I was going to talk about how this
episode made me think of A Man with No Name flick, or any number of Westerns,
but I think that’d be redundant. It’s been… what? 60 years, at least,
since THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN and YOJIMBO respectively remade SEVEN SAMURAI and
YOJIMBO? As recently as last year, we saw six shooters get swapped rather
easily with katanas in that Ken Watanabe remake of UNFORGIVEN. To observe that
Westerns share a lot of similarities with jidaigeki/chambara films is to
re-state what’s been obvious for decades.
Hell, the exchange has happened enough
that it might as well be unremarkable, by now. Audiences all over the world
respond quite well to the basic set-up of a stoic and mysterious warrior
wandering into some town and solving the highly personal disputes there (even
though he or she has no personal connection the conflict). That’s the basis of
most super-hero fiction, isn’t it? There’s just something about impersonal
vigilantism that’s fundamentally more interesting than, say, a local sheriff
taking care of problems that’ve been in front of him for years.
Once again, BLADE & SOUL handles a
familiar set-up rather adroitly. To re-state my point, the show gets away with
Alka being a borderline Amnesiac Child Assassin because it makes sure that the
supporting characters - - whose affairs she intervenes in, each week - - have deeply
realized personalities. It really was heartbreaking to see desperation drive this
young brother and sister to ruin.
The show also riffs on another reliable
theme of Westerns and chambara fiction... warriors’ lifestyles are fundamentally
dangerous to normal people. Alka may be felled by this awful spell, but she
still deals with dangerous things every day, and doom awaits any norms who get
too close to her when she’s doing that. This episode even makes that conflict
literal by having the brother start courting his own death - - more or less - -
as soon as he starts playing with Alka’s sword.
I think the show succeeds, in spite of
being a MMO adaptation, because the crew’s probably had all these
same considerations about genre.
Watch “Sword”
and decide for yourself, then read my comments on the previous episode.
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