©Nishio Restoration/Kodansha/Anipu
This is one of those episodes that’s more about characters than story progression. The entire episode is two conversations, one in the afterlife and one at Hachikuji Shrine. The overall purpose is to explore more about Shinobu, her dual nature, and how she views the Suicide Master.
It’s hard to understand, but Acerola and Shinobu are both the same person and not the same person. The human Golden Tigertail “died” and became a vampire, abandoning his humanity and becoming a weirdo. However, their memories so far are the same. Therefore, although Ailora is in heaven and Ren is on earth, they both know the Suicide Master equally and are convinced that she is not the culprit.
As we saw in the previous chapter, the Suicide Master would rather die than eat substandard food. Both the fairy tale heroine and the vampire agree that the Suicide Master would never eat randomly like the case Araragi and Geon are investigating. They also all seem to believe that the Suicide Master’s current state is their fault and that no one else would find it palatable to taste their blood, but this logic may be flawed. While it’s true that the Suicide Master is smaller than we’ve seen her before, if that were the case, she would surely be completely gone by now after six hundred years of repeated starvation.
How much of Shinobu’s (and Acerola’s) thoughts on the matter come from ego, rather than from logic that they believe they are that special. Sure, it seems unlikely that the Suicide Master would be feeding on schoolgirls, but that doesn’t mean she’s currently starving to death for Shinobi/Acerola. It just makes me wonder how many of the connections made over the course of this episode are real and not imagined.
That said, things seem to indicate that another vampire in town is trying to blame things on the Suicide Master. There’s another code to crack, and we have a looming deadline for Kagenui to arrive in the city, by which time any vampire (except Shinobu) will be safe.
This all sets the stage well for the final act of this story, even if it does little to help the story progress. I’m looking forward to seeing how things turn out and just how wrong my attempts at solving this mystery really were.
Story Series: OFF & MONSTER Season Currently streaming on Crunchyroll.
