#7.8.19

I went into neutral ground and invited it to talk, and it immediately joined me. A tall, very thin, white (like the color white) skinned creature walked in. He had this long, dark blue cloak/cape around his shoulders and back with white hem and trim, and he walked slowly and showy, kind of like a royal person would walk.

He sat down in front of me. I tell him that he may call me “Zu” and ask what i should call them. I get static. I asked why he’s been following me and what he wanted, and he said that he doesn’t want anything, that he is just merely curious.

I asked him if he was a fae; he said, “maybe, but it doesn’t really matter, does it?” to which i agreed.

I asked him if i was trespassing in fae space in my wanderings in the forest. He told me no, i haven’t been, and the space that i’ve been walking in is shared space; but it’s okay, because i am “with the forest.”

He said that he finds my energy... interesting, and he hasn’t seen a human work with the forest like i do. So that’s why he’s been following me.

I decided to give him a little tasty morsel of energy as a gift. He devoured it and thanked me, and said that he would return the favor.

At this point i again asked him if he is fae, and he confirmed that he was.

We talked some more, and we parted ways. That was Saturday.

Today i felt him kind of floating around me all day. He was lying on his side, kind of relaxed/coy, watching me bemused, all day. Kind of odd, and a weird sensation; i’m not used to sensing spirits like that, i think my discernment is getting stronger.

Anyways, it was a little bit uncomfortable, so i met up with him again tonight and we talked. I asked about his intentions, and what he wanted. He actually started saying something about liking me and wanting to strike some kind of deal. I didn’t hear too much of it, because i told him that at the moment i’m not interested, because I don’t know enough about his kind and the fae customs to be in a position to accept. I told him that i’m sure our paths will cross again in the future, and we can revisit. He bowed and respectably agreed.

It’s very interesting... his energy feels kind of devious, and like trickster energy... but he doesn’t seem evil at all, and he doesn’t seem to actively be trying to mess with me; but he definitely has the potential.

Anyways, i don’t think that this is the last time that I’ll be crossing paths with Prince. But it’s been a revelatory encounter, nonetheless. I’ve learned so much already, and I’m going to be doing some digging on the fae, so you all can expect to see some more posts about them and in my #fae tag.

Anyways, that’s it for today.

See, a few episodes ago, Luca was revealed to be male. The show wasn’t trying to hide this fact or anything, but I was surprised because I honestly thought he was female. Now in this episode, thanks to some Ulgar stuff I’ll talk about a bit later, Luca takes his top off and reveals a pair of breasts. In my mind, this confirmed that he was actually female and I was right the whole time, or maybe just biologically female but is a trans male. However, he actually tells us that he’s medically intersex, and identifies as male. This was a pretty huge surprise to be honest, I can’t really think of any other anime that even have an intersex character, and by the way this literally can’t be up to interpretation either, Quitterie even says “intersex” in Engrish for us so that idiots can’t get salty and pretend to speak Japanese (thanks Tomoyo Kurosawa). So aside from that just being kinda cool inherently, I also appreciate that this exposition about Luca’s character felt really natural. It’s not just the episode arbitrarily focusing on him because that’s how to do easy character development, it’s a series of events that transpired from plot points in the last episode not directly relating to Luca’s intersex that all lead up to this point where Luca shares this information to save his life. In other words, it’s character building that feels more justified by the narrative. He also drops that he was adopted because this show is just, like that, and I mean it’s done with equal grace as the “he’s intersex” thing albeit with less focus on it, because that’s a less meaningful revelation. Cool nonetheless, I feel like this show has an interesting relationship with adoption. But yeah after this one episode and just how well Luca was done in it he’s shot like, really high up my favourites list. He ain’t Kanata, and I mean I’m also fond of Funi and Aries for being super cute and Quitterie because she’s a sassy hot tsundere from my girl Moyo, but Luca’s definitely up there. I just hope that he still actually develops as a character, you know like I don’t want him to be done here. He does wear a shirt that says “transient love” in English on it, and while it’s possible that he just uh, doesn’t understand the English or does and just think’s the shirt’s cool or something like that, I think him openly wearing a shirt that says that could suggest that he’s bi or pan or something. I mean if you’re gonna drop an intersex character on us I don’t think dropping a non-straight character is out of the question.

