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Utawarerumono: The False Faces
Episode 12

by Jacob Chapman,

How would you rate episode 12 of
Utawarerumono: The False Faces ?
Community score: 3.2

I don't know about you guys, but I'm tired. I'm as tired as Haku on his fluffy throne of twincest, pictured just one furtive glance to your right.

I'm tired of U2warerumono wasting its lovely animation and design aesthetic on the same insanely rote comedy setpieces. I'm tired of the show's handful of good characters getting shoved to the side and diminished to make way for further harem expansion. We've reached the halfway point of Utawarerumono: The False Faces, a show I really wanted to love at the beginning, but more than anything, I'm just tired by it.

So if you guessed that this week would be another three minutes of story stretched to twenty by fanservice and bad jokes, congratulations, you win the booby prize! (And what a wealth of boobies it is...) Following Princess Anju's staged kidnapping, Munechika and Oshutoru cover the little brat's misdeeds by claiming that Haku led the charge to rescue her, earning him an audience with the emperor himself! So apart from those weird snippets of Oshutoru foreshadowing, episode 11 really was surprisingly important for moving the story along, right? Well no, not exactly.

As it turns out, the emperor is that mysterious old human dude that Haku met during his hypnotized dreamwalk back in episode 8. The emperor's servant Honoka is actually Yamato's high priestess, so if Haku recognized her face, he had to have known her (along with Ukon and probably the emperor?) back before he caught amnesia, linking them all directly to the world before the kemonomimi apocalypse. What's my point? Well, if Haku knows Honoka, and Honoka knows the emperor, that means the emperor already knows Haku. If Haku has some all-powerful secret that's ripe for exploitation (and he almost certainly does), the emperor totally knows about it already. My point is that Haku didn't need an excuse to get an audience with the emperor. No, more accurately, Haku himself is the only person who needed an excuse. The whole kidnapping plot is for Haku's benefit. It allows him to come face-to-face with Yamato's sovereign without getting suspicious or questioning why. But we've been given multiple hints by this point that the emperor knows everything about Haku already. If he wanted to see him for his own designs, he could have summoned him at any time, for any number of phony reasons that sounded right to Haku. It's still just padding.

The strings holding this plot together are becoming way too visible to ignore, distracting from the show's lighter iyashikei moments and harem antics even if you're still able to enjoy them. (And that's a big if now that we're rounding off the half dozenth episode of jack-squat happening.) The characters in charge of the big-ball-o'-story-and-secrets are only waiting around for Haku's harem to get properly beefed up before the inevitable war, but that's not a good in-universe reason to do nothing important for this long, it's just convenient for the uninspired writer. The first Utawarerumono series went back and forth between "intense plot progression episode" and "new characters join the team and screw around episode" from the start. In fact, it moved so sharp and fast at some points that it's more common to hear complaints of that series being too fast than too slow. It set expectations that The False Faces just hasn't been able to follow, so we all get to sit on our hands and pretend there's no story yet, while the show just winks knowingly and spoonfeeds us the world's oldest harem mush instead.

Okay, so what does happen in this episode? Well, Haku is rewarded for his valiant princess rescue (or status as the Chosen One, or both) with two slaves! Yup, he gets two belly-dancing twin sisters as literal slaves that he is promptly encouraged to molest. Of course, being the upstanding nerdy harem protagonist, he won't lay a finger on them, but the rest of his merry band of ladies reacts to their presence in pitch-perfect predictable ways from Nekone's disgust to Rurutie's arousal to Kuon's bottled jealous rage. These twins (Uruuru the light and Saraana the dark) are the "Kumanagi of Chains," the most valuable and powerful priestesses (probably light and dark magic users in game terms) in Yamato beneath Honoka, their mother. Of course, that means they also appear to be fully human, bringing the total living human count in U2warerumono up to five times the number of its prequel, but I have other pressing questions about them banging around in my brain. If they're Yamato's most valuable priestesses, what the hell is the emperor thinking just giving them over to some guy who could damage or misplace them? Sure, we know Haku's a good guy, but even if the emperor knows some shocking secret about his origins, I don't think he has enough information to entrust his country's two most sacred ladies to Haku's care! On top of that, they claim to be trained in every discipline possible to please their master, including and especially a range of 108 different sexual favors (to please the Buddha I guess?) that they are very insistent on trying. So does the emperor want Haku to knock them up? How were they "trained" in the sexual arts so thoroughly, and is the answer as creepy and gross as I'm assuming?

Whatever the case, I'm done assigning brain cells to it, so that eventually brings us to the only other thing that happens in this episode: the reveal of another disguised warrior. It turns out the snarky old candy salesman named Sakon that we've seen pop up in various past episodes is Ukon's counterpart. The General of the Left, Mikazuchi, shares Oshutoru's enthusiasm for blending in with the common people on his days off. He reveals this to Haku's group apropos of nothing, has a good laugh at their expense, and invites Ukon over to have a secret identity drunk-off. Apparently, the emperor's left and right hands have been friends for a "really long time," but for whatever reason, I feel like Mikazuchi isn't in on Haku's secret. I could be totally wrong, of course. Right now, he seems like a good-natured soldier with an unspoken violent side, and I look forward to learning more about his personality out of disguise. That might have been a better use of time than an extended gag about the twins sponging hot tea off Haku's crotch, you know?

The one nice thing I can say about this episode, and the only thing keeping it out of that dastardly D-F range, is that it looks totally terrific. U2warerumono has always been an attractive anime, but the series is back in top form this week, on a par with its unusually beautiful and expressive 6th episode. The jokes surrounding them may be lame-to-rotten, but the priestesses' dance moves are divine and the banquet at the tail end of the episode is also filled with pleasant and endearing animation. It remains a surprisingly classy half-hour of anime, if only on a visual level. But it's not going to work this time, U2warerumono. That pretty mask you wear is just a false face, and I'm giving you a time-out next holiday weekend to think about what you've done. The after-credits scene hints at a skirmish with barbarians next week, so if I'm really lucky, maybe I'll have two episodes of excitement to review when I come back to the series in January. Please, Santa? I have been very good this year.

Rating: C-

Utawarerumono: The False Faces is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Hope has been an anime fan since childhood, and likes to chat about cartoons, pop culture, and visual novel dev on Twitter.


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