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EP. REVIEW: Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon


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Minos_Kurumada



Joined: 04 Nov 2015
Posts: 982
PostPosted: Tue Nov 24, 2020 1:36 am Reply with quote
I am beyond impressed on the lengths the plot goes to make it's own premise void, again...

Why should I care about Towa getting her sister's sleep back if it just saved their lives on this episode?

I mean, imagine that Natsu's whole motivation was to get Ersa a real eye... just that her fake eye not just works exactly like a real one but it saved her life like 3 times.

Well, this is worse because not having to sleep in a war/demon infested land is BEYOND useful and this episode made it worse.

How hard it's to give her a side effect?

Let me think in some:

- Loosing her memories as time goes.
- She looses her powers every night, like Inuyasha did in full moon.
- She is missing her taste or smell sense.
- One day, she will fall asleep and never wake up.
- She hallucinates when stressed.
- She goes blind as time goes on.

Such a little change that doesn't affect the plot at all and could make the quest relevant and give an urgency felling, but nop...
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chex mix



Joined: 28 Mar 2015
Posts: 415
PostPosted: Tue Nov 24, 2020 8:20 am Reply with quote
Is there any indication that any of these girls experience the same half-demon monthly "depowering" that Inuyasha and Naraku did? Especially Towa, since she didn't even know she was a demon and you'd think she'd totally freak out that her hair changed color and she got super weak once a month. Unless the show plans on giving us some horrific excuse that the depowering relates to their time of the month, which honestly wouldn't surprise me at this point. Or the show is just gonna pretend it isn't a thing and hope we forget.

Either way, if these girls can't be bothered to care about the various plot elements that have been strewn around so far I don't see why I should. I'm just going to wait until the show is done and see if it's better on a binge.

I'm truly disappointed.
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Minos_Kurumada



Joined: 04 Nov 2015
Posts: 982
PostPosted: Tue Nov 24, 2020 12:48 pm Reply with quote
Let us draw a parallelism with another Anime about a MC wanting to get his sister back: Saint Seiya:

- In episode 1, we are told that Seiya was separated from his sister at young age, both were orphans so they are both everything for each other.

- Subsequently, we are told that Seiya was sent to get the Pegasus Cloth and had to spend 5 years of hellish training with 90% odds of dying in order to see her again.

- In episode 2 we are told that his sister is missing, so if he enters the Galactic Duel tournament and wins the organization will look for her, she can also see him in worldwide TV and make stuff faster.

So, its a logical scalation and you care about Seiya getting his sister back because we have seen his struggle all of this in 2 episodes of a 30 years old Anime.

Yashahime in 2020 and 8 episodes has failed to make the same basic story telling, not just Towa lived an idyllic life with a middle class family in a first world country, but his sister is apparently quite happy being a monster hunter and Towa trying to get her sleep back not just is shown as something detrimental for Setsuna, but it even seems as egoistical since the show has made very clear its super convenient.
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Violet Park



Joined: 18 Jul 2018
Posts: 115
PostPosted: Tue Nov 24, 2020 1:29 pm Reply with quote
Saint Seiya problem is that it has a lot of filler and even in the manga the sister isn't very important. But it's indeed better than Yashahime, where the characters could get information on their missing parents at any moment yet they don't even care
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Nom De Plume De Fanboy
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Joined: 14 Jan 2011
Posts: 606
Location: inland US west, pretty rural
PostPosted: Sat Nov 28, 2020 10:10 pm Reply with quote
Is anyone else having trouble getting the subtitles to work for this show on Funimation? I'm seeing pretty bad timing lags there, but not when I watch it on Crunchyroll. I'm using a Roku on a monitor.

Or is this part of problems with Funi in general?
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Minos_Kurumada



Joined: 04 Nov 2015
Posts: 982
PostPosted: Wed Dec 02, 2020 9:15 pm Reply with quote
Now, as I pointed in a previous comment, setting up a reason for the girls to stick together was a 10 mins tops endeavor and this episode did it, partially, on 3.

There is still no reason for Setsuna to be there but "I need money to buy information so lets us kill stuff to get it" Its good enough reason, this is not HXH nor Dead Note with characters constantly playing 4D chess after all.

