Claymore 20
August 17th, 2007 by Shirukii
Seems like nothing went right for Claymore this week. Aside from the delays from Eclipse (which they were very quick to respond to and inform) the episode itself wasn’t that great. The dialog was repetitive, nothing major in terms of plot was revealed despite the episode being pure talking, and the animation was worse than usual. But hey, every arc so far has had one really boring episode, I thought The War in the North was going to be spared that fate, but it looks like it was just put off.
And for the manga readers out there, yes, it has been confirmed, Claymore will be deviating from the manga plot, something that has never worked well for shounen in the past, but hopefully it doesn’t turn out to be a complete disaster.
Episode Rating: 7.5/10
Picking up from last episode, Raki has been picked up by Isley and has Priscilla hanging all over him. Isley manages to find him a horse so he can travel along side them, but is interrupted by some travelers who warn them to stay away from Pieta because there is a bunch of claymore gathered there, and where there are claymore there are surely yoma not far off. Hearing this, Raki decides to decline Isley’s invitation to travel with them and head off to Pieta in hopes of finding Clare. Isley begs him to stay with them, for Priscilla’s sake, convincing him by assuring him that Pieta is on their way anyways.
When the three stop to rest for a while, Isley takes the opportunity to question Raki for a bit. Raki tells him that the one he is looking for is indeed a claymore, named Clare, and even though claymore usually don’t make good companions for humans, he wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for her, and this time he wants to repay the favor by protecting her. But Isley questions whether he has the power to protect her, taking Raki’s sword and showing off some moves from his claymore days. Noticing his obvious talent, Raki get Isley to help him improve his swordplay so he can be stronger when they arrive in Pieta.
Meanwhile, back at Pieta, the claymore are a little shaken up from their encounter with the awakened ones. Undine is disgusted by their weakness and heads to the weapons storage warehouse to get away from them. Deneve shows up soon after to find Undine in the back room with her yoki unstable and her normally buff physique reduced to a frail girlish look, shaking uncontrollably and crying. The two talk for a while, Deneve guessing the circumstances that turned her into the person she was today and lamenting at how common such tragedies are in their society. But Deneve can tell that Undine is a good person, one who values the lives of her comrades and will go to great lengths to protect them.
Suddenly, Helen shows up and when Undine is unable to bring herself back to normal just yet, Deneve covers for her until Helen leaves. Even though she’s a good person, Helen can’t keep a secret and knowing that a captain is breaking down would shatter the morale of the other claymore.
Deneve leaves Undine with the story of how she decided to become a claymore, a typical story of a family being attacked by a yoma and a small girl being the sole survivor bent on revenge. But in Deneve’s case, the fear of death when she was becoming a claymore was so strong that she became a defense type, despite her want for revenge. But then she met Helen, who assured her that it’s human instinct to want to survive and there’s nothing wrong with what she was feeling. Which pretty much sums up the feelings of all the claymore after the awakened ones attacked. Fear is nothing to be ashamed of, but it’s not something that you should let control you, and surrounded by so many comrades, they’ll somehow make it through.
Meanwhile, Flora’s interest in Clare is growing. She takes her aside for a talk and asks her about her right arm, noting the similarity to a certain former rank number 2, Flash Sword Irene. When Clare remains silent, Flora readies her stance to pit her windcutter again the famous flash sword, but is interrupted by Jean, who gives her usual “I owe my life to Clare, screw with her and you have to go through me first” speech. Clare gives in and tells Jean and Flora about how she got her right arm and the determination she has to take the head of Priscilla, Flora accepts that as a good reason to fight and raises swords with Clare and Jean, vowing to survive through this war.
Elsewhere, Raki and Isley come back from training and Raki passes out from fatigue. Isley notes how amazing it is that humans can push themselves to their limit yet still accomplish so little. He notices someone off in the distance and leaves Raki and Priscilla cuddling together by the campfire to go speak with him.
He meets up with Ricardo, the commander of Isley’s military, and instructs him to attack Pieta, the front lines of the northern lands of Alphonse, and completely wipe it out, leaving no survivors.
