Sunday 3 November 2013

Monogatari Second Season - Episode 18

Settle down and make yourself comfortable, as it's story time with Shinobu in this week's episode of Monogatari Second Season.

In short, this instalment is all about Shinobu's past as Kiss-shot Acerola-orion Heart-under-blade, and more specifically her previous visit to Japan.  Having arrived from the Antarctic via a single, mighty leap, her landing in a lake near an area of drought saw her feted as a deity thanks to the rainfall she'd inadvertently caused - a position that she decided to take up for a period of time.


With even an apparition hunter befriending her, it seemed that all was well with Kiss-shot living the life of a god, until the area around her became racked with strange disappearances.  Although there were no signs of apparitions or anything out of the norm in the vicinity, these disappearances accelerated until the entire area under Kiss-shot's influence was wiped out; a point at which the dark nothingness responsible came to take the lives of both this vampire and the apparition hunter.  Having just enough of her wits about her to escape, Kiss-shot reformed the apparition hunter as her first ever minion, only to see him later kill himself.  The darkness which attacked her never appeared to torment her again... until now, it seems.

Well, this was certainly a pretty unique episode of Monogatari, that was nothing more than Shinobu's monologue for the most part.  Yet, somehow, it was still pretty compelling, connecting Kiss-shot's mysterious past to the present in a way that had just enough visual panache and interesting content to keep its head above water.  Whether all of this will prove worthwhile depends upon how the rest of this story arc pans out, of course, making next week's episode all-important in validating the content of this one.

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