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Originally Posted by Anh_Minh
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Hah! That was the first thing I thought of, too, when the village's name came up.
Spoiler for Ep. 8:
I must say, this was the first time I've been genuinely disappointed by an episode of this series: 4-5 weren't as good an arc as either novel-based stories, but didn't really raise expectations either, but this episode really crashed compared to the set-up episodes.
On the one hand, we got badly shortchanged on the unique atmosphere of the village, which is supposed to be such a strong telling point for how the mystery plays out. On another, the main mystery itself, the gold thieves and the falling-out among them was so utterly glossed over as to be almost irrelevant. We got nothing of their backgrounds, their reasons for being there--why they believed this village would even have artifacts worth stealing! I really need to reread the novel now, because I definitely had none of this reaction from the book...and I believe that a lot of the metastory material from this episode was added for the anime. The hazelnuts and the dropping of the urn in the font seemed ridiculously slim evidence to make that deduction on. However, there is the saving grace that Victorique did not present this as "the answer" but actually went to the church and let the criminal incriminate himself by the theft attempt (i.e. her real evidence was that he was caught red-handed in another crime that followed the pattern of her earlier deductions).
Roscoe appears confirmed to be the magician from Ambrose's one-second flashback to the back of his head, and the suggestion is that he's hanging out with Cordelia; we'll see if that's confirmed or a red herring.
Score another one for the power of prophecy/fortunetelling in this series.
Genuinely nice moment when it was revealed that Victorique and Kazuya asked the same question to the oracle.
Harminia being able to hop around the village setting off random fires like timed explosions was just too over-the-top; I could buy the bridge going up in sudden flames as dramatic license, but the sudden massive explosions just from a torch; even if the roofs were thatched (I admittedly was not paying attention to the architecture) it wouldn't go up like that. Especially since she's doing all this ninja-hopping in full maid skirts.
On the good side again, the murder of Elder Theodore made sense and was tied in with the, y'know, clues.
I've pretty much come to the conclusion, though, that the anime, unlike the novels, is fundamentally not a mystery series but more of a "Gothic adventure" kind of thing--The Mysteries of Udolpho rather than Sherlock Holmes; time and again the writers of the anime have de-emphasized the mystery aspect in favor of the Victorique/Kazuya relationship aspect, keeping all of the latter while cutting significant amounts of the former, and I'm going to be watching it in that way from now on.
So, does anyone know if the next episode is from the second manga volume or the third novel? It looks like we're going to get three eps. per novel and two per manga vol., which would add up to the announced 24 if I'm counting correctly (6x3 and 3x2)?