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November 2nd, 2024. The night of “premieres”. After an hour of the premiere of Invincible Fight Girl, a former Cartoon Network original which got shifted over to Adult Swim, Blue Exorcist made its re-debut on the block. When rewatching the first episode after ten years, a wave of memories came flooding back as I remembered my senior year of high school, when Toonami kicked off its tremendous year. Every Saturday night, I would tune in at 11:30p for the world premiere of Space Dandy, stick around for Bleach at midnight, skip Shippuden at 12:30, watch One Piece at 1, then check out this new show Blue Exorcist at 1:30am. I’ve mentioned it before in previous throwbacks but back then, I was unaware of most things about anime. I knew at the time that Blue Exorcist was based on a manga of the same name but didn’t know anything else about it. The story follows Rin