Man, this show continues to deliver beautiful night skies. I have been absolutely loving this show, but at the same time, I am aware enough to know that this isn’t the type of show that many anime fans would gravitate towards. I am just super glad that the studio has been putting effort into this show and delivering a great anime.

In this episode, we get to follow the MC of the show (the necklace), change hands a couple times. It starts out in the hands of a nameless heretic, went to Oczy, promptly abandoned and then picked up by Gras, and then through some anime magic, finally ended up in the hands of Oczy again. Also, we get to see eyepatch guy from the OP at the end of this episode, a monk named Badeni. It will be interesting to see where these two go from here.

Finally, I just wanted to talk about Nowak for a sec. He is one of the most interesting characters in the show to me. He seems to only really be half-heartedly doing his job these days; he complained about being there, shot the horse instead of chasing, and then gave up pursuit because it wasn’t worth it with some excuse about them being too dumb to be heretics. The only time he got serious this episode is when he was sword fighting. Looking forward to more Nowak going forward!

Alright, science time! There isn’t much this week. Just one historical aspect that I was curious about so I looked some stuff up and wanted to share:

• Latin

So, this story is set in Poland Country P. However, even though Gras can read the letter in the stone crate (written in Polish P-ish), he says that he can’t read the texts that are held within because he can’t read Latin. During this time period, Latin would have been the language of educated people broadly. For a long time, Latin was primarily taught and used for religious purposes, but starting with the Renaissance, this changed and Latin began being used for more secular works as well.

In this period, Latin would have been the exclusive language used for scientific writings (like astronomy). In fact, when searching for information on this topic, I found this book talking about the history of Latin in scientific literature that covers the years 1450-1850.

It should be noted that Latin wasn’t exclusively used for science and religious writing, but there was actual prose/poetry written in Latin during this time period as well. An interesting piece of trivia that I learned while researching this topic is that Johannes Kepler (yes, that Kepler), actually wrote a fictional book in Latin in 1608 that has astronomical themes, titled “Somnium”. In the book, he writes about what the Earth would look like if you could view it from the Moon. It is sometimes considered one of the earliest examples of science fiction.

I love the animation, story and music so much! It’s also one of those rare anime I can recommend to non-anime fans. This is definitely my second favourite anime this season (I’m sorry but Natsuki Subaru’s Melancholy: Season 3 is also airing).

@rikka@ani.social