The Warrior Princess and the Barbaric King

Episode 6

I was really hoping that I was overthinking this show's treatment of women last week, but that doesn't seem to be the case. The tentacles enveloping Malcius – the main point I thought I might be overthinking – turned out to be every bit as tentacular as other similar creatures in more prurient anime. That's an obnoxious way of saying that rather than just immobilizing her, they strip her and spend plenty of time wrapping around her breasts while she shrieks and drools. Yes, it's an evil being, and yes, Malcius summoned it by sucking life from the forest around her with her reckless use of magic, but this is a bit much. And to have it followed up with a rehash of the “oh, these silly western women who think we're going to rape them” gag is just insult to injury. It's also striking that we now have two Illdoran women who preferred a life of “barbarian” domesticity to being knights, although I'm not sure how well that holds up with Wysterisia. Still, her drive to get Sera and Veor married (or at least having sex) seems to indicate that she's embracing a more traditional path where marriage and children are tantamount.

Credit where it's due, Wysterisia's groping of Sera's breasts is called out as harassment, which is not something I was expecting after everything else. All too often, woman-on-woman groping is played off for laughs, as if one woman can't sexually harass another. (Compare this to the persistent fear of man-on-man groping that pops up in the “gay for you only” trope in BL if you want to get really annoyed.) But Veor calls his mom out the minute he arrives, forcing her to stop what she's doing, which feels like a breath of fresh air. Is it good that the groping happened in the first place? Absolutely not, but at least it got called what it is.

This is actually a very boobful episode in some kind of weird ways. There's the aforementioned groping by both Veor's mom and the tentacle Fiend, but there's also Malcius freaking out over Sera showing some cleavage (complete with lingering shot of it) and, more bizarrely, the Fiend's core, which is a half-skeletal woman with eyeballs where her breasts should be. Creature design aside, the revelation that the Fiend is powered by what looks like a partially decomposed angel is the most interesting bit of plot this week. Given the other uses of Christian-style symbols in the show – Malcius' nun outfit, saints, and some other things – I can't think that the core's design is just because someone liked ladies with wings. Malcius seems at least a little corrupt, possibly courtesy of her church (her flashback seems to both blame them for her parents' deaths and credit them with raising her), so it's not outside the realm of possibility that this particular faith has been misused or corrupted over the centuries. Was the Fiend once an angel who was corrupted? What does that say about Illdoran's crusade against the so-called barbarians?

Veor's final words this week indicate that we're going to start getting some answers. That's not a guarantee that the “west bad, east good” elements are going to get any more subtle, because as I've said before, that's really not this series' strong suit. But the world building is interesting when it's allowed to shine through; even Wysterisia's description of how the cultures have changed since they began intermingling seems well thought out and like a natural result of social change. I just wish the story would give its female characters the same care.

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P.S. – We all knew Wysterisia was going to be alive and be Veor's mom, right?

Warrior Princess and the Barbaric King is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.