Basara 13

Yeah.  So I stopped to eat dinner, then read another volume of Basara.  I won’t talk about all of them tonight soas not to flood my front page with Basara reviews.  I’ll try to mix them in with other things tomorrow.

I had sort of guessed who Earth Bear was, so I wasn’t all that into the twist at the end of the prison segment.  I did like seeing Sarasa take care of Asagi like that, though.  He certainly does have his moments.

I liked that Matsunaga was actually a young guy under his mask, though.  I guess he just wears it to instill fear in the hearts of his enemies.  It doesn’t seem to work that well on Tatara.  The scene between him Tamon was pretty awesome, where Tamon complains that he still stinks after being in prison all that time, and Matsunaga tells him he always stinks and that’s why he never found a wife.  It’s not a very good joke, but it made me laugh all the same.

Ageha’s just awesome, too.  You have to wonder about his background as a slave.  He’s said before he wanted to kill Shido since he was the son of his abusive master, yet he didn’t, and he was really more of Shido’s friend.  But you’re not sure if maybe he was just biding his time.  Here, he takes abuse from both prisoners and the guards, and yet brushes both off as necessities and forgives everyone in the end.  Perhaps he’s setting a good example for things to come.

Shuri is also an interesting character.  I think he’s starting to see that what he was doing as the Red King was bad.  Bad enough that when he tries to take his throne, he is having problems convincing people he should have it back.  And actually, the only reason people may have been rooting for him was because King Ukon’s representative was much worse than Shuri ever was.

There’s an awesome scene were Asagi averts disaster for a little while longer.  Supposedly for his own reasons, but it certainly would have gone badly in the city if he had not intervened.

The infiltration of Suo City was quite good, both on Shuri’s side and Tatara’s.  I actually quite enjoyed Tatara’s scare tactics.  The two people she runs into and gets on her side are pretty awesome, just like every other character in this series.  I have no idea how it is I can’t bring myself to hate anyone in this series.  They’re all really great and serve their own individual purposes so well.  In this case, there’s a woman who runs a newspaper to keep the people of Suo City informed despite the fact she goes against the government to do so, and the artist who fights without violence to keep the city from being razed by the new ruler.

Things get really intense in this volume, and sort of keep going at an extremely fast pace through volume 15.