Kusuriya no Hitorigoto is, by all means and purposes, a female oriented power fantasy. Yes, this is exactly how I started my review last time and that's because this series is really not better than the first season, hell, Maomao at this point is no longer the underdog she was supposed to be at the start, she has more support than ever and is as capable as ever.
What has improved since last season? Well, I don't have to see Maomao intimidating stupid ladies-in-waiting, but I guess that's about where my compliments come to an end, as it follows the same formula of having a mystery and Maomao solving it with some parts building a bigger picture to resolve at the end of the season. Maomao and Jinshi's romance is as bad as it has ever been, but you now get him acting like a toxic shoujo male lead, like Jinshi gently laying down Maomao and pulling her leg up while asking her if she wanted to find out if he had a dick, and honestly, they completely lack chemistry since the first season and they don't seem to be moving their relationship as it's so one-sided that it hurts, but I guess the moments where he is the most forceful will be the closer they get to have any kind of thing remotely similar to romantic tension in the foreseeable future.
Of course Maomao is still a Mary Sue, you can scream to me that she isn't, but what people don't realize about this term is that it works on a spectrum. Sure, there are some characters that might fit better all the criteria, but Maomao covers most of them pretty easily, she just lacks fighting abilities to kick people around, and you will always see a discourse about this. It still looks like that, without Maomao, the integrity of the palace would fall in any moment; her underdog aspect of being a lowly servant has been pretty much put into irrelevance ever since Jinshi bought her; we were told last season about her father Lakan, a very high ranking member of the military who would literally wage a war if something were to happen to her; she has been working under Gyokuyou, one of the emperor's main consorts, as her attendant, so basically no lady-in-waiting ever pesters her again; the fact that Maomao and the series still act like she could catch fire any time is nothing short of stupid and dishonest. The closest argument you could get from this season was that Maomao was "kidnapped", which I put in quotation marks because nothing ever happened to her, she was taken to a festival, then put inside a house where she didn't suffer anything beyond doing some medicine for immortality, she could read, she could eat, she could rest, the two worst things that happened to her there were that she was hit with a fan (which is even less than the metal bat from the previous season) and she was put inside a closed room with insects and snakes, but she is very quirky, so she just ate them, which means that at no point in time she was in any danger. Nothing about this arc made me think that Maomao wasn't a Mary Sue, and just as I put it at the start, one of the thing she lacks to be a Mary Sue to a "T" is having any kind of fighting abilities.
At the end, the only episodes that may be worth a damn are completely ruined by their cop-out solutions: the kids that dramatically died last episode by drinking some shit? They aren't dead and drank the medicine that can "kill" a person and later "bring them back to life", of course, this was quite obvious if you remember that said medicine exists, but it doesn't make it any less stupid. Suirei? She doesn't have any punishment whatsoever for what she did this and last season, she quite literally plotted to kill the emperor's younger brother and is quite literally associated to the clan that tried to do a rebellion, and instead it's her comically evil step-mother who takes the fall for everything she did because she was abusing her, it's so unrealistic that she didn't get executed and instead is living with the kids alongside Ah-Duo. Shisui? She has this stupid "emotional" dance with music and everything while she gets shot multiple times and then falls from a high place, of course, that is a fake-out and at the end she is perfectly fine. For the last year, I have been pestered about this series being mature, smart and realistic, which is quite obviously untrue, these events are quite literally on the level of intelligence of battle shonen (which are kid's shows), events like emotional deaths followed by death fake-outs is overused in those, you can see them in Bleach, Naruto or One Piece and they are already stupid there, despite the fact that they are quite literally for kid's so they don't try to be smart, this series pretends to be smart while at the same time pulling this kind of stuff which is honestly embarrassing, I wish this was me twisting the events or anything, but this is quite literally what happens in the series, this author has no backbone at all.
It has been a pain watching this series, it didn't help that I was sick to the point of being bedridden without wanting to watch anime for an entire month, so I had to catch up with many things instead of just taking it more slowly, and Kusuriya was easily the thing I wanted to see the least between the list of anime I hadn't dropped at that point, you don't have to worry about me anymore, as I'm not excited in any way to even see the continuation of this series.
Thank you for reading.
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