All Right! Claymore did pick up! EPS5

After anticipating something good for Claymore, I finally got rewarded.

My friend Mike always says that he usually watches 6 eps of a show before he makes a decision whether to continue watching or not. I guess I have far less patience and even though it’s usually very difficult to drop a show once I started watching it (unless the show really pisses me off, is really bad, or if I fall asleep while watching it with or without alcohol) I usually just stay with it anyways. Anyways, onto Claymore EPS5.

This episode gives no hint that it’s a flashback of Claire’ s past. It began rather ordinarily – by that I mean, a Claymore lady cutting up a monster. But very quickly we get to see that Clare isn’t the Claymore who’s doing the cutting, but a woman with long hair. Could I have realized that she’s not Clare without the long hair? Probably. There’s something different about the way this woman, Teresa, is drawn from Clare. Although I’ve got to say, like one of my old rants, that the character designs in a show seems to be based on one mold (literally), and the faces and body shapes of the characters are like clones. However, in the case of Claymore, that’s not quite true, and other similarities can be forgiven, because this group of swordswoman are meant to be killing machines, after all. They’re trained as a group of soldiers fighting monsters. Soldiers are trained to be uniform. But anyway.

Beginning with Teresa killing the monster with a smile, and then it was explained that she can easily defeat any monster without using demon power, which makes a person’s face twisted and ugly. But she doesn’t need to use it so she can look beautiful while doing it. It’s all in a day of a supermodel’s work – even if the work consists of cutting demons into little pieces!

After, the show never gets bogged down by anything. The pace is light and the two women seiyuus really carry the episode forward. Teresa, played by Romi Paku, slashed and spoke with a equally magnificant flair, and stunned both the demons and the villagers (and me) with her femme fatale grace – grace isn’t quite it when it comes to her way of talking. To me, she sounded more like a leader of female gangs, without the gang talk. But she had that heartlessness and contained wildness in her voice. She doesn’t sound particularly cold or anything, but it’s quite distinctive.

The other seiyuu on the other hand, said nothing at all save for few small uttering of sounds. She was the complete contrast of Teresa. Kuwashima Houko managed to use few utters of sounds to bring the shellshocked and muted young Clare to life.

I kept thinking, I’ll probably use the commercial break to get something to drink, and I did think that a commercial break is coming (it’s a fansub but usually there’s a break – a still frame [Editor’s note: an “eye catcher” Thanks Threed]  – that tells the viewers commercial is coming), but before I can take a break, the eps was over and the song began to play.

Clare chose to follow Teresa, who was not thrilled at the idea of being followed by someone. Despite Teresa’s repeated attempts at getting rid of Clare, even kicking her, she keeps up with Teresa, who finally gives up and takes her along. Teresa decided to call her Clare, which happened to be her real name. We see that a connection is made there and this time, a small part of it coming from Teresa, who was rejecting as hard as possible.

That gives us a reason why later, Clare decided to take Raky/Lucky/Rocky along. The relationship between Teresa and Clare parallels Clare and Raky’s. In this eps, we see that nobody cares for Clare in the village she was in because she was kidnapped by a monster to bring to the village, and we assume that her parents were killed by the monster; we see that she hugs and tries to hold on to Teresa; and we saw at the end of eps 4, Raky held on to Clare, and Clare awkwardly with a blank expression, tries to hug back (my guess is that Teresa never did hold Clare, and Clare did all the hugging).

What really impressed me was the fact that the episode didn’t have a lot of action, but the pacing was tight enough that I got through it without wondering if they were going to drag it on. The fact that the gang appeared and a subplot seems to be developing from there really helped. If it were just all the antics of Clare trying to follow Teresa, like Raky trying to follow Clare, I would’ve been bored.

So, I’m looking forward to more. I read some of what will happen next and I’m eagerly waiting to see what happens.