Summary:
Horo finds that Lawrence got ganked, and she is pretty angry. She just had to prostrate in front of the other wolf to avoid fighting, and now she finds Lawrence got himself humiliated as well. Horo wants to bite Remerio’s head off, but Lawrence offers to buy her some honey peaches if she keeps the casualties down. With that, Horo owns the band of thugs, and Nora smartly keeps Enik from getting involved.
Lawrence tracks down Remerio and comes up with another complicated scheme. Basically what it boils down to is that Lawrence lends Remerio a big chunk of the smuggled gold in a loan with kinda crappy terms whereby Remerio has to pay back 500 Rumione over 10 years. The contract is made out to the Rowan Trading Guild so that Remerio won’t be able to weasel out, but at least Remerio can rebuild his company.
Reaction:
Was burning the ropes off really the best decision? Couldn’t Lawrence have just used his knife? I have no faith in Lawrence as a merchant, and all the money he makes is in get-rich-quick schemes. At least he was cute in teasing Horo about calling her name because it is shorter than Nora’s. The trick of maybe-calling her name when the clock tower struck was somewhat humorous as well.
The fight with Horo and the thugs was dumb, because it’s not like Enik could cover enough ground to intercept Horo anyway. At least Lawrence was able to get all up on Horo without shying away from her wolf form. She should have drank some more of his blood instead of eating the wheat, though. Overall this episode was ok, but nothing special. It’s hard to believe so little happened in this series, aside from boring economics lectures from Lawrence, and silly schemes that didn’t work out.
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This post was written by...
Kabitzin – who has written 1940 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.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Really wanted this series to end better. It didn’t even really make me angry, or make me hate it. Just petered out.
They were cute together, and I’m glad they didn’t “get together” or something like that, but for a guy with a ton of lectures about what made a great merchant, Larry turned out to be a crap merchant.
That was one of my major problems with him; he talked so much jazz that I expected him to be owning people up with his haggling skills. Instead, he took dumb risks trying to hit a home run. I was way more impressed with the way Horo did things.
I kept getting the impression that Lawrence was so smitten with Horo that anytime she was around him, his skill as a merchant became utter crap (trying to impress her, or just concerned about how he acts around her in general). That became obvious to me a couple episodes before this one when he idiotically let her tag along as he desperately hunted for loans, to disastrous results.
Still, Lawrence is obviously shown to not be as good as he thinks he is.. at the very least he plain sucks at reading Horo. It’s more likely that he’s just too sentimental, helping people in far-off villages out when he should be gathering information about world events and such. I just can’t accept that they intend him to be the idiot everyone makes him out to be. I mean, he’s 25, and if he was this bad as a merchant in those days he’d be long dead.
I think it’s just inexperienced writing – too subtle and too wordy where it shouldn’t be (I tire of the exposition about bartering, when it is clearly meant to be a vehicle about other things and not a history lesson). This isn’t really an anime where the reader is meant to draw their own conclusions about the metaphysical or something, like Mushishi.
This is basically a painfully realistic shoujo about how difficult it is to overcome the debilitating effects of prolonged isolation and loneliness, when you are so far gone you might not want to give up basic companionship for romance. Which, frankly, is so far removed from most modern romance stories that I am probably kinder to the writing than I ought to be.