Anyway, that was a lot of talk about Luca, but to talk about that Ulgar stuff, what we effectively get from Ulgar this episode is that he had a brother who he loved more than anything, the brother was a journalist that found himself some big news about Luca’s dad, and then he got pushed off of a building. This is Ulgar’s motivation for wanting to kill Luca and I mean, it’s fair enough. The “I have a brother I’ve not mentioned and this is all for revenge” reveal feels quite a lot less natural than Luca’s “I’m intersex” reveal, but honestly, I think it’s understandable. He’s standoff-ish anyway so I understand why the brother wouldn’t be mentioned, and since he values honesty so much I can get why he’d pick now to talk about about that stuff rather than kill Luca without letting him know why. Thing is it’s honestly just not that interesting of a backstory, and I feel like I’ve seen shows that do similar things with similar characters albeit a lot better. Ulgar does attempt to martyr himself to atone for the sin of almost taking a nakama’s life, but a quick apology later and it’s all water under the bridge, I don’t really feel like he’s developed that much or in a particularly unique way. I don’t know it’s not bad, and it’s at least less formulaic than the Quitterie and Yunhua episodes in that Ulgar got to go through something of an arc at the same time as Luca did, all the while answering and introducing interesting questions to the narrative, but I guess the stuff specifically to do with Ulgar just feels worse because it’s beside the stuff specifically to do with luca which really was just, handled better. Ah, comparison.

The episode ends off on a couple of interesting notes. Firstly, the “something big” Ulgar’s brother was investigating, about Luca’s dad, is suggested to be this whole warped 5000 lightyears away in space thing. The characters are already seeing this as some sort of assassination attempt and Kanata is always pondering what the common link between all of them is that someone would want them all dead, so it’s reasonable for them to assume that the shady politician dad disappointed in his son who was being investigated by the brother of another member of this crew would do such a thing. I’m bad at speculation anyway so I can’t really come to any specific conclusions based on that seeing as how Ulgar and Luca are definitely not the enemy, but moreover, the episode ends with Aries and Charce talking about how they both did biology in their highschool, and after we’re told that they only had one biology class, everyone becomes suspicious of Charce because Aries’ photographic memory doesn’t remember Charce’s face. That kinda makes everything a lot harder to speculate on, seeing as how we don’t really know anything about Charce at all, or if he has any connection to the few outside parties that have already been established as suspicious. What makes this stuff even harder is that their ship was already beside the planet they were warped to, and we learn in this episode that the gun Charce used was just kind of there in the ship’s storage bay. Did a “good” party anticipate what would happen to the main cast and leave the ship for them? But if they did, what’s with the gun? Is it all some sort of messed up test? Is someone among the main cast even the enemy? I honestly don’t know, and while I obviously can’t say for sure if any of this stuff will get a satisfying answer, I will happily admit that this suspense and mystery the show does is honestly pretty intriguing.

Miscellaneous notes: Yunhua’s appearance in the OP has been changed to reflect her haircut and there’s a newly added section of her singing in that dress we saw from the fantasy in the last or second last episode I can’t remember. So that’s cool. I guess when you’re not showing the OP every episode anyway you wanna mix it up a bit, I dig. Also this episode played the ED as well. Unfortunately I’ve forgotten which of the previous episodes did and didn’t play the OP and/or the ED so. Obviously every planet we have to visit needs to have some sort of environmental conflict, this time it’s tsunamis, and we escape just fine. Hope to god the last 2 planets are more interesting than the first 3. Quitterie’s still up to her shipping crap, and tries to create something of a love triangle between Aries, Kanata and Charce before the whole “Charce is mighty suspicious” thing happens, and that just kind of annoys me, don’t really like when characters are like that. Uhhhhhhh I think that’s it.