Thoughts
lol, you know you’re in trouble when Miria starts praying for survival
Again, quite a boring episode, but I guess it was a necessary one. A war is about to break out and this episode illustrates the tension that everyone is feeling, sort of a ‘calm before the storm’ type feeling. In my opinion, it didn’t warrant an entire episode of sitting around and worrying but as long as the next episode capitalizes on the build up, I won’t complain.
Not to say the episode didn’t have it’s good points though, the main one being Priscilla. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve always liked characters who act all cute and innocent but in reality have the power to rip your head off at any given moment, and while I don’t like her quite as much as Riful, this side of Priscilla is quite an improvement. I swear it’s not just my lolicon tendencies coming through here >_> …really.
It’s also too bad that Clare and Flora didn’t have a short sparring match. The abilities the two posses are really close in their inherent nature, I’d go as far to say that Flora’s Windcutter is based off the Flash Sword. When the Flash Sword was first described, Helen noted that Irene drew her sword, attacked, and sheathed it before the average person even noticed her move, which is exactly what Flora’s Windcutter is. And if Flora doesn’t end the fight on the first strike, she’ll probably keep her sword out after having drawn it and just move it at blazing fast speeds from then on…which is exactly what the Flash Sword is. I’m not seeing the difference. Which is why I was disappointed when they didn’t clash swords, it might have given some insight on how the two differ, however slight.
Next episode looks like the beginning of the raid on Pieta. The ominous preview made it look like Ricardo took quite an army of awakened ones with him to get the job done. And no matter how much the claymore have improved either individually or as a group, the amount of damage they sustained when taking on three AOs that were just scouts doesn’t bode well for what’s to come.
As for the whole manga vs anime issue. Can any manga readers tell me how much the anime is deviating from the manga at this point? Are they going off in a completely new direction, or are the changes only slight, while the plot as a whole remains largely the same? I’m curious to know because, for one, it’ll give me an idea of how scared i should be for the ending of the Claymore anime, and secondly, whether I can start reading the manga yet.
Manga Countdown: 6 weeks?
~ Shirukii ~
18 Responses to “Claymore 20”
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As you wish….
minor changes:
Raki, Isley and Pris are supposed to be in Isley’s personal mansion, instead of being in the middle of a forest. But otherwise, the dialog is the same.
More glance into the token claymores.
major changes:
In the manga, Raki is within the mansion, so he is totally ignorant of the happenings in Pieta. In the anime, he has an idea what is going on and plans to head there.
Flora is was supposed to have a duel with Claire to test their respective special moves against each other. In the anime, Jean interfered and Claire spilled her sob story to them both. Best friends forever… yay!
In the manga, Claire has told NO ONE yet about her past and her borrowed arm. Not even her half awakened allies. All they know is she has a grudge against a certain nameless woman.
The only reason I can think why they are doing this is:
MAJOR SPOILER
Show ▼
For some reason, I don’t think things are going to go too well for Raki in the anime version. I marathoned this series quick up to this point though, so I definitely think I’ll become a fan of the manga. I’m already planning on picking those up after this is over…..bad end or not :P.
Yeah, Miria starts praying - BAD things are about to happen. ^^;
As for Flash Sword vs. WindCutter - if you will remember, Irene never kept her sword hand on the grip at all when it was sheated, unlike Flora. She literally grabbed the sword, unsheated, slashed, resheated, and put her hand back to its original starting point. Irene’s true speed with slashing was unparallelled. Like Kenshin’s move - the Kuzu Ryu Sen (9 Dragon Strike), its one of those ‘how the hell do you block a multi-directional attack’.
As to why Irene’s slashing was so weak against Teresa when they first squared off, Irene wasn’t going all out, if she did, she would have nailed Chibi Clare by pure accident. That and Teresa figured out that by stopping the blade with her strength rather than out speeding her, that Flash Sword won’t work.
I won’t say that WindCutter is a cheap imitation because to build up your speed to that sort of level is amazing in its own right but Irene was the #2 while Flora’s #8. And as we know, there’s a huge disparity between powers even at the single digit level.
