Screw WordPress for going from the “you automatically get to see your text in its rem and can edit it to your liking” back to the “preset font size that you can toggle to be custom though you don’t get to see the default value” thing it had before. I don’t even know when they did the change due to just how infrequently I actually pay attention to that side of the screen, but I guess they saw the good praise I gave them back in July and were like “shoot, we’ve got to reverse that default back to what it was”, or if I was misunderstanding something on my end, but just…augh! 😡
Before I talk about this episode, however, I need to talk about something that I ultimately skipped over in my previous writeup for this series that I think is actually kind of important regarding what I’m hoping comes out of the series. In the previous episode, when the mother cat was hearing the rumors about the dragon in the forest (aka the cat dragon), she was like “that doesn’t sound like my little one”. I feel like this is a subtle but excellent way to highlight nature vs nurture. While she had nurtured the cat dragon to follow a cat-like nature, what she was hearing seemed to suggest more about a dragon nature. With how the cat dragon acted in the end of the previous episode, though, it seems like that nurturing did indeed work.
Anyway, this is the first episode of the series to include two stories in the same episode that aren’t connected…which is surprising considering that we are on episode 8 of 12 for this cour. MAL says that this series is going to be 12 episodes long, at least for this season, which gives me a better image of just how long this anime is going to end up being. Due to this episode being two different stories in one episode, however, I guess I’ll use the heading strat that I’ve been using.
Life in the Castle Town
This episode follows the cat that accompanied the mother cat to the forest in the previous episode and shows us his daily life in the town. Overall, this has been one of, if not the most chill episode in the entire series so far. Really the most serious activity that we got was “our main cat in this section talking to a cat that serves as a chaperone to younger humans” and “main cat thinks that a human is a spy when he isn’t”.
This was a very nice way to open the episode, as it still gets across that this is a story about cats and how they interact with the world.
The Black Cat and the Adventurous Prince
This episode continues the plotline with Kurobane and “Stan” that was started back in Episode 4 of this series.
After having breakfast, Stan decides on two very important things he has to do to become an adventurer: get a proper robe for adventuring and gather medicinal herbs! He gets the robe from a shop that has more lower level gear, though when he goes to try and gather medicinal herbs, he’s told that he needs to attend a class first. He doesn’t mind this, though, and decides that if he has to take a class to become an adventurer, so be it.
At the class, the instructors request Stan’s help to keep the other students safe, and we get to see the proper method for gathering these herbs. With the fact that including the roots when getting the herbs was something that was highlighted to be something to do else you get root monsters, I had genuinely thought that the episode would have one of the students accidentally pull up some herbs without the roots and have that be a conflict. Alas, the only trouble that comes their way is a bird, which Stan shocks down and cuts the head off of.
It felt weird for the root thing to get highlighted and not expanded upon in this episode, but maybe it got highlighted here because Stan runs into this kind of situation later in the story? I don’t know if the series will ever get to adapting the next part, but if we do get it, I’d love to see it!
Overall, I feel like “Life in the Castle Town” was a lot stronger than “The Black Cat and the Adventurous Prince” in terms of the story when it comes to what I can currently see in the anime, but who knows, maybe something later down the line with the Kurobane and Stan plotline actually expands on that roots thing.
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