If this episode's opening, plus a reason for Setsuna to want to get her sleep back, would have been episode's 3 opening most complains about the show would not exist.
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Covnam



Joined: 31 May 2005
Posts: 3627
PostPosted: Sun Dec 06, 2020 11:24 pm Reply with quote
Why did Moroha need to bring back proof for her bounty when Takechiyo was there to witness everything?
If the corpse dealer has a use for the head, that would make sense, but Moroha just said she needed proof :/
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meiam



Joined: 23 Jun 2013
Posts: 3442
PostPosted: Mon Dec 14, 2020 1:31 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
That's right: Nix the twins, drop the Fake-Shippo off at a fire station somewhere, and make Moroha the star of the program. Call it “Beniyasha's Potato Chips n' Pancakes Power Hours!”, and have it be nothing but Moroha gorging herself on futuristic foodstuffs and mangling J-Pop karaoke.


Pretty much, inverting the story with Moroha coming to the present would have been a nice differentiation from Inuyasha while still keeping link to the original. It's weird how much the shoe focus on the twin rather than Moroha, who's the kid of the two main lead of the first show. I can't even figure out what they're trying to do, is it just a case of pushing for a bland lead so they're more relatable or something?
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ThrowMeOut



Joined: 10 Oct 2018
Posts: 256
PostPosted: Mon Dec 14, 2020 1:50 pm Reply with quote
meiam wrote:

Pretty much, inverting the story with Moroha coming to the present would have been a nice differentiation from Inuyasha while still keeping link to the original. It's weird how much the shoe focus on the twin rather than Moroha, who's the kid of the two main lead of the first show. I can't even figure out what they're trying to do, is it just a case of pushing for a bland lead so they're more relatable or something?


Man, that's such an obvious concept I'm baffled they didn't go with it. She goes through the well, is cut off from her parents so that gaping plot hole of "where is everybody" is filled, and she has to fight a bunch of monsters who were awakened/created by magic and collect a bunch of macguffins to get home while also trying to adapt to modern day customs.

Instead we got... whatever this half-baked thing is. Yashahime is trying to do so many things and not fleshing out any of it.
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Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
Posts: 11306
PostPosted: Mon Dec 14, 2020 2:54 pm Reply with quote
Why does Setsuna seem so ill-equipped to fight demons? Where was her anti-poison/miasma mask? The previews show she does have one.

This seems to be falling prey to the problems writers frequently get into with female protagonists in action settings, where they want to have badass heroines but just don't know how to write them, because all their archaic ideas about what girls should be like cloud their imaginations. It's getting harder and harder for me to believe that Takahashi signed off on this.
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RR529



Joined: 14 Dec 2020
Posts: 46
PostPosted: Mon Dec 14, 2020 4:32 pm Reply with quote
meiam wrote:
Quote:
That's right: Nix the twins, drop the Fake-Shippo off at a fire station somewhere, and make Moroha the star of the program. Call it “Beniyasha's Potato Chips n' Pancakes Power Hours!”, and have it be nothing but Moroha gorging herself on futuristic foodstuffs and mangling J-Pop karaoke.


Pretty much, inverting the story with Moroha coming to the present would have been a nice differentiation from Inuyasha while still keeping link to the original. It's weird how much the shoe focus on the twin rather than Moroha, who's the kid of the two main lead of the first show. I can't even figure out what they're trying to do, is it just a case of pushing for a bland lead so they're more relatable or something?


From what I understand (or so I've heard it said) Sesshomaru was the most popular character in the OG series (even surpassing the mains), so the shift in focus to him (or his lineage I suppose) for the sequel is what they believe the fandom would respond the best to (I can't remember where I read it, but the original idea was to center on the twins exclusively, with Moroha having the same supporting status as Hisui, until they realized they didn't play off each other well enough so Moroha was upgraded, though arguably a bit sloppily as we've seen). There are a few problems with that in my view though.

1. For all the reasons Sesshomaru was popular in the first place, a gripping romantic arc wasn't one of them as he was one of the few characters in the OG series not to have one. Thus, unlike Moroha & Hisui (who's bizarrely been reduced to background decoration when the girls need to speak to Kohaku) the twins aren't the result of a romance the fan base spent nearly 200 episodes & multiple movies waiting to finally happen, so I don't think there's that initial fan anticipation for them from that angle.

2. No matter what deep issues he had going on in the background, Sesshomaru was never a very emotive character (and he at least had Jaken to consistently play off of) & Rin (for better or worse I'm assuming she's the mother) was little more than cute kid doing cute things in the OG series, and since the twins are a bit too old to pull from Rin's playbook, they only have Sesshomaru's (or lack thereof) to pull from (this is exasperated as you pretty much only have one parent to pull from in creating personalities for not one, but two new characters). This runs in contrast to Moroha who has elements carried over from two distinctly emotive parents.

