KYO KARA MAOH-season 3: overall numbers 88 and 89: Conard and Gunter; The Bride Is Anissina?

 

KYO KARA MAOH-season three: overall numbers 88 and 89

 

88-Conrad and Günter

 

Yuri and co. visits the academy where Conrad trained to become a soldier. After Yuri gives a speech which no one really understood, Conrad challenged Günter to a duel where Conrad gives his answer to a question that Günter asked him a long time ago.

 

Okay so this is a really good, touching episode and at least has Yuri in it, even if as a side character giving a speech that Wolfram doesn’t understand. Not sure why but it’s about team work and working as a team and of course, Yuri uses baseball to tell the story. BUT this is really Conrart (and annoyingly the subtitles call him Conrad and Conrart) and Lord Gunter Von Christ (is that HIS name?). The art is nice. I love that Conrad’s mother, the Demon Queen comes to visit him and cares about all her sons.

 

The back story here is welcome, warm and even if predictable, much needed and wanted. It’s nice to see Conrad and Josak though I was hoping we’d see them meet for the first time. Did that ever happen? I like that Conrad tries to cover for Gunter’s loss by blaming Yuri’s intervention when he rushes between them to stop them fighting. A really good episode followed by….a not so good one. BTW, Gisela is his adopted daughter. We also see some heavy violent fighting in the wars Conrad fought in. Who was it that he put a sword into the man’s belly? Whoa.

 

89-The Bride is Anissina!?

It turns out that Anissina's brother has set her up with a suitor for her to marry so she concocts a stupid plan to use poison to put herself and her “lover” or “husband” or boyfriend into a death like coma so that it will make her dopey meddling brother upset so he will stop arranging marriages for her. When Gwendal refuses because he’s been on the receiving end of many of her exploding inventions in the past and has no time to lose because of Yuri’s lack of experience in running a kingdom, everyone tries to get him to change his mind. Dacsascos (was he named after the action hero?) is taken instead but he never goes through with it, good thing as it would have killed him. Gwendal takes Anissina away and the whole thing is never really resolved anyway.

If you're going to do a light hearted episode maybe picking Rmoe and Juliet to model it after is not a good idea.

 

This episode reminds me of a show I loathe: I LOVE LUCY where another redhead usually plots to get her own selfish way regardless of who she hurts and harms and usually her plots fail and it’s never funny. Ever. I don’t know what this episode was trying to be but maybe it was trying to be funny? It’s not. It’s annoying and where the last episode went fast, this episode feels like it takes centuries to just friggin end already. On top of that, Anissina is an annoying self centered stupid coward who won’t just tell her brother enough already!

 

We’re supposed to sympathize with Anissina and feel bad that Gwendal refuses her? I took his side from the start and think her plan is an imbecilic one. It also seems as if she would have killed Das, the nice guard she tried to drag into this. Overall, the main conflict is never resolved as Gwendal just takes her away and we hear in the coming attractions that the wedding never took place. WTF? This is, so far, the worst episode of all three seasons. I don’t care about this female character at all and to focus on her and not on Yuri is a mistake.

 

This episode more than any other, though there are others, totally stopped me from watching the third season when I had copies YEARS ago. It’s just such a departure from the first two seasons, that and now instead of the excellent American dubbed actors, I then had to get used to the original Japanese. I hope the episodes get better than this one and less about back story.

 

This ep was really awful, though, of course the artwork was just fine.