Shadows House S1E13: "For the Sake of the Shadows Family"

The ending of the abduction plot is a bit anticlimactic, all things considered. It leaves some new doors opened for the plot to progress in novel directions, but they're sort of oblique directions from the focus of the arc itself. The lack of consequences for the seemingly high-stakes incident feels unsatisfying, in a way that I would think was deliberate, with the momentum being deferred rather than simply dropped...except that I now know that this entire plotline was invented to pad out the anime.

So, yeah. There will not be any consequences for any of this. And, most likely, there will be another arc adapted from the manga in the next season that covers most of the same ground, and it'll be weird and wtf how none of the characters get deja vu.

Sigh...oh well.

The episode starts with Edward overpowering Kate and tying her to another chair next to Emilico's. The flash forwards make it unclear if Kate tried to put up a serious fight or not, but given how untouched and undisturbed Edward looks after she's bound I can infer that it didn't amount to much if she did.

For now, Edward just kinda bullies them. Asking questions he knows Kate has no incentive to answer truthfully while gloating about how he's going to drag her to the Lord Grandfather with proof of her transgressions come dawn.

Kate does a good job of playing things off the same way Emilico did. Acting innocent, in a way that makes her sincerity unclear even to the audience. Once again, Edward seems to be asking the wrong questions. He asks her what she's planning, but for all we know she actually isn't planning anything at all yet. We know she wants to take down the Lord Grandfather, but we have no idea if she has anything approaching a plan yet. She might well still be at the stage of "my plan is to try and come up with a plan."

Once again, he fails to ask her what information she possesses that she knows she isn't supposed to have. Or for details about any subversive actions she might have already taken (or at least, any that can't plausibly be answered with "I was just trying to survive your bullshit"). Meanwhile, the way he flexes on these two literal children and puffs himself up over how he's defeated them is just incredibly pathetic, in a very telling way.

...

To give this anime-only tangent some credit, and generously assume that the creators were communicating with the mangaka...

I strongly suspect that, thematically, Edward is a sort of a minime for the Lord Grandfather. Like, we're being shown a weaker, pettier, easier-to-see-through version of the big bad as a kind of foreshadowing.

And it does fit. The Shadows Family having this obsession with the appearance of power and security, while knowing full well how precarious their operation actually is. Making the drugged peasants and mindwiped children sing their praises (literally singing their praises, in some cases, as we saw with the cleaning song), even though they know that being praised by someone you've literally drugged to love you is a pretty meaningless accomplishment. Much like an adult in an administrative position performatively flexing on a couple of kids who are already under his authority.

So, with that in mind: Edward is obsessed with improving his status. In both spoken and internal monologues, his primary motivation in exposing this suspected conspiracy against the Lord Grandfather isn't fear of the conspiracy succeeding and endangering his clan. It's a desire to gain recognition and status from the other shadows by being seen to neutralize a threat, and to weaken those within the Lord Grandfather's inner circle who he suspects are involved in this. All ego and insecurity, very little pragmatism, heavily skewed priorities.

Assuming that the Lord Grandfather is indeed an artificially evolved morph like his underlings (which may or may not be the case; he does look a bit different from the others), then he must have had creators of his own. Is he trying to earn recognition and respect from them? Prove himself the superior to other creations of theirs? Or maybe it's a more basic Frankenstein type situation, and he just wants to Show Them All.

He's not the first shadowy magi-construct patriarch in anime to have this set of motivations, if I'm right.

...

Amusingly, Kate asks him what the hell he's even planning to accuse her of, when she only disguised herself and snuck in here because he literally kidnapped her Face, ie her most valuable possession. He just says that it's going to be her word against his, and he's a respected second-floor adult, so nya nya.

-___-

This guy has really not thought things through lmao.

Meanwhile, John has decided to go ahead and infiltrate deeper into the adults' wing himself since Kate and Emilico are taking so long. Since he's disguised as a veiled doll, and they typically don't move in pairs, he's left Shaun behind him for the time being. This is a strange and new experience for both of them. Not *totally* strange or *totally* new, on account of the cleaning shifts and the recent debut challenge, but still, something they're both getting used to.

