Turkey!-Time to Strike-

Episode 6

Can I give this episode 6 stars? Or maybe even 7? This episode checked off every possible box I dreamed this show would have and more: queerness, makeshift bowling by way of hey-that's-not-how-physics-work, and soul-wrenching despair as one of the girls comes to terms with learning that she's okay with killing people. Perfection. Delicious. Precisely what I wanted.

This episode was, very plainly, about the girls—Sayuri in particular—having to grapple with the different norms of the Sengoku era. At first, this manifests in their concern for Sumomo, who's going to become a bride in a political marriage after she has her first period. But of course, as you likely already know, political (or at least, strategic) marriages were far from being unusual during the 15th century. So Sumomo, of course, thinks nothing of it—in fact, everyone seems to think the fact that Mai and the future girls seem concerned is what's unusual here.

What you might not have known, meanwhile, is how people who menstruate dealt with periods in a time before modern sanitary products. Relevant to the 15th century, it's worth noting that they generally spent more of their lives pregnant than in the 21st century. Still, that's not to say they spent so much time in this state that they never or barely experienced their periods. And during those times, they generally used rags, or makeshift rags, as pads. I confess that I don't know what a cinch is specifically, and I've had difficulty on certain search engines to learn more about them, though.

And this leads us to Suguri, and some pretty overt queer overtones. It's been said here on ANN before that this summer has been a pretty queer season of anime, broadly speaking. And this week's episode of Turkey! does nothing if not further affirm that. The line is still a bit blurry on the particulars of Suguri's gender identity; do they (and I'll be using they/them pronouns for them until it becomes clearer what their preference would be, to mirror how Suguri themselves uses the gender neutral “Watashi” to refer to themselves) view themselves as what we would describe as being a crossdresser, trans, non-binary, or perhaps something else all together? Does Suguri even care about labels for their gender identity at all? All this, and some crush vibes are going on between Sayuri with both Suguri and Mai. More specifically, just as the series would have us believe, Sayuri has a crush on Mai, whom she's constantly thinking about; we're also seeing Suguri being set up as another potential love interest. So, you know, eyes emoji.

That leads us to our big finish. The showstopper. What we've all been waiting for (or I have, at least). While there was more to this era than this, its violence is often a key part of how we define the Sengoku era. And Sayuri learns this the hard way. Namely, you were much more likely to need to kill another human being out of necessity or self-preservation.

In hindsight, last week's episode was a great one to have right before this. Last week was the first time we saw any of the girls in any real, possibly life-threatening peril. It all worked out, of course, but it planted the idea that they're not exactly in a bubble, and that if they want to get out of this alive, they're going to have to do things they don't necessarily want to do. And this week, that idea was taken to an extreme in the form of Sayuri sticking around for Suguri to end a bandit's life—something Suguri didn't regard as a particularly unusual circumstance. For Sayuri, meanwhile, this is traumatic on multiple levels. Not only is she listening to a man's life end, but she's having to reconcile with how her circumstances have necessitated this, and could very possibly do so again. Phrased differently, she's painfully having to accept that she might have to kill, or at least turn a blind eye to others killing. Either way, this is a lot for her to have to accept on top of the rest of the stress of her circumstances.

What I think drives everything home is Sayuri's pleading to Suguri—as though pleading with herself—that the life of a bandit is still a life, and that it's wrong to take a life. Suguri, meanwhile, is telling Sayuri plainly that this is the only way to protect everyone. Sayuri doesn't want to accept this—but she also doesn't want anyone she loves to get hurt. Sayuri breaks down, slowly, then quickly. She confesses that she's from the future, and that in the future, people don't simply kill each other. She runs off in tears, reflecting on the weight of life.

I think this strikes such a chord for me, in particular, because Sayuri is wrestling with something more people should try to contend with when they study history, even if they're not doing it with the intent of, say, pursuing it as an academic career: the weight of historical lives. It's so easy for us, in the 21st century and with the power of hindsight, to sort of view lives in the distant past—people who walked the earth before even our grandparents' grandparents—as something that's at best, abstract. At worst, well, surely their deaths couldn't have been such a big deal since life was so much harder back then, right? And yet, that's not at all the case. Life was so much more than the bare essentials that we often strip eras of history down to—it was so much more than the miseries that we often remember their times and places for. People played games, had hobbies, had friends—yes, even in Sengoku Japan. Even a life in, say, the 15th century is still a life. And that holds weight as much as a 21st-century life. Just because they lived at a time that we in the 21st century can't remember—that we have to piece together like a puzzle full of broken pieces—doesn't mean their lives were any less important. And when tragedies occur, the era they lived in doesn't make those tragedies any less tragic—as though there's a threshold where, after a certain number of years, deaths stop meaning something. But Sayuri's life, the lives of her friends, and the lives of those protecting her could very plausibly come into jeopardy. And in tears, she's forced to make what's very clearly a difficult decision for herself to abandon her morals in the name of self-preservation—she realizes that she's in a kill-or-be-killed situation. The white flower she's been looking at, which the camera has been lingering on every few seconds, is soon stained with blood.

Sayuri is no longer the same person she was at the start of the episode, and she more or less says as much. Moments like these are exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for from this series, the minute we saw a man's freshly decapitated head hit the ground. In the span of one singular episode, Sayuri went from being the one fading the most into the background to one of the biggest focal points of the show. To end this on a lighter note, here's a meme I couldn't resist making by the end of the episode.

Rating:

Turkey!-Time to Strike- is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.