Ushio to Tora – 34

Things aren’t quite as bad as last week’s closing events indicated: Asako is safe (for now), Kouhamei is still kickin’, and Tokisaka has brought Kirio back from a past where he learned about the origins and weaknesses of Hakumen no Mono.

Ushio needs to rejoin the battle ASAP, but before that happens he takes a deep plunge not just into the ocean, but into the head and heart of a man named Shagakusa, who led a far worse life than Ushio, eventually becoming the Tora he knows.

This show involves so much inexplicable magic that I didn’t really have a problem with Ushio going back 3,000 years to live Tora’s cursed life through his eyes (instead of drowning or being finished off by Hakumen in the present), but it still seems awfully late in the game to be digging into Tora’s past; not to mention somewhat momentum-killing.

That being said, I felt Tora’s hate and pain build as awful things kept happening, and even when he found happiness in his friend Raama and Raama’s kind and pretty sister, that small surrogate family of his was always bound to be doomed, adding fuel to the fire of hatred within him.

This constant “foregone-conclusion” feeling, combined with paper-thin supporting characters and intentional but still cheap-feeling animation, made it hard to get fully invested. And what’s all this about “hiding in Shagakusa’s mouth?”

Raama’s sister, who tilled the earth and planted seeds so they’d bear fruit, warned Shagakusa that hatred breeds nothing. She wasn’t entirely right, as Shaga’s hatred eventually gives birth to Hakumen, a seed that had been planted in him as an infant when a shooting star fell upon his home and family, leaving only him alive.

There, in Shagakusa’s shoulder, Hakumen fed off of all that hate, until his corporeal body was strong enough to emerge. With the only people he ever loved dead, Shagakusa devoted the rest of his life to tracking down and ending Hakumen, including with the Beast Spear.

Now the spear is in shards in the sea with Ushio, but those shards form wings around him and help him rise to the surface. Now that his own hatred has passed for the time being, and he’s seen how ineffective that kind of tack is against Hakumen, Ushio is ready to return to a battle he now realizes has only begun. Those who love him are still alive, and they’re waiting for him. Hatred won’t work…but hope might.