The sword fight with Flora actually happens in the manga(and Clare wins), shame they didn’t do it the anime itself, this might be because of budgetary reasons as the director probably wants to spend his money on good fluid action scenes(imo), he did this in other episodes too, the episodes which actually involved alot of fighting had a good budget while the more talking oriented episodes were less in animation (quite noticeable in “Endless Gravestones Part 1″ and “The Witch’s Maw Part 1″)
Another reason why the fight didn’t happen is that I feel the director places a lot of his attention on single moments which capture the spirit of Claymore as being mature, straight to the point, for example; the arc “The Witch’s Maw” -> in the manga Galatea is awed that Clare is so strong and fast, yet the director doesn’t show Galatea’s facial expressions in the anime, he lets it boil down to the supposed final confrontation at the end of “The Witch’s Maw” when The Dweller of the Deep leaves.((don’t know if you actually understood what I’m trying to say here :) )
Some interesting things which actually happened in the manga but didn’t happen in the anime are ->
- At the end of the episode “Awakening”, Clare leaves the Holy City with Raki with the two guards and the priest waving them off, in the manga the young guard gave Clare a kiss, Raki pushed him for that and then they left town.
- In the episode “The Slashers Part 3″, Miria says she doesn’t know yet what the organisation might be up to, in the manga she actually says she’s discovered a big secret about it but doesn’t want to discuss it with the other Claymores.
- Also in “The Slashers Part 3″, Miria mentions Ophelia as a dangerous woman to the Claymores, in the manga she didn’t mention this at all, she actually forgot to mention this when they already left, she just uttered this to herself.
- At the end of part 3 of The Witch’s Maw arc “The Dweller of the Deep vanishes in to the air, same as in the manga but.. watching from afar are a Claymore and her boss. They discuss what the chances are to destroy that “Dweller of the Deep(Rifu)”
The claymore female says “I could wound her for probably 50% and then I’d die” to which the boss says something about improving her body(if I remember correctly)
These are basically the most important changes up to now, but I feel it’s gonna start changing a lot now :/
I’ve seen the anime like 8+ already by now :)
Ken
This indeed was a slow and boring episode, but I think the director did a pretty good job in showing the intensity of the situation. Even Miria praying to a god she believes do not exist. One quick question to Shirukii:
@shirukii: “it has been confirmed, Claymore will be deviating from the manga plot” where did you hear this confirmation? I’m just curious.
I would guess from the Random Curiosity blog, here’s a link to the post: http://randomc.animeblogger.net/2007/08/15/random-musings-wednesdays-blues/
About the Flora vs. Claire Duel in the manga, after their match Flora says that Show ▼
I can’t say that I am extremely knowledgeable about the series, because I haven’t read any of the manga. One aspect of the flash sword/ wind cutter difference that I haven’t seen discussed is the scene that Clare covers Jean as she uses her special move on Duff. She uses invisible slashes that continue for a half football field. Another difference is the shear velocity of the wind cutter. When Flora shows her power for the first time (in front of all the others) she moves the sword so fast that the ground all around her is cleared of snow. I think this shows the precision that she has with the wind cutter, and gives you a glimpse of just how fast it is.
I’m not an animator of the series or anything, but they seem like quite different moves. I think that Flash Sword Irene probably knew both of them.
“I’m not seeing the difference. Which is why I was disappointed when they didn’t clash swords, it might have given some insight on how the two differ, however slight.” that is the reason y u should read manga after watching the anime.
The anime is deviating from the manga just at some points but the one in this ep is a little big, i cant say it is not important but it doesnt seem change the whole remains largely plot yet.
The different between FS and WC :
+Flash Sword:
-Speed faster
-Strength weaker
-Need to release Yoki to used FS or u can say awaken ur right arm.
+WindCutter:
-Speed slower
-Strength better
-You don’t need to release your Yoki to use WindCutter.
It seem that FS and WC r similar but the fact is both of them r completely different in term of using, controlling and effecting.