Most interestingly, there's one moment where John seems to be trying to get himself to self-identify as "I" rather than the third person "John." First time we've seen a shadow of any age do that.

Anyway, while stumbling around looking for signs of Kate, that bowtie-wearing morph that we saw trailing Kate earlier approaches him.

He has no idea what a morph is, despite having been one himself a matter of months ago. But, despite his dislike of the eerie little phantom, it does help him avoid getting caught by Edward's allies as they patrol the floor. And also helps goad him in the correct direction to find Edward's quarters.

After doing this, the bowtie-morph slips into Edward's room, gets Kate's attention, and helps her and Emilico stage an escape. It seems to notice that Kate has used her extending soot-threads to surreptitiously loosen her and Emilico's bonds, and positions itself near the ceiling to prepare a dive-bombing attack while she slips another thread around a nearby teacup of Edward's.

On Kate's mark, Kate and Emilico break free at once, Kate flings the tea into Edward's face, and then the morph divebombs him while he's sputtering and pulls a towel over his face. The effect being that he's blinded and stumbling around for the few precious seconds that the girls need to flee his quarters. The morph, for its part, slips away before he can even see what attacked him.

Also, Emilico has the exact opposite response from John's to seeing a morph in its near-natural state.

Saw it coming, of course, but it still made me smile.

They meet up with John, but the three of them are quickly chased down by Edward and his pair of cronies. Eventually, the children are chased up onto a tower balcony and cornered. Very impressively vertigo-inducing parallax animation for the tower scene, when we see the mist melt under the dawning sun and revealing how high up they actually are.

I don't usually get vertigo from animated heights. This scene is one of a single-digit number of exceptions.

They end up escaping with a combination of John's explosion powers and Kate's soot-wings. The blast isn't able to do more than stun the adult shadows for a moment (it probably didn't help that they knew he could do that and were doubtless expecting it), but it does provide a shockwave for Kate's wings to catch, allowing her to bear Emilico's weight much further than she otherwise could. They are therefore able to make it to a patio just outside of the children's wing, where Patrick, Ricky, and Shaun are considerate enough to help them cushion their final fall after Kate's wings give out.

As for John, erm...the way he supposedly escapes being surrounded by hostile adults who have only been momentarily stunned doesn't really make sense to me, but I guess what's important is that he gets away somehow.

The reunion of the other five is actually an important character moment for Patrick and Ricky. Ricky being legitimately torn up at the prospect of Emilico not making it back home okay, after her behavior in the debut. Patrick considering the relationship between Kate and Emilico, and thinking about how important his own "face" really is to himself as a person rather than as property.

The (anti)climax of the arc starts when Edward catches up to them at the children's wing and crows about how he's got them now, they're all destined for liquidation now, it doesn't matter what they say or do, its his word against theirs, etc etc. I'm not sure if he actually would be able to get the Lord Grandfather to discard 3/4ths of the surviving debutants of this batch purely on his say-so, and - as is often the case with Edward - he sounds as much like he's trying to reassure himself as much as he's gloating at the kids. In any case, it turns out that Louise and Lou didn't actually retire for the night; rather, they went to Kitchen Kapo and told her that Edward is going insane and attacking kids. She, in turn, went and got some other prefects and lower-management shadows, and they were watching from the shadows while Edward got baited into giving his deranged villain speech.

Edward's authority might exceed that of any other individual present, but his word most definitely doesn't outweigh all of theirs.

But...the reason why it's anticlimactic is because of what actually happens as a result of this, which is "not much." Either for good, or for ill. Which feels, like I said, like the consequences have been put on ice rather than playing out.

Edward and his two cronies are sent to the Lord Grandfather for judgement. Some of the other senior shadows (particularly, the ones who Edward rightly or wrongly suspects of being behind Kate) want Edward banished and his accomplices punished harshly.

The Shadows punish adult offenders by banishment? Interesting. And surprising, given how much they seem to value their secrecy and security. Maybe "banishment" is a euphemism, but I won't make assumptions just yet.

In any case, though, the Lord Grandfather himself countermands this judgement.

