Hello and welcome to Anime Rants. The third episode of Hell’s Paradise second season was heavy on exposition and yet was never boring. There was also a spicy scene and an exceptionally powerful, emotional ending scene. My recap and notes explain more.
Content Warning: some images and topics may be NFSW
Episode 3: Immutability and Change
Episode Rating: 8/10
The episode begins with Fuchi seeing the Doshi escape and letting him go. After losing Senta, Fuchi didn’t feel like taking a life. It makes sense especially because Fuchi was aware that the Doshi and similar creatures were partly made from humans. When he returned to the cave where everyone was camping, Fuchi saw that Mei was still weak and suffering. She was covering up with a cloak and seemed to have a fever. Fuchi prepared some medicine for her on the condition that she talked to them about herself and the other Tensen.
It was Sagiri, Fuchi, Yuzuriha, Houko, and Mei in the cave. Everyone else went outside to practice sparring with Gabimaru. Tamiya, Shion, Touma, and Nurugai each attacked, but Gabimaru beat each of them using Tao. Then Gabimaru and Shion talked about how to defeat the Tensen while Touma asked Tamiya to help him get better with the sword. To show his dedication, he cut his own hair. (He looks even cuter with short hair, in my opinion.) Touma doesn’t like Tamiya and neither do I, but he is the stronger and more experienced combatant. I’m glad Touma is learning even if his teacher isn’t great. He needs to be strong to fight alongside his beloved, Choubei.
Meanwhile, Choubei and Rien wasted no time getting started fighting. From Rien’s perspective, Choubei was worth keeping alive because he was such an interesting lifeform. Rien wanted to study him. Choubei used his Tao and transformed into his monster form. He succeeded in killing Rien – or so he thought. The one he killed was just one of many clones of the real Rien. Choubei was outnumbered. The clones quickly captured Choubei and knocked him unconscious. The visuals were beautiful for this sequence. Hell’s Paradise has some fairly brutal fights, but instead of the violence being gross, it is aesthetically pleasing somehow. The battles are so vibrant in this anime.
Choubei woke up later, tied to a mattress in a beautiful greenhouse. To his surprise, Rien was there. Since the Tensen are genderfluid shapeshifters, it’s not that the real Rien was female. The real Rien was both female and male, but they chose a female form for interacting with Choubei. Anyway, Rien was extremely attractive. She wanted to have sex with Choubei… for science. I’m not exactly sure why that struck me as funny. Strictly speaking, Rien wants to feel and analyze Choubei’s Tao by doing naked “Bochu jutsu.” But that literally means “art of the bedchamber,” and it’s clear by the end of the scene that they are having sex. Nice and spicy!
At the same time, Fuchi and company discovered that Mei’s arm had become a woody branch. She was turning into a tree like Houko. She explained that her body was imperfect compared to the other Tensen and that if she ever used her Tao, she would become a tree. That’s not all. We discovered a lot about Mei from what she told Fuchi. First of all, Mei is centuries old and one of the two original disciples of the Taoist hermit who created them. Rien was the other disciple. Together, Mei and Rien learned Tao and helped raise the other five Tensen while doing immortality experiments on the island. But after several centuries, Rien betrayed Mei, cut out her “ovule,” and forced her to drink a potion that made her body regress to that of a child. Mei ran away after that.
I am not sure about the Japanese word used, but “ovule” in English is a part of plant anatomy – the part where the female’s germ cell develops. Presumably then, Tensen do not have fully human reproduction, but something loosely based on plant biology. I suspect that removing an ovule would result in the Tensen losing their Tao or becoming imperfect, as we see with Mei. She can’t be healed with Tao because she doesn’t even have enough Tao circulating inside her. This is a good time to state that we learned that the Tensen were created from a mixture of the hermit’s Tao and plant Tao. They are plant-people who grew from Tao-infused flowers.
While we’re doing exposition, I will also explain what we know about the hermit (AKA the Grandmaster, AKA Jofuku) and the plans of the Tensen. Some of this we heard from Mei and Fuchi, while some of it came from the conversation of Choubei and Rien. Jofuku was actually an emperor a thousand years ago. He took several hundred people with him on a ship and disappeared to study immortality, never to return. We now know that he somehow created Rien and Mei and then the other Tensen. As Fuchi said, it’s likely that Jofuku is still alive somewhere on the island, conducting experiments.
The Tensen study Tao and run experiments for their master in the pursuit of true immortality. Right now, they are in the process of perfecting an immortality potion – the Elixir of Life. The prototype is Tan – a drink made from the Tao of humans consumed by the flowers on the island. Rien’s plan is to make the perfect Tan using the lives of humans from the mainland. She also said that she was allowing Choubei to live so he could witness that. I think that’s most of what we know so far.
(Side Note: I complained at one point that Choubei was dumb, violent and selfish. But his character development is finally getting better and more interesting. We saw a flashback of him as a young child in the dark, grieving the fact that his father never came back. Choubei is determined to not abandon his brother the way they were both abandoned by their deadbeat dad. He also seemed alarmed and concerned by Rien’s plan to kill humans on the mainland. For now, he’s playing along with Rien, but even as he performed “bochu jutsu,” he was thinking and worrying about Touma.)
Fuchi and company were at a loss about how to save Mei from turning into a tree. That’s when Houko offered to give his Tao to Mei to heal her. Tensen are apparently able to steal the Tao of other living beings and make it their own. That’s what they do when they create Tan, after all. Houko explained that he lost his daughter several centuries ago and saw Mei as a substitute. Since she never grew up, they lived together as father and daughter for a few hundred years. Houko felt guilty for seeing his daughter in Mei and he offered his life as an atonement. He apologized for making Mei play along with a fake family. The voice-acting of Houko was amazing in this scene. The emotional music helped too. It was leading up to a highly emotional climax.
With tears streaming down her eyes, Mei said that their family was not fake and they were just like a real father and daughter. Then Mei reluctantly accepted her father’s noble sacrifice and took his Tao. Houko ceased to be, and Mei was healed. (She reverted to her child form, however.) Mei said in a trembling voice-over, “Goodbye, father.” I confess this moment made me teary-eyed. For being a slightly rushed scene, it was extremely well-executed. The episode ends with Shugen and the Iwagakura arriving on the island on their ships. To be continued.
~Thanks for Reading~
Written by 7Mononoke at Anime Rants
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