Utawarerumono: The False Faces

Episode 11

Witsalnemitea be praised, it finally happened! U2warerumono is finally about something again, if only briefly. The tyrannous tower of lukewarm harem hijinks has been toppled, and I can finally see a bright future of stakes on the distant horizon! There's a story in here somewhere! It's still alive!

Alright, enough melodramatic bellyaching. This was a good enough episode to renew my faith overall and remind me why I like this world and characters so much to begin with. I feel like this is proof that I'm not asking for much, because on the surface, not much happened in episode 11! Princess Anju's phony kidnapping scheme went completely tails-up, but she learned something from the experience, so it all worked out in the end. Sure doesn't sound like much, but the devil's always in the details with a slow-burning series like this one.

It doesn't take long for Nosuri to realize she's just had a treasonous-level brain fart: her starry-eyed dreamer is actually the Princess of Yamato, and the prince charming they're attempting to lure is the General of the Right himself. She's gotten too deep into this plan to back out now though, so she shanghais poor Haku into her service. Maybe if Oshutoru and his hundreds of mounted units see two thieves holding Anju at knifepoint instead of one, they'll be more hesitant to charge in and rip the poor pranksters to shreds? Probably not, but at this point they don't have any other options that don't involve publicly humiliating the princess. (Of course, Anju remains nothing but enthusiastic about the whole idea.)

Ougi can't help out with the hostage negotiations himself, because he's too busy delivering the ransom message and preparing an escape route for when the whole stupid idea eventually implodes. That's the other refreshing thing about this episode: Utawarerumono is genuinely funny again. Oshutoru, machiavellian mind that he is, can tell from the beginning that this is just a silly ploy for attention (with a familiar birdbrained stink to it), so he refuses to answer the death threats against Princess Anju delivered by arrow. With no idea of what else to do, Ougi just keeps delivering them, until Oshutoru's office desk is palpably peppered with arrow-messages. His reluctance to humor Anju is just costing him furniture at this point, so he sighs and assembles a small force to go teach Anju (and Nosuri n' Ougi) a lesson about accountability. It's a funny scene, and most of this episode's gags are funny in a way they haven't been since the show's promising beginnings.

So if Oshutoru knows this whole thing is baloney, and Haku knows this whole thing is baloney, then what's the point? Well, that turns out to be the giant unsettling question at the heart of this supposed waste of time. When Oshutoru's troops (and all our other heroines) finally arrive to rescue Anju, the hoax seems obvious, so they decide to chill and get some late-night ramen from a handy traveling stand, while their fearless leader works negotiations. Unfortunately, General Oshutoru hasn't softened at all. In fact, he's got a rather disturbing look on his face. Suddenly, he comes at Nosuri and Haku like he's ready to kill, and while Nosuri surrenders immediately, Haku gets no such mercy. As the lead girls watch in horror (save for one hyperventilating wolf-princess), Oshutoru beats Haku back with blow after blow, even after he's dropped his disguise and starts begging the general to come to his senses. So what the hell is going on?

At long last, we're finally seeing the real Oshutoru peek through the mask. He's pushing Haku over the edge for two major reasons: one, he finally has a (flimsy) excuse to fight him, and two, Haku just so happens to be carrying a real weapon for once. When Oshutoru insists that Haku draw the weapon he's been given, it seems like a ludicrous demand. Haku has never displayed any acumen for fighting, but since Oshutoru isn't letting him surrender, he does what he's told. In a bizarre twist, Haku instantly becomes a master swordsman the second he crosses blades with the general. He's doing backflips and fancy footwork and forceful fencing and it's oh so satisfying, thank you, finally. (Sadly, the only character in the show who seems to share my enthusiasm is getting worked up for very different reasons. At least it gives us another good gag, as Rurutie blusters endlessly about her passion for man-love while the ramen vendor behind her mutters that he's found a rotten egg in his stock.) When the two finally reach a standstill and Haku starts coming back to his meek and nerdy senses, Oshutoru whispers, "You've gotten better, huh?" Then it's like it never happened, and Oshutoru is busy impressing the gravity of Anju's actions upon her, making it clear that he would have to commit seppuku for letting the daughter of the emperor be kidnapped. Princess Anju apologizes, grows up a little from the whole affair, and everything goes back to--no, I'm sorry, that one line of dialogue from General Two-Face changes everything.

I'll try to avoid getting too deep into spoilers about the first series, but it's hard to speculate too much without going into the past of Utawarerumono's world, when humans still existed without animal ears and tails. Still, that line from Oshutoru makes it painfully obvious that he knew Haku at some point in his past before he lost his memories, and that opens up a colossal can of worms. We know from the first episode that Haku is a human from before the apocalypse. (Probably a scientist or engineer rather than a test subject, given his uncanny talent with numbers and machinery.) Humanity should have been wiped out by Witsalnemitea's curse (let's just say the red blob from this show's first episode recognized Haku for ominous reasons), but Haku woke up from cold sleep insanely tardy but otherwise unharmed, wearing medical scrubs inside some abandoned facility. This suggests that the only time he and Oshutoru could have known each other was before the rebirth of the world and propagation of animal-people. On top of that, they have the same face, even though Oshutoru is an animal-hybrid creature (probably?) and Haku definitely isn't.

What does all this mean? The short version is that Oshutoru must be very, very, very old. He had to have existed before the beginning of civilization in the new world, and I'm guessing that he's either Haku's twin brother who engineered some way to keep him alive in cold sleep when every other human died, or he's some kind of animal-ized clone made from or by Haku to survive in the new world, with Haku being left behind and surviving for unknown reasons. The warriors of Tusukuru were concerned about the rapid technological evolution of Yamato (and the rumored immortality of its emperor) for good reason. I don't want to say that Oshutoru is up to no good, but even if his motives are noble, he probably introduced the "masks" to Yamato's military, which makes his goals dubious at best because those masks are bad news. The jury's still out if he's puppeteering the emperor in some way, but I think it's safe to assume that he's waiting for something inside Haku to awaken. Maybe Haku survived because he carries some part of Witsalnemitea inside his body as well? Maybe, like Oshutoru, he diluted his humanity enough to escape annihilation, and now the god-bits inside him have the potential to change the world in shocking ways?

It may be a half dozen episodes before we finally see that happen in any small way, but I'm glad we got a little excitement, intrigue, and solid humor out of this series again before the next meandering wait for a story development. I believe in you, Utawarerumono! If nothing else, you'll always be pretty.

Rating: B

Utawarerumono: The False Faces is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

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