11/21/2023 0 Comments God eater anime aragamiGod Eater isn’t getting a whole lot of love these days, but my hope is that it can bring some fans back in by being the best action series of the summer and maybe even the year, so long as it’s firing on all cylinders. With another week without an episode, it’ll be hard for the series to keep up its momentum amongst fans, but I’m crossing my fingers that it returns with the excellent pacing of “An Eye for an Eye” and can continue to tell stories this engaging, rather than ones that are mired in the less interesting aspects of this dystopian universe. God Eater has been admittedly hit or miss over its five episode run so far. I love anime, but I don’t get that feeling too much these days with even my most favorite shows, so the fact that God Eater pulls it off without being over the top and ridiculous, wins points for me. The ending of the episode couldn’t be more perfect in its purely cinematic underpinnings, encouraging us to devour the next episode as soon as the credits roll on this one, just to see what happens next. The consistent unease of “An Eye for an Eye”, speaks to God Eater‘s newfound capability with pacing, causing us to worry quietly about the population information from the beginning of the episode, and to be slowly drawn further and further in by escalating circumstances. That said, things never get too dramatic, and this episode’s revelations mixed with its sheer brutality and shockingly aggressive fight scenes, leaves the audience on edge throughout. To say that the revelation of the last few minutes here makes the overall episode that much more tragic, would be doing a disservice to the dramatic flare that God Eater implores when it wants to. There’s something to be said for “An Eye for an Eye”‘s back story, which we don’t get until the last few minutes of the episode, but which finally delivers a definitive answer to the question of the origins of the Aragami. God Eater has been best so far when its stakes have been ramped up mercilessly, and “An Eye for an Eye” has to be the greatest example of that yet. Survivors are wiped out by the swipe of a monstrous Aragami’s paw, Alisa loses nearly all her luster from the third episode and the elder statesman of the god eater set are few and far between. It’s this dichotomy which exists between the weak survivors view point–the god eaters as saviors–and the reality of the situation–the god eaters as amateurs–that creates the most frightening element within God Eater the complete loss of hope. Lenka and crew willfully throw themselves into fights with several Aragami, but they are–for the most part–still babies, not yet ready for the unsurmountable task at hand. Many of the down trodden and hunted human beings that Lenka and crew come into contact with, feel as if they have finally found the answer to their problems when the god eaters show up. Scene after scene reinforces the idea of the god eaters existing as a source for hope for the common man. This ideology is at the center of God Eater‘s reverence for the young and the strong of heart, whether they have the adequate skill to go along with that or not. Of course, the larger the Aragami, the bigger the core and the bigger the core, the quicker the development, leading to Lenka, Alisa and Kota deciding to put their own lives on the line in hopes of speeding up the development process. This core is then utilized in the weapons building process as a vital part of the raw resources needed for development. If you’ll recall, the mythos of God Eater tells us that the god eaters themselves have to extract the core of an Aragami after a victory against one of the creatures. While this is noble for the desire that the god eaters have to rescue the world, they may be getting over their heads. This leads Lenka and his cohorts to push Sakuya–their sub-leader, if you’ll recall–to okay orders for the group of young god eaters to go after the bigger fish in the Aragami sea, in order to speed up the weapon building process. Basically, it doesn’t look so hot for the future of mankind. The episode starts out with Lenka coming to his own realizations about the Far East Branch’s bloated time table for weapon creation, versus the quickly dwindling numbers of humans throughout the world. God Eater‘s fifth episode, “An Eye for an Eye”, deals heavily in dwindling numbers and the relative ease by which human lives can be taken by the Aragami. With its fifth installment, God Eater proves that the wait of a few weeks ago was more than worth it, as the show–now more brutal and well-crafted than ever–finally feels like it has a reason for existing beyond just looking cool. That episode was actually a good watch, just not “two-week wait” good. It was two or three weeks ago now that God Eater had a break in its episodes, leaving many people disappointed when episode four was finally released and thought to be lackluster.
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