Black Torch Ep.06 - Backstory time! Wait, Ragou's part was sort of...

Episode 6 of Black Torch touches on, after Ichika last week, the other two backstories and sort of completes all the motivations that the characters have to fight in this world. Reiji turns out to want to kill his brother, who got possessed by an ancient sword used in his family. It's the typical plot where the cursed sword possess the holder and force him to kill everyone on sight.

Ragou/Jirou's situation is more complex and intertwined with the main storyline. A mononoke named Amagi (probably the final boss of this story) wanted to build an alliance with Ragou against the humans who were organizing to fight the mononoke on a national scale back in ancient Japan.

Obligatory shot of Ichika, the only grace in these backstory heavy episodes. Everyone must bless our goddess Ichika!

Fuyou continues to be mostly a comedy mascot character, but I don't really dislike her. Hopefully she get more screentime.

Ragou was uninterested in taking any side, so Amagi resorted to the mass murder of the humans who enshrined Ragou as a god. This caused Ragou to go into a rage, destroying the entire mountain and eradicating all the mononoke except for Amagi, who barely survived. This was under Amagi's plan to create a rift impossible to close between mononoke and humans. Ragou, though, put a block on that by sealing himself in the Sessho-seki.

Fast forward to today, Amagi is still alive and he's still plotting something. This something still includes Ragou in his calculations, but I'm not sure how the other two backstories will fit into this. Will they be treated as separate plot threads, or are we going to see Ichika's mother's assailant and Reiji's brother appear as lieutenants of Amagi?

You know, the sort of "mid-boss" that you see to hype up the final battle against the big boss Amagi. Though honestly, I could see Ragou becoming the final boss at some point, you know, himself splitting between cat form and giant monster form? That could work for some closure and letting him live with Jirou.

Now that the motivations are all settled, the next step is to learn about what exactly Amagi's envisioned world is, what his "endgame" of sort is. As far as I understand, mononoke need humans to survive, so he can't just literally destroy them all and move on, can he?

What kind of mononoke Amagi is? Horns tells a lot and yet tells nothing because there's so many mononoke that have horns...

Art from far away degrades quite a bit, animation is still pretty good overall though. I was worried it would degrade quickly, but...

For the rest, same old, same old, I guess. We're at the halfway marker for the series, and while I was never surprised by anything they threw at me, I still look forward to watching it. Be it a bit about looking at Ichika, be it just to unwind watching something straightforward...