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Glad that they didn't ignore the Pandemonium and got it out of the way since it definitely seemed like a viable option till you learned it was full of monsters. Odd that she basically teleported back to Menou (I guess time traveling?) instead of rolling back time like we had previously seen.

I thought that Manon poisoned those sandwiches as well, but maybe she just fed them her latest victim

Yes - Pandemonium makes an appearance, the next arc is going to be good and in places gory (if they don't censor it or make what occurs happen offscreen with just the noises).

You can guess that the sandwiches are dodgy from the look on Manon's face when she knew they were eating them....

spoiler[They contain something similar to the red stuff the train hijackers had swallowed]

The fog is a type of eternal prison trapping the main being of pandemonium so it doesn't destroy the world.

Funniest episode so far. Possibly also the horniest, given all of the shots of Akari's butt.

No mention to how comical the use and abuse of recycled animation throughout the episode?
That was a lot of peanuts that Momo destroyed. And I didn't expect two planes to be the entirety of two scenes - one time with an envelope, another without.

Menou fits the criteria of being a Lost one. She was found almost Amnesiac in a Bleaching white. Although Akari's previous Flash Forward kind of hints that Flare is the Lost One, since she was there at both Bleachings. Menou could be one but from what I've gathered that her etheric energy is so low that she can't fully manifest her pure concept.

Episode 9

Menou keeps having in-Japan flashbacks involving Akari, so those might add to the "Menou is a Lost One" ledger.

When she died, Manon's mother told Manon has an older sister (in Japan, presumably). Who might that be? Have we met her? What is the relationship of time-in-Japan to time-in-this-world? Tightly coupled? Loosely coupled? Non-continuous mapping?

This was the first time we got to see some perspective on the world and Lost Ones COMPLETELY divorced from the church’s propaganda, and I like that we got two different perspectives in said episode. The first is Manon’s monologue including what the Fourth believe - that use of a Lost One’s power will gradually wipe their memory of their life before, rather than simply overwriting their personality entirely (and since True Akari basically confirms this, it’s legitimate,) that it seems like it MIGHT also degrade their present memories as well (or at least, Manon’s father believed that it could,) and that Lost Ones can be lost even WITHOUT someone in this world deciding to sign a kid’s death warrant. It also looks like Manon’s mother was significantly older than the high schoolers we’ve largely seen so far even when she arrived. (Also, we get very little sense of per-the-credits Mitsuki’s sense of things, but those brief shots and the look on her face, plus the hinting she left a family behind in Japan, suggest that her life in this world was quite sad.) Interestingly, Manon doesn’t actually disagree with the church’s position that Pure Concepts are so dangerous that even someone who’s actively NOT using theirs is too much of a threat - she seems more angry at Flare that she DIDN’T kill Manon as well than that she did kill Manon’s mother, all being tied up in Manon’s desire to be powerful. It’s also notable that either Manon’s father didn’t know, or the knowledge wasn’t widespread enough for the rest of the Fourth to know, the mechanics of Pure Concept attachment. I figure if it were heritable Manon would have figured that out before her final plan, so again let’s take this one as legitimate. That scene also suggests, given Flare knows that information, that before the Human Errors Lost Ones living long enough to have kids wasn’t unheard of and the church still knows some of those details.

Which dives us in neatly to Pandaemonium’s reveals, because she’s SO MUCH OLDER than anyone else in the show. My take on the Ivory Hero was that they were the original wielder of White, way back in that golden age, and that the Salt Continent thing happened in the course of their fight with Pandaemonium and their heroism subsequently covered up by the church. And the picture painted by what we knew of Pandaemonium from the previous Libelle Exposition (that she’d get injured for the monsters it would produce,) and what she says in her grand monologue really just keeps making the denizens of this world worse and worse - she acts like her power was used for ENTERTAINMENT purposes, too, and that either way she was clearly a commodity to the residents of this world. Even when it meant killing her, repeatedly, which seems to have forced use of her power no matter what she would originally have thought of it. Small wonder she hates them and wants to use her demons for revenge. The Ivory Hero, in turn, seems to have been forced into the role of cleaning up the mess this world’s residents made, almost certainly died for it in the end, and is remembered as a bringer of cataclysms in their own right.

It says a lot that the self-loathing child assassin who kills other children is one of the more sympathetic, reasonable residents of this world that we’ve seen.

On the relationship to time between the two universes, recall that Menou’s own flashback sequence showed mosaics of the Pre-Human Error Age that seems to have been centuries ago, and those Lost Ones were basically wearing standard modern uniforms. So I suspect it’s not 1:1 - and frankly, who’s to say the isekai kids aren’t being pulled through time in their interdimensional travel as well. I do think Menou’s a Lost One (and give good odds she was Manon’s sister,) but I don’t think she was the original Ivory Hero. Could be proven wrong, but leaning towards ‘what matters is that even the Human Errors were justifiable, once, and this world should not be trusted with the wellbeing of supremely powerful children.

Regalli wrote:

she acts like her power was used for ENTERTAINMENT purposes, too, and that either way she was clearly a commodity to the residents of this world. Even when it meant killing her, repeatedly, which seems to have forced use of her power no matter what she would originally have thought of it. Small wonder she hates them and wants to use her demons for revenge. The Ivory Hero, in turn, seems to have been forced into the role of cleaning up the mess this world’s residents made, almost certainly died for it in the end, and is remembered as a bringer of cataclysms in their own right.

