ThatAnimeSnob

Yashahime follows the trend of most modern sequels. It’s heavily dependent on the original cast, it has a lot more emphasis on chicks than men, and is overall unneeded and a waste of time. Inuyasha had already outstayed its welcome by over a hundred episodes, but at least it ended. You were free to leave it behind you as a very good action adventure than ran out of juice very quickly and then kept going in circles until you no longer gave a damn. Years later and for no logical financial reason they decided to make a sequel for a show nobody asked for or was looking forward to. How did they expect to make back their money I have no idea, since everyone had either moved on to other shows, or stopped watching anime altogether. And they didn’t exactly win back a lot of people with the direction the continuation had. I am not referring only to the callbacks, which were the only interesting thing about it. There were nonstop cameos of older characters and locations for attracting the fans of the original for which they would have a heavy dose of nostalgia about a show they had watched decades ago.

The problem was with the newer stuff which was a complete mess to figure out or to give a damn about in general. It’s all fine when they are showing you what the older characters are doing in flashbacks, but when the plot switches to the newer ones you are just waiting for another flashback. The three girls we are following for most of the show have very little to do compared to their parents. One of them wants to make money. The other one wants to be able to dream again. The third one wants everyone to be friendly with each other. Holy shit, how is any of that interesting? Remember the monk who would be sucked in a black hole at any moment? Now that’t tension. And sure, the objective is to eventually defeat a super powerful demigod, but most of the show is wasted on silly episodic missions with weak enemies. The older series was also full of silly adventures to the most part, but that show came out at a time when having a loose plot was fine. You could have a hundred filler episode of Naruto in a row and people wouldn’t give up. A mostly episodic structure no longer works nowadays. That aside, the fights were far more exciting back then, because the horror aspect was far more prevalent. In Yashahime you never feel any tension or dread, because it’s like a bunch of silly girls going on a picnic. They are more preoccupied with unimportant first world problems than with dealing with demigods who ruined their childhood, hurt their parents, and who want to kill them. And the reason they can be so carefree is because the bad guys are not killing them despite being easy and despite knowing of the prophesy which foretells of their demise by their hands. It’s obvious plot armor and there is no good justification for it.

And even that is peanuts before the incomprehensible plot. They constantly throw these little mysteries in order to make the characters act in mysterious ways. They want to make you believe there is a lot going on behind the scenes and that is why their motivations seem to change from one episode to another. But that is not true. The more they explain what they want to do, the more you realize not even the writers know what is going on. They keep flip flopping for the sake of the plot, or plot armor in general. It’s so jarring.

And what the hell is wrong with their magic powers? Many special attacks in Inuyasha could only be used if you had a special weapon or you went through a specific procedure. In Yashahime most of these special attacks can be used freely and right away. It doesn’t matter what weapon they use and they sure as hell didn’t spend any time in training so they can learn any of those abilities. Like a typical modern shonen, the best powers are given to them right away when the plot demands it, usually in the middle of a fight and with no effort. That makes the fights very boring, because they are won too easily. As a follow up to that, it never feels like they deserve their victories, because they use powers they shouldn’t be able to master so easily. In Inuyasha they would always spend a few episodes on getting a power up, and then a few more on using it properly. There is no such thing in Yashahime; everything is easy and the girls are going on a picnic where they discuss their first world problems. It’s so boring to watch.

Oh, and one last thing. The only time the show created some buzz during its run, was when it was revealed who was the mother of two of the girls. Hell broke loose because it was Rin, a girl that was like a daughter to Sesshomaru. They never showed any romantic interests, not even in the sequel, so it came off as grooming, a very typical thing in anime that feature a man raising a girl as his daughter, only for eventually making her his wife. It doesn’t matter if that was common in feudal Japan. We didn’t see them falling in love, there was no build up to that relationship, and therefore it comes off as disgusting. And that is Yashahime in a nutshell. A show nobody wanted, almost nobody watched, and even those who gave it a chance ended up hating it for having dull main characters, boring fights, incomprehensible bad guys, and disgusting grooming.