Chained Soldier Season 2

Episode 4

Well, it took a few weeks, but Ren finally made good on her promise to “borrow” Yuuki from Kyouka, which delivers yet another new Slave form for the Demon Defense Force to take advantage of. Yuuki's “Killer Fang” form is all shadowy and scary looking, too, as if Ren made sure to stop by the Sex Pokémon BDSM shop on her way to cuckquean Kyouka. All in all, it's a set up for some delicious and long-foreshadowed interpersonal conflict between the two ladies currently vying to dominate Yuuki, which is everything we come to Chained Soldier for, isn't it?

Well, almost everything, maybe. As I've mentioned before, one of Chained Soldier's defining traits is that it functions just as well as a fun action show as it does shameless, filthy smut. It's never been exceptional action on the level of a Chainsaw Man or a DAN DA DAN, of course, but it was still one of the rare examples of unapologetic anime erotica that you really could watch to enjoy the simple plot and fun fight scenes, provided that you didn't mind all of the naked titties and butt-cheeks getting shoved into Yuuki's face on a regular basis. “Rampage” is really the first time that this new season of Chained Soldier has tried it hand at proper spectacle, and is it just me, or was the action on display this week…bad?

On paper, getting to watch Yuuki go apeshit on a bunch of anonymous Shuuki before turning his fangs onto his would-be new Master should be a slam dunk. It shows off why these women even need to bicker over Yuuki to begin with, and it helps establish Ren as a truly Bad Bitch™ that Yuuki and Ryouka need to watch out for. In execution, though, the whole sequence is a bit of a mess. Outside of one halfway decent cut where Slave Yuuki gets kicked into the side of a mountain, the titular “Rampage” is an almost incomprehensible jumble of needless closeups, jarring cuts, sloppy storyboarding, and an incredibly distracting VFX shadow filter. I was looking forward to seeing what the new studios might do to exploit the parts of Chained Soldier that viewers aren't explicitly meant to be watching one-handed, and I ended up feeling very disappointed.

At the very least, Ren hijacking Yuuki ends up having a pretty good payoff. While Ren simply expects Yuuki's reward to be more head pats, she ends up being made to get on all fours and beg for pets like an attentioned-starved puppy in expensive lingerie. On the one hand, this is the most iffy the show has been with the nonconsensual elements of the whole Reward dynamic, but this is an anime that is based entirely around riffing on the master/slave kink, so it isn't like we haven't been provided our due content warnings. Besides, I honestly have to commend the series for actually squeezing some meaningful characterization out of this shlocky fanservice gimmick. For once, Yuuki desires to be the dominant one while Ren gets to be knocked off her throne after abusing her power to take Yuuki for herself by becoming a simpering little face-licking puppydog. I don't know if it's the sexiest of the Reward scenes, but it's certainly the most interesting.

The rest of the episode is mostly about dealing with the fallout of Ren's humiliation, though we do divert for just long enough to stick poor Himari into a very strange standoff with her mother that gets all sorts of quasi-incestuous. We have nowhere near enough time or space to unpack all of that, but somehow I am convinced that this is a well that we will return to soon enough. When it comes to engineering truly deranged sexcapades that will cross every boundary of taste and common decency, Chained Soldier, like life, always finds a way.

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Chained Soldier Season 2 is currently streaming on HIDIVE.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.