12 Days of Anime #6: Cry Me A Lake Biwa

This post contains spoilers, so read at your own risk!

 There’s more to Doten ni Warau than beautiful men, Japanese mythical beasts, and dark secrets – there’s also the theme of brothership. Some can also see it as powerful bromance if they also include the majority of the male cast and how close they all seem to one another, but that’s a topic to talk about another day.

I might seem like a broken disk repeating this over and over again, but the first episodes of Donten ni Warau were not impressive at all. I’m not even sure how I lasted until the last episode which will be out this week, or how I managed to like the cast composed of mostly pretty unexciting characters.

Rest assured (in some way), the flaws in Donten ni Warau are only half of the reason why I was highly tempted to quit watching the adventures of the Kumo siblings. The other half was because of a very emotional scene we see at the end of episode six, Tenka Kumo’s execution.

For those who haven’t seen the anime, imagine the only remaining adult of a family, the eldest of the Kumo brothers, be arrested and hanged in the same day under false charges. The true reason behind his execution was because of the obvious danger he could cause to the entire nation as Orochi, but the fact that this was the only known solution to avoid destruction and deaths was heartbreaking.

The scene when the townspeople, along with the Kumo brothers Soramaru and Chutaro, seem about ready to begin a huge coup d’état to save Tenka, the latter –though relatively calm at first- breaks his metal cuffs and rushes to give his two little brothers a last hug and encouraging words before his execution can tug the heart strings of even the most manly of manly men. At least I’d like to believe so, since it’ll make me feel better about sobbing hardly during that scene.

Did I write sobbing? I meant yelling “WRYYYYYYYY,” in front of my computer with tears in my eyes à la ***.