The Ancient Magus' Bride Season 2

Episode 16

Samhain (Halloween for you Christians in the audience) might be over in AMB, but it's still airing right in the middle of the season of ghosts and ghoulies. So it's only fitting for our favorite characters to be creeping through the College's halls, telling scary stories, and getting up to mischief in the dead of night. Yet it's not the spirits or the dark of night that wait to horrify us, but the all-too-mundane and human damage hiding beneath the surface.

The whole "Test of Courage" thing is a pretty fun setup. It's funny to see Violet, an English teenager, trying to hastily transplant a distinctly Japanese custom and getting it about half right, with dollar-store Halloween stamps and seemingly made-up ghost stories to re-contextualize the enchanted landmarks around the college. I especially love that the whole thing caps off with everyone watching a schlocky B-movie together, a quintessential teenage experience, before ending on a surprise ghost reveal that's immediately undercut by the totally nonplussed teachers. Like, yeah, the College is also haunted. We've got a formless shadow man who wears a dog skull on his head and teaches you all magic. Keep up, chumps.

The more meaty reason it works is that it gives our large cast a chance to interact in personal, intimate moments that continue to reveal more about them and the world they've grown up in. I especially love Violet's heart-to-heart with Rian. While he's merely trying to give Rian perspective on why Philomela doesn't respond to his challenges, Violet and Jasmine's familial situation is grounded in real-world expectations of gender conformity rather than the more abstract magical ones in Philomela or Lucy's backstories. Nothing we've seen about AMB's world suggests that Violet preferring dresses and skirts would make him any less competent at magic, yet that's enough for his parents to softly push him out of the line of succession, grooming Jasmine into a more traditionally masculine presentation so she'll look the part of a "proper" heir. Even for something so superficial and meaningless to either character's ability to carry on the family legacy, any deviation must be passive-aggressively nudged out of sight.

In the grand scheme of things, it's a far less dramatic or dangerous set of circumstances, yet it's another example of how their families' restrictive traditions and demands have caged these kids in. At the same time, it re-contextualizes everything we've seen from the twins before, as a brother who wants to be himself, even as his parents force his sister into taking on the role he's rejected. Isaac gets a bit of fleshing out himself, even if he still doesn't have a face, and it's sweet to see him trying to smooth things over with Philomela and offer her an opportunity to vent. He may not know exactly what she's going through, but he can empathize with her repression – and getting fed up with Rian being a blockhead – enough to offer her a hand even if she's not at a point where she can accept that advice or sympathy, it still means a great deal. While they may or may not play into the larger story down the line, each individual adds a critical perspective to the history and culture looming over the entire arc.

The pairing I was most excited to see explored (no, not like that...well okay, maybe a little like that) was Chise and Veronica. Throughout this entire second season, one of the biggest mysteries weighing on my mind is just what the hell Veronica's deal is. Between her unbreakable poker face and Reina Ueda's perfectly enigmatic performance, figuring out what's going on in this girl's head, especially with her proximity to Philomela, has been like trying to ice fish with your bare hands. So, finally getting (some) answers was by far the most satisfying and fascinating part of this episode.

In contrast to her peers' constant struggle beneath their families' restrictive traditions, Veronica seems happy to thrive within that environment. She sees an attempted assassination as proof that she's capable and important enough to be a threat, as if it were an extra gold star on a homework assignment. She's so comfortable with the hierarchy of their families that even as a kid, she would casually order around Lizbeth, by far the most intimidating character in this arc. Even her taking on Philomela as her guard is borne from a twisted sense of sympathy, acknowledging the girl's suffering but never even considering the possibility of freeing her from it. Right now, she doesn't seem inclined to reinforce those strictures like Lizbeth, but she's accepted and internalized them as a fact of life. They all live within a cage, and while others struggle with the lock or sulk in the corners, Veronica is happy to make her perch as comfortable as possible.

It's a fascinating foil to the other kids, establishing Veronica as an almost passive preservation of the toxic status quo of their families. It's always hard to tell with her, but my read is that she honestly doesn't understand what Chise is trying to do by reaching out to Philomela and assumes our heroine doesn't understand the unbreakable rules of legacy. Of course, even that could be too generous on my part because it's so goddamn hard to intuit the character's intentions here. Is she telling this to Chise as a polite warning? A threat? A simple statement of fact? Hell if I know, but that ambiguity makes Veronica fascinating as we learn more about her.

It's great and so engrossing that I'm honestly sad that we look to advance the plot in the next episode. Much as I'm excited to see the werewolf assassin return and to figure out more about the magical ailment afflicting the school, these episodes exploring the cast have been massively compelling. I hope we can return to this dynamic soon.

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The Ancient Magus' Bride is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.