#jade slayers

-Lina is rather humble when the demon talks about how she defeated Hellmaster. Anime Lina would have been more of a braggart. But in the novels Lina really doesn’t want the type of attention it would attract and she also uses humility to lure the demons into underestimating her. While the demon is grandstanding Lina is chanting and she comments about how she uses his stupidity against him.

-Lina is in full form this chapter. While we don’t see powerful spells she is very street smart. I absolutely love the scene where she storms the castle and fools the inhabitants into believing that she is working with them against the intruders…when she is the intruder! I absolutely hate that we will likely never see this scene animated. I can visualize it all so perfectly, along with Gourry watching Lina work her spell lovingly and admiringly.

-It’s worth looking at Luke and Mileena’s responses to Jade’s request that someone heal their former enemy, General Allus, after Allus helps them by ordering the guards to leave them. Luke is distrustful and scolds Jade for being too soft and seems to believe (falsely) that Allus is leading them to a false sense of security.

The group does have good reasons to trust Allus by this point because he did divert the guards away from them. People who have a healthy sense of who to trust can look at evidence like this and make a calculated risk to trust, but Luke is not able to. Further, he also does not want to heal Allus’ wounds and leave him in pain.

While Luke could be thinking in pure pragmatic terms with not wanting to heal an enemy once they have him cornered, it also contributes to the lack of evidence as to whether Luke (or any of the people who house Shabranigdu) has a sense of empathy. So far nothing Luke has done has indicated that he has this important trait. It is also possible though never proven that Luke could feed on Allus’s pain.

Luke’s statements indicate a lack of trust and wanting to keep control of the situation and stay on top. People who don’t have empathy and difficulty with trusting do tend to be motivated more by staying on top and accumulating power and top dog status than relationships that are genuine and reciprocal. Such people also tend to deride people who show empathy like Jade as being “soft” and even deserving of being betrayed for their kindness. But the other things that a difficulty with trust indicates to me is that the person exhibiting that difficulty is someone who himself is not trustworthy. Luke could be projecting his own tendencies to use other’s trust against them onto Allus.

Meanwhile, Mileena silently heals Allus. When she does this Luke is caught off guard and awkwardly says that there are times it’s not bad to trust others.

This does indicate that Mileena has the ability to trust and emphasize that Luke does not. But this also shows that rather than having an internal sense of what is right or wrong, Luke is taking his cues from Mileena, who he is trying to impress and whose motivation would likely vanish the moment she returned his affection (going by typical patterns of people who do things similar to Luke). That poor woman is living with a giant red flag.

The fascinating question with Luke of course is whether or not he was raised in an abusive environment that leads some children to develop the traits that he exhibits or if he developed this way because of Shabranigdu.

-Magic Sucker Sword. I laughed.

-Gourry is full of awesome in this chapter. Speaking of empathy, Gourry shows it in spades with Jade when he steps up to fight his father for him, and this is one point where I would love to see the novels from his point of view. Gourry speaks to Jade like someone who has been through something similar and tries to be the person he needed at that time for Jade. It’s a great Gourry moment, the type that sadly never made it to the anime.

-Further, Lina speaks highly of Gourry’s skill, at one time noting that his maneuvers are inhuman and that anyone else would have difficulty executing them the way he does. I would so love to know if HK has any explanation for Gourry’s skills that he’s kept secret for 30 years or if he just made him a major badass without explanation to keep us fans speculating.