able to produce a tiny fireball when they step into black dragon territory. Ka Grava realizes that even just possessing this artifact in Nil Kamui, without using it, increases the chance of Kouran's dominion returning to the island. When the merchant king's servant expresses concern over this transaction, he promises that he will keep them all safe no matter what, on the honor of his deceased wife. Wait, Ka Grava has a dead wife that made him promise to take care of the disenfranchised, like half-breeds and Bounded Ones? Dang it, why isn't this show about Ka Grava's adventures instead? He remains far and away the best character in Chaos Dragon.

Long story short, Eykha reveals that Mashiro is a (non-bloodthirsty) Returned One, Inori reveals that she brought the poor girl back to life to pacify her stupid brother, and the jig is up all over the place by episode's end. If I had to guess, I'd say this entire Mashiro thing was added in the light novel or anime adaptation, and did not happen in the tabletop campaign. (I'm probably wrong, but that's just where I'm stacking my chips based on the story's flow so far.) I don't know why, but it just feels like the kind of thing that happens all the time in hacky anime, but not so much in role-playing games where plot recursion/planned callbacks are rare, and attempts at a full-circle cohesive theme are basically nonexistent (because the collaborative storytelling method makes a singular worldview impossible.) Anyway, my point is that I've been pretty down on this story's reliance on tabletop campaign events to be narratively compelling (because they usually aren't), but Mashiro's return is the single stupidest thing to happen in the story so far and I'm pretty sure it's anime or light-novel original. When will these awful clichés stop rearing their ugly heads? Regardless of where it came from, Mashiro's return was such a bad idea, executed so poorly, that it destroyed whatever small resonance Inori's appearance might have had.

I still like the bare bones of Chaos Dragon's story a lot. I still think it had the potential to be not only a good fantasy anime, but a great one, at least on paper. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen, and I think we've officially reached the point of no salvation for this series. The story has gone from painfully awkward, to gently recovering, to an unsalvageable stinker, so all I can do now is wait patiently to see how it wraps up.

Rating: C-

Chaos Dragon is currently streaming on Funimation.

Hope has been an anime fan since childhood, and likes to chat about cartoons, pop culture, and visual novel dev on Twitter.


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