Edward's outside-the-box thinking and willingness to take risks with the handling of the children is what earned him his recent promotion. It also, the Lord Grandfather reasons, should earn him some leniency in misdeeds concerning the children's treatment. He wants to see if Edward's methods continue to yield more powerful debutants, and would like to keep the man himself around to continue refining them.

However, he also makes it clear that Edward went way too far with his freewheeling methods this time, and that he is on very thin ice. One more incident like this, and Edward is in deep shit.

From the wording, it's unclear if Edward is going to keep his administrative position over the children's wing or not. He and his buddies *aren't* being busted back down to the first floor, that much is clear. However, I'm not sure if Edward is still running the kids' wing on probationary terms, or if his role is being reduced to just a debut ceremony specialist.

Either way, like I said, there weren't really any major consequences or changes to the status quo because of this plot. Even if Edward has lost some power over the debutants, he still has a decent amount of it. On the other side, Edward wasn't able to inflict any real damage, he didn't get away with it, and the Lord Grandfather's judgement means that his threat isn't going to keep escalating, so it wasn't even a partial villain victory either. Nobody got hurt or killed or learned any big secrets.

And, nobody could. Because this is filler.

-___-

Now, it still managed to not be a TOTAL waste of time, to be fair. Some new potential doors were opened for the plot, probably (I would assume) adapted from more oblique introductions in the manga.

First of all, Louise demonstrating the kind of tactical thinking and political calculation that she did could mean any number of things. It really depends on which side she ends up falling on; her interests aligned with the other debutant's in this situation, due to their common hatred of Edward, but there's no telling if they will continue to do so given her Golden Child status and seemingly uncritical worldview. She could be a key player in overthrowing the LG, or a highly dangerous enemy who already has some social hooks in the protagonists. Now that their "batch" is post-debut and allowed freedom of mobility through most of the house, we'll be able to see how she engages with them and their elders.

The fact that Lou is un-brainwashed along with the other faces now will hopefully be a saving grace. While I'm almost sure that the anime had the process be much easier than it was in the manga version, it may still be that the motif of each successive deprogramming seeming to ride the momentum of the previous ones is true to the author's plans. And, if so, it does suggest that the combined influence of her broodmates and face might be enough to turn Louise.

The other new thread, of course, is the one pulled by that mysterious bowtie-wearing morph that behaved in such an uncharacteristically proactive, non-mimic-y manner. In the episode's denouement, we see that morph return to a human girl imprisoned in the dungeons, where it takes the form of a ring to hide on her finger.

Not sure what that's all about. Those hair-curls look a lot like Rum's, but I don't think the proportions match up. Is that Rum? If so, then...did Shirley secretly fuse with her, somehow? I don't know. I also don't know why they'd be using a pseudo-morph form, rather than a more unique soot construct like we've seen other shadows send out for these kinds of remote operations. Yeah, dunno, could be them, could be someone new. In either case, I suspect that this (infiltrator?) will be catalysing the next major plot by giving the gang some important hints or warnings.

The episode - and the season - ends with Emilico, Ricky, Shaun, and Lou singing a reprise of the cleaning song, with their respective shadows beside them listening attentively, as they go about their new lives as young adults in the Shadows House. The tone of the song has changed, though. The talk about passively waiting, dealing with the soot as it accumulates, etc, comes across as a "lay low and wait for the opportunity to strike" sentiment now. When they sing about the importance of serving and protecting the Shadows Family, one gets the sense that they're referring to themselves rather than to the fused adults who rule them. Or, perhaps, that they seek to "serve" the shadows family by upending its hierarchy and thus improving things for all of them. One or the other.


That's season one of "Shadows House."

In addition to shifting slowly from "surreal mystery-horror" to "fantasy espionage with children," the course of this season also had it turning from a single POV story to an ensemble cast. Emilico and Kate are still soooort of the main characters, but Ricky, Patrick, John, Shaun, Lou, and (to an extent, at least for now) Louise are also sharing the protagonist role. It's a starring gang now, rather than a staring heroine or pair of heroines. Very well paced transformation that you don't even notice happening until it's done.

Which, I think, mirrors the corruption (from the Shadows Family perspective) of this debuting class.

This show has a ton going on, and most of it is only barely starting to move. I'd be extremely interested in continuing it.