I'm really curious about how you even reached this conclusion. Her power is to create monsters and all kinds of other abominations/ Why... scratch that, HOW would anyone use that for entertainment? And at which point did she say anything about wanting revenge? That's Manon, not Pandaemonium.

Also, no, Ivory isn't remembered as a bringer of cataclysms. That would imply he is remembered, and the entire point of bringing him up this episode is to point out that people don't know who he is. That's why it's the Four Major Human Errors and not Five.

On entertainment: That would be from Pandaemonium’s spiel right before she brings on the demons. It has a very… rehearsed quality, like she did this before, more than once.

Quote:

Thank you for coming on this wonderful day, everyone. I welcome you to beat, crush, and mash me as you see fit. There’s more than enough of me so don’t hold back. What you are about to witness is a B-movie screening. The entertainment of gods and demons determined by dice! Demons! Monsters! Dark Lords! Mysterious wonders both divine and demonic. The dice are governed by chance. Who knows what will happen next?!

The way she’s framing it, at least, is very much a carnival broker’s patter. Come see the monstrosities! Watch them fight for your amusement! (If you’re wondering how that could ever be entertainment, think of the Roman Colosseum, especially gladiatorial combat and public executions being held there where prisoners would be torn apart by wild animals.) Could well be that, yeah, SHE turned this into the B-movie framing to make the people who were killing her to summon demons uncomfortable, but either way the opening where she goes ‘thanks for coming here, please kill me as brutally as you like to summon monsters for whatever you need’ is uh, something. It sure is something. Very few kids would volunteer killing themselves to summon monsters of their own volition, not until they’d been killed enough times to go numb to everything messed up about this. I’m pretty sure it was mentioned a few episodes back that it only needs her bleeding, not actually dead, to activate, too. But you almost certainly get less monsters that way, so better to kill her to get more bang for your buck.

Revenge is a bit of an extrapolation from there, but again quoting Pandaemonium: “Forced to protect this stupid world,” “I think that’s why I remember hating you all.” And then she summons her demons, including activating the monstrine in people’s systems OUTSIDE the castle. She definitely hates this world, and I don’t think the monstrine activation is necessary for dealing with Menou. It also seems like she might have been an active collaborator with Manon, not just a tool in her revenge, in coming up with the monstrine and such… though it’s hard to tell given everything else about her, and it could be Manon used her and Pandaemonium decided to use that. Still, I definitely think she has plans beyond just killing Menou here.

If the ‘Ivory Hero’ means they used the Pure Concept of White as I speculate (‘stronger than any Pure Concept ever,’ Pandaemonium claims, with the evidence it could be used to kill Akari, the way White has come up repeatedly in the story as SO extremely dangerous, and the synonymous link between Ivory and White) then yes, they became a Human Error we already know about. The identity of the kid and what they did before wiping out a continent (or if they did so in the course of trying to stop an equally-dangerous threat) is lost, including the idea that they got dragged into cleaning up the mess this world made by irresponsibly using Pure Concepts at the expense of their wielders. All that’s remembered is the salt.

Regalli wrote:

On entertainment: That would be from Pandaemonium’s spiel right before she brings on the demons. It has a very… rehearsed quality, like she did this before, more than once.

Pandaemonium seeing how she's over thousand years old... yes she's had the time to practice her moustache twirling- Afterall Pandaemonium's Pure Concept is Evil with a big fat capital E,and "she" as a human no longer exists.

((We're at volume 2 with the anime, volume 4 is when the real "whammies" get dropped,and there are only 7 volumes currently released,so there's a lot to be still written))

Nordhmmer wrote:

(We're at volume 2 with the anime, volume 4 is when the real "whammies" get dropped,

Yes, some real whammies. spoiler[Whammies that would make you want to join the Human Errors in destroying this world.]

If I recall, we've been spared a bit of body horror in the anime; in the book, after "Summon: I See a Little Shadow" Manon's abdomen swells like she's pregnant and at "Summon: Happy Birthday to Me" Pandemonium tears her way out of her abdomen, not her chest.

Heavily censored / adapted pandemonium arc. I was hoping for more gore - with almost the alien bursting out of the chest level of grossness. Then with repeated pandemonium's exploding out of bodies using the monstrine users as fuel to power the taboo!

At least they showed there were two girls. both Little fingers of pandemonium that had been cut off and poked through the rift in the fog-prison caused by Akari's total world rewinds.

And the flashback - were the lilies on akari's desk or on her friends desk?

Pandemonium's comment to menou about her being like the ivory hero - the previous flashbacks with young blank menou, fleur & orion (with her admission that she'd messed up a blanching to split a pure from its owner) makes me think that menou is a lost one and possibly was related or in a relationship with akari in Japan.

I really like the OP of this series. It has a strong resemblance to the "Pray" ED of Angels of Death (which has been my current earworm over the last couple days), and both give off a very unsettling vibe.

^
Yeah, the OP is one of the best so far this year, though for me, more for its visuals than its song.

I'd only read the first source novel for this series (I often stop reading series I'm borderline on once they get anime adaptations), but I must say I've been impressed with how the second novel's story has played out. It's got a fine core cast, with even Ashuna being likable, and has done a better job than most at keeping the magic system interesting. This one's up there with Bookworm, Devil Next Door 2, and Spy x Family as one of the season's priority views for me.