Arcana Famiglia Episode Five

Oh, joy, more oedipal undertones.

So, more building up of characters this week, unsurprisingly, although there was a nod to the Arcana Duello – Nova tells Felicita that the event’s been set up to help make her, the family heir, stronger, basically confirming what most of us already suspected. But there was no sign that it’ll happen anytime soon (hopefully a second season announcement’ll make an appearance soon, though).

Since last week we got uguu uguu angst for Liberta, this week it was Nova’s turn. It was still largely a silly affair, but it didn’t feel quite as clunky, even if the revelation about Nova’s parents was somehow even dumber than Liberta’s past in the orphanage. Ok, so, get this… Nova’s parents? They’ve been asleep for seven years! And its all ’cause Nova put them to sleep with his Arcana powers! ZOMG! Drama.

Y’know, I do like the relationship depicted between Nova and Mama, for the most part. However, there is still this slight edge of weird… not romance, but, well, like I said, an undercurrent of Oedipus about the proceedings. Its been cut down since last episode, but there’s still enough of it there to make me feel weird watching it. I think it was the whole “lean across the table so boobage is showing while you’re wiping cream off his shouta-self’s face” that was the cause, this time. I don’t know, J.C. Staff does weird stuff like that with their adaptations sometimes…

There was the usual dollop of stupid this week, and not simply in Nova’s backstory. His section of the family went out on patrol, with him instructing them to pay attention to anything suspicious at all… so, basically, I guess the Arcana Famiglia is actually a cross between the mafia and the TSA with less, y’know, full-body scans and knee-capping incidents. Nova knocks out a thief with the back of the blade of his sword, and Felicita marvels at that, so we get treated to some dumb stuff about how the AF is wonderful and doesn’t want to spill any blood. Snore. I think we’d figured that one out already, no need to bludgeon us, thanks.

There’s also a lot of hilarious crap about “Giaponne”, which, you guessed it, is the Italian word for Japan. The upshot seems to be that some of the bad guys on Regalo are racist (of course!) and that Nova is probably at least partially Japanese. His name is very Nihon, after all. The bad guys were also sexist, which pisses off Felicita, who ends up handling two out of the three bad guys in the scene. I love seeing her more than hold her own in a fight.

Felicita cooks twice in the episode. The first time, it was fine – she didn’t do the whole asinine blushing routine so common to anime girls, and it seemed more that she gave Luca some help as opposed to, “don’t worry, she might kick ass, but she is still a girl, look, she baked a pie!”. The soup cooking later in the episode was more irritating, since she did act embarrassed about it, which is idiotic.

I will say that I would like to actually see Felicita in action with her “troops”, so to speak; we’ve seen her go out with other members of the family on patrol, but never with her own section. However, as this has been a way in which the show has fleshed out other characters, I’m not going to hold my breath on seeing her in action with her people.

Shouta and loli versions of Felicita and Nova were pretty cute.

I guess I should mention that in this episode the sunglasses-always dude was being all creepy and obviously up-to-no-good as usual. He’s shaping up to be the main antagonist of the show. Good! He is such a creeper, and I do not want to have to endure him as a potential love interest at all. Granted, as I’ve said before, AF is shaping up more as a triangle than a true reverse harem, but I still like the confirmation that one of the creeper-asses isn’t going to ever come up in the running for Felicita’s future husbando.