Joran: The Princess of Snow and Blood

Episode 10

Jin has ostensibly been one of the main characters of Joran: The Princess of Snow and Blood from the very start, yet “Confidential File 089, Star Sign” is the clearest look we've ever gotten at who he truly is as a person. Everything we've seen up to this point, including his attempts at being honest and vulnerable with Sawa in recent weeks, has been obfuscated by how closely to the vest that Joran has played every single element of its story. We've never had enough context to see Jin as anything other than a vague figure of menace and undisclosed truths. Now, though, we see him as a much simpler and more pitiable creature, just as much a victim of Janome and the Shogun's manipulations as Sawa or anyone else.

Here's where I would like to make a bold suggestion: If “Star Sign” was much earlier in the season, maybe around episode four or five, then I think it wouldn't have just made it a lot better – it would have improved the plot of the whole show. My main reason for this becomes clear when you look at how much shocking, twisty information that “Star Sign” delivers, which is to say surprisingly little at all. Sure, we learn a lot of new stuff about Jin and his connection to Sawa, but I don't think any of these revelations benefit much at all from being kept for so late in the game.

Let's break it down: Jin was once merely one of dozens of anonymous civilians that were abducted and tortured for the sake of Janome's immortality research. After stealing a shard of glass from another prisoner who opted to commit suicide rather than endure any more experiments, Jin manages to cut up a whole mess of Janome's crew and escape. This is where he runs into Kotodama, the swordsman who recruits Jin into the order of Nue assassins; he's the one who also teaches Jin the lesson that, friend or foe, everyone will betray you eventually. After this, Jin is ordered to watch over the Karasumori clan, and he ends up bonding with Sawa's kind mother, Towa.

Then, as we learned last week, Jin was ordered to slaughter every last one of the Karasumori before Janome could get to them, and he did, all save for Sawa. Out of some mangled sense of shame and rage at his own captor-benefactors, he saved her in order to train her up to be the killer we all know today. He had no problem cutting down Kotodama to do it, either. Everyone betrays everyone, and all that.

So far as backstories go, this is perfectly fine. It is consistent with Joran's general tone, it explains a lot of Jin's weirdness over Sawa and his duty to the Shogun, and it is just melodramatic enough to entertain even the most jaded of Joran viewers. However, not a single one of those details is particularly game-changing, and it certainly doesn't alter my perspective on events in any radical or exciting way.

This is why I think Joran would have been much better off to have this episode run much earlier in the season, long before Sawa finds out about Jin's deception. It would have made the threat that Janome posed much clearer, for one, and it would give us some much-needed concrete information on what exactly his experiments were that lead to all of these monster people running around. On top of that, I think our connection to Jin and Sawa's relationship would have been much stronger if we knew about its origins upfront and got to stew in the dramatic irony of knowing about Jin's betrayal while Sawa dutifully served him, unaware.

Instead, we've just been left to fumble in the dark along with Sawa, again, and “Star Sign” even goes so far as to end this episode with the exact same scene that capped off the last episode, where Sawa cuts Jin's robes and asks him whether or not he killed her family. Last week, the answer was “Almost certainly yes.” Now it is simply, “Yes.” I guess that's some kind of progress, but with so little time left in Joran's run, I was hoping for something a little more ambitious than this smallest of nudges closer to the finish line.

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Joran: The Princess of Snow and Blood is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

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