Shakugan no Shana III (Final) – Episode 20

Sorry for the slight delay in getting this out, homework called on Sunday, and then I had no motivation to do pretty much anything on Monday after getting my first Calc II test back. So I can do the homework just fine, getting the answers right and everything, and yet I can’t pass the actual test? I only joked about it before, but I seriously am starting to believe I have test anxiety. I always manage to bork something up.

In other news, this episode wasn’t as good as the last one. Though that’s not too surprising considering the last episode had the greatest scene in the history of mankind in it. Or, well, at least according to what I look for in a show it was. I didn’t expect this episode to be able to match that, so it’s not like I was upset with the episode or anything. I thought it was yet another good one.

In this episode, we actually learned something very important near the start:

Apparently, there’s yet another god, the God of Guidance. Rofocale was never a follower of Snake, it was this new god. So now we have a God of Creation, God of Destruction, and God of Guidance.

At first I was going to flag this as a deus ex machina and be upset with the show, but I actually read something interesting about this… somewhere. God my memory is horrible. I do remember it was someone mentioning that the universe of Shana is heavily influenced by eastern religions (shocker) such as Buddhism and Hinduism, and that Hinduism has some sort of trinity of gods thing with destruction, creation, and balance. Considering all of this, I don’t think this plot point really counts as a deus ex machina, so it gets the a-okay.

But that’s not all we learned!

Turns out there was a point to Pheles seeking out the Scooby Doo gang other than to just make the most unintentionally hilarious Mystery Machine getaway. They have some sort of magical trinket that’s enough for a follower of a god of balance/guidance to start tripping balls. It’s too bad I have absolutely no idea what it is. I don’t think whatever it is has been mentioned before, but I could be wrong. They brought back a bunch of old Treasures in the last episode.

I was small, but I really liked this scene.

There was something charming about the small, child-like Pirsoyn telling big, muscular Ribesal not to die on him. It was also helped by the fact that Ribesal agreed with him, rather than saying the same thing back.

…Goddamnit this means they’re going to die now, doesn’t it?

And the final event I have a screencap for. Yuuji getting his own unrestricted spell.

At first I was confused by this scene, but I have a theory now. So far throughout the show, Yuuji has been essentially borrowing power from other sources (Midnight Child, Snake, Silver, Johaan’s ability to detect and such), so he doesn’t really have any abilities of his own. Now, when he “ended” his existence in order to fuse with Snake, while they’re one entity now, they still have their own individual identities. I think that in the process of fusing with Snake, Yuuji (or his identity) became that of a Crimson Denizen. And Sydonay mentioned that Yuuji’s identity was becoming more dominant, which was why he was able to access his new ability due to being a Crimson Denizen.

Other than that, the episode ended with Shana managing to fire some Psalms of the Grand Order into the World Egg. Now if you recall, that’s the same thing that was fired into the Midnight Child, and it didn’t destroy it, it modified it. Shana seems to be doing the same thing, though the reason of what and why we don’t know. The preview for next episode said that we’d find out though, so I guess that’ll be when a lot of things start clicking into place.

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