Waaah i can’t wait for more claymore ^^ I really want to know if 26 is the confirmed number of episodes… because that means there’s only 6 left o_O
I would have loved to see the battle between flora and clare…
@ Mellow RG: Ah, thanks for the comparisons, though I’ll be avoiding that spoiler =P
@ Totali: Do yourself a favor and wait until you’re sure you want to read it to buy everything, having the volumes sitting besides you increases the temptation ten fold.
Btw, watch for a new post, your comment has entitled you to something.
@ Arakan7: Hmm, true, but that’s a really subtle difference, there must be more to it than that. Claymore is fairly creative with their special techniques, so I’d hope the Windcutter has something unique to it.
@ Ken: Hmm, seems like reading the manga will be quite a bit different when it comes to those subtle changes, which I happen to take note of. And 8+ times =O wow, you’re dedicated haha.
@ shinichi: I lol’d at Miria praying, because all I could think was “Oh man, they’re sooooo screwed”
As for the news that the anime would be deviating. The news was posted on 4chan along with a link to the anime magazine article that confirmed it ( a link which I did not save)
@ Za_Paper: Hmm, I actually rarely read randomc XD Only when I need to fill in things I miss when I watch anime raw.
@ Daniel: Yea, looks like the Windcutter is slightly stronger in power and accuracy and Flash Sword wins out in speed.
@ Siva: Ah, pretty much exactly what I said to Daniel, heh.
@ mi: Yep, only 26 episodes, there’s room for another season, assuming they leave this one open enough to continue.
And yea, it would have been nice to see those two face off.
I enjoyed this episode.
It kinda feels like, “Know the characters more before killing them off.” I wasn’t reading some of the comments above. I’m paranoid even they’re pseudo-spoilers. XD
But I will read the manga after the anime.
Sorry, I was too late making a comment in the last post, but, speaking of dropped series, are you going to do reviews on the second season of “Higurashi”? I mean, they are already on their seventh episode now.
@ SHiN_aKuMa: I fear for how many claymore will actually survive this whole ordeal. It would be awesome to have Clare as the sole survivor and go GAR on us through all the suffering and loss…but that’s just wishful thinking, and I kind of want Miria and Flora to survive >_>
@ ItAintEazy: I probably won’t be reviewing Higurashi, no. For one, I haven’t watched anything past episode one yet, put off by the intensely slow pacing and the lack of Hanyuu (auauauauau~). If anything, Soda will blog it, but Soda is lazy, so I wouldn’t expect much. Sorry =(
@Shirukii: “It would be awesome to have Clare as the sole survivor and go GAR on us through all the suffering and loss” it would be cool if that happen. The manga had a different ending to the arc, but anyway, since the anime apparently taking a different route, there is no guarantee that your prediction is inaccurate. Anything can happen now, I can’t wait to the next episode.
@Shirukii:
Oh, if episode one is all that’s keeping you from watching the series, then you are really missing out ;^)
@ shinichi: With the anime deviating from the manga, it seems that everyone is more anxious to see the next episode, now that it’s not certain what will happen. Anything is possible!
@ ItAintEazy: Oh I’ll watch it eventually, no doubt about that. I just hit a snag with that first episode that I’m having trouble getting over.
Oops, bad assumption on my part. ^^;;
But it is really disappointing that anime will have an original ending. Especially when the anime has been faithful to the manga all along and adding an ending now doesn’t fit with story development and feels just tacked on at the 11th hour.
Based the ep summaries from Newtype, I’m guessing that the anime will mostly follow the manga’s storyline (but with added Raki and Priscilla scenes) through the next 2 eps and completely deviate from the manga at ep 23.
I was really looking forward to the having “Cognates of Paradise” (last “Part 1″ story arc of the Claymore manga) animated. Especially seeing:
-The major battle between Show ▼
-The appearance of the Organization’s “Darkest Secret(s)” Show ▼
-And the reappearances of Show ▼
I wonder how much of that (if any) will end up in the final eps of the anime. (T_T)
probably all of u already thought about this ,but do you guyz think the because of the numebr 47 is actually linked to the famous japanese tale of the 47 Ronin? where actually the 47th was the strongest…