Summary:
Lawrence is flirting with Horo and getting excited at the thought of all the profit he will make from buying goods at half price from the dishonest Ratpearon merchant in episode 8. Unfortunately, it turns out that buying a ton of useless armor and HD DVD players at half price (on credit) wasn’t a great investment, and the Ratpearon Company quickly sold Lawrence’s debt to the Remerio company. Now Lawrence has to come up with 47.75 Rumione in 2 days to clear his name. The armor he has is practically worthless due to a pricing drop, and things look bleak.
Lawrence spends most of the first day going to the big merchant stores and trying to eek out a small loan from a large number of people. Unfortunately, they all turn him away and one guy even tosses water on him. Wouldn’t you know it, but all the usurers are so ronery that the sight of Lawrence begging for money to waste on his loli-wolf-girl drives them into a stubborn rage. Lawrence is so upset that he starts to take it out on Horo, and says he wishes he never met her.
Reaction:
Wow, in this episode Lawrence sucked. The decision to buy armor ran counter to everything he had been talking about before. He knew nothing about the product (unlike the peppers) and the armor is troublesome to transport. I guess his greed got the better of him, and now it looks like he’s screwed. It’s true that Horo indirectly put him in this situation, but she didn’t tell him to go into debt to buy a worthless product. If only he had taken the payoff in cash, he wouldn’t be in such a predicament! I can already see this story appearing in a Harvard Business School case study.
Anyway, Lawrence will probably have to come up with some dangerous trade in order to settle his debt before the mafia comes and busts his kneecaps. Since they kept harping on how great it was that Nora could take that shortcut through the spooky forest, perhaps there is some town full of n00b knights that have no armor and are willing to pay top price. All in all though, this episode was quite boring and the production values were worse than usual.
This post was written by...
Kabitzin – who has written 1971 posts on Sea Slugs! Anime Blog.
One of the founders of Sea Slugs, I handle most of the blog admin tasks while wearing my I AM BOSS shirt. I like my action series well choreographed, and my romance series extra trashy. I also have a soft spot for puns.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
‘n00b knights’ is about it; what Lawrence needs is a tutorial city full of lvl.1 characters.
I’m not sure why I keep watching this show. It might be habit.
I’m kind of the same way. There is little about this show that seem interesting.
Even as someone who has some knowledge of economics, some of the stuff that goes on in this show confounds me (I completely missed what happened when he bought the armor, for example. I heard something about going into temporary debt, but I didn’t really understand what happened. And if I didn’t, are most people going to?)
Yet I still watch it. Maybe I’m expecting it to get interesting eventually, I don’t know. Maybe I’m using it to fill my anime watching quota since I axed True Tears and Shigofumi due to them being licensed.
What happened is that because the Ratpearon guy tried to cheat Lawrence and got caught, Lawrence made the cheater offer a really good deal. The deal was that Lawrence would buy up a ton of armor at half price and even get a loan for this purpose. The idea was that Lawrence would then sell the armor at regular price and make over 50% profit on each armor set sold (normal profit + 50% discount). The loan was meant to be short-term so that he could buy more sets of armor since the profit margins are so good.
I guess the idea behind picking armor to sell was that the Ratpearon guy had to sell all goods at 50% off to Lawrence, and so Lawrence picked the most expensive things that the Ratpearon guy had.
I think I only keep watching this show because it is so close to the end. I don’t see any way for Lawrence and Horo to make it up North and have meaningful story resolution in 3 episodes though (actually only 2, since at least 1 eps. will be getting Lawrence out of debt).
I thought this episode was good, guess I like the show in general a little more than you (and apparently, others) do.
I hold out hope for a sweet caper or scheme to get Lawrence out of debt.
Two things I agree about 100%: Lawrence was not uncharacteristically dumb with his massive armor-on-credit deal, and that’s why he’s in this mess. And you’re definitely right about the production values continuing to drop… not that they were fantastic to begin with.
i’m waiting for som fox action. it’s long overdue. i know i would pull her tail hard..