3. Similar to issue number 2, but with powers. Rin had no special abilities or weapons for obvious reasons, so they have to split up Sesshomaru's powers between the twins, while Moroha gets a wide variety of abilities from both parents.
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TarsTarkas



Joined: 20 Dec 2007
Posts: 5821
Location: Virginia, United States
PostPosted: Mon Dec 14, 2020 10:53 pm Reply with quote
I liked the original Inu Yashi, and I was planning to watch Yashahime. But when the first couple of episode reviews came out highlighting that Moroha had no interest in finding her parents once she met her mother's family, well that turned me off. Whether it is a fantasy, supernatural, or science fiction story, the characters still have to be believable as characters.

Were my parents murdered, was I stolen from them, did they step in a fairy circle, or was I abandoned at a hospital? All burning questions, she has no interest in finding out. If Moroha is the heart of the show, it must be a hollow one.

I understand shows have a central mystery, which this seems to be. But when the main character of the show doesn't even care about it, why should we.

Question for the watchers of this show, did Kagome's parents act like real human beings, when they meet their grand daughter. Real human beings whose daughter and son in-law have been missing for 15 years, but all of a sudden they find their grand daughter, but she know nothing about her parents and doesn't even seem to care.
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Covnam



Joined: 31 May 2005
Posts: 3627
PostPosted: Mon Dec 14, 2020 11:33 pm Reply with quote
TarsTarkas wrote:

Question for the watchers of this show, did Kagome's parents act like real human beings, when they meet their grand daughter. Real human beings whose daughter and son in-law have been missing for 15 years, but all of a sudden they find their grand daughter, but she know nothing about her parents and doesn't even seem to care.


No, not really. The entire family was pretty passé about it
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Agent355



Joined: 12 Dec 2008
Posts: 5113
Location: Crackberry in hand, thumbs at the ready...
PostPosted: Tue Dec 15, 2020 5:42 am Reply with quote
Last week’s episode, the snake twins ep, was the *worst.* I really want to like this show and I have been holding on to hope that it will pick up and become legitimately engaging more than most commenters here have, but snake twins nearly killed it. First, they try to hamfist a “siblings truly love one another” analogy out of a pair of siblings who have been fighting one another since birth. Then, they basically torture Moroha in the most mean spirited way yet, and try to pass it off as “funny.” The show may not have told us why Moroha is in so much debt to Jyubei, but she’s obviously desperate. I’m not laughing at her attempt to gather the snake brothers’ sand remains. It’s not funny.

This episode was a little bit better; at least the siblings here care about each other and the violin/biwa theme was genuinely sweet. But they’re still sidelining Moroha, barely advancing the main plot, and not giving the audience any reason not to conclude that Setsuna is better off without the ability to sleep. I’m still planning to watch, but I’m losing my patience.
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meiam



Joined: 23 Jun 2013
Posts: 3442
PostPosted: Tue Dec 15, 2020 9:19 am Reply with quote
TarsTarkas wrote:
I liked the original Inu Yashi, and I was planning to watch Yashahime. But when the first couple of episode reviews came out highlighting that Moroha had no interest in finding her parents once she met her mother's family, well that turned me off. Whether it is a fantasy, supernatural, or science fiction story, the characters still have to be believable as characters.

Were my parents murdered, was I stolen from them, did they step in a fairy circle, or was I abandoned at a hospital? All burning questions, she has no interest in finding out. If Moroha is the heart of the show, it must be a hollow one.

I understand shows have a central mystery, which this seems to be. But when the main character of the show doesn't even care about it, why should we.

Question for the watchers of this show, did Kagome's parents act like real human beings, when they meet their grand daughter. Real human beings whose daughter and son in-law have been missing for 15 years, but all of a sudden they find their grand daughter, but she know nothing about her parents and doesn't even seem to care.


I think them ignoring their family could work if the show main theme was something along the line of "you're not defined by your family" or something like that. But instead it's the opposite, the three main character only things keeping them together is the fact that they're family (none of them seems to particularly like each others) and the closest thing to a main quest is Trowa trying to give Setsuna her memory of when they were kids together because they're sister. The show is simultaneously acting like family is the most important and least important things in someone's life.

As for her present world family, they just didn't seem to really care. Iirc none of them asked about Kagome, they just made an off hand comment and Moroha act like "Yeah I TOTALLY know my mom, ahahah". Also Trowa is her brother adopted kid and when she decide she's going to the past time, something which probably means he's never going to see her again just like Kagome, he just sorta agree, as if she just asked to spend a month camping or something.
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