We've
had a brief introduction. Now it's time to get up close and personal with one
of our bad guys. And I DO mean up close and personal. Meet someone who I like
to call 'Snake Lady', because she... no. I'm not even going to bother explaining
it, it's blatantly obvious, and will become moreso as we go along. But one of
the many advantages of having a goon-ess who is covered in tattoos is that she
never wears clothes, and that's good for keeping the audience awake. Plus, snakes
are highly phallic and can come out of the darndest places!
What
IS it with anime and tentacles, anyway? Have there ever been any ACTUAL tentacled
demons spotted in Japan at any point in history? Is there some precident for
this? It sounds like the kind of hard hitting investigative journalism that
should appears on 'Sightings' or something. "And here we see a blurry photo
of what COULD be a tentacled monstrosity attacking an innocent young woman!
Or it might be someone's auntie with a pair of pruning shears trying to tame
her rosebushes."
I suppose there's a precident in western culture with our bad boy Cthulu. But
Cthulu's too busy doing Elder God kind of things like producing Shuggoths and
lurking in frozen wastelands to spook the main characters afteer 142 pages of
buildup, so I don't quite see him as the type that would seek out some human
nookie. "Dammit, I'm trying to unleash the yawning horrors from dimensions
which are affront to sanity itself. I don't have time for babes." But anyway.
Jubei,
of course, is mesmerized by the hypnotic snakes. Or maybe he's too busy staring
at her two best friends. Regardless, he's just sort of standing there like a
wooden post through a red filter until someone, out of the goodness of their
heart, sinks a four pointed poisoned throwing star into his arm to wake him
up. What courtesy! Jubei makes short work of the snakes, because frankly a bunch
of wriggling worms with teeth aren't much of a match for a wind ninja. If it
wasn't for the hypnotic dangerous curves odds are she'd be sushi way before
this.
Perhaps
in a flash of realization, Snake Lady thought, "Oh, damn. I forgot I'm
basically a wuss with a bunch of pet shop rejects." And so she fled, leaving
behind the suit that guy in Silence of the Lambs was trying to make. I'm beginning
to see a pattern here, which is going to get reaffirmed later on; Jubei rarely
actually KILLS one of the Devils. They tend to get killed in other ways, usually
by their own teammates, or they just run like hell -- which is wise. But notice
none of them actually quit and go work at McSushi or some other less hazardous
occupation, so they can't be that bright.
So,
who does Jubei have to thank for flinging a lethal weapon at him? ...oh, no.
Not again. It's HIM. The little bastard who keeps bogging down the plot with
'intrigue' and 'detail' and 'character development setups'. And what's more,
now he added one of the most classic cliched ways to get the antihero involved,
a 24 hour poison that only he has the antidote to. Yeah, right, like Jubei's
gonna go through the whole movie only to get killed when his time's up. It didn't
work on Snake Pliskin and it won't work now.
Fortunately, Jubei has a certain finesse when dealing with manipulative little
melodramatic twits cramping his style...
I
think this picture basically speaks for itself. But I think I should point out
that odds are before Jubei got there to have a nice soak in the hot spring,
the water was clear...
Let's move on.
...proceed to 'Jubei vs. Lengthy Exposition'
We've
had a brief introduction. Now it's time to get up close and personal with one
of our bad guys. And I DO mean up close and personal. Meet someone who I like
to call 'Snake Lady', because she... no. I'm not even going to bother explaining
it, it's blatantly obvious, and will become moreso as we go along. But one of
the many advantages of having a goon-ess who is covered in tattoos is that she
never wears clothes, and that's good for keeping the audience awake. Plus, snakes
are highly phallic and can come out of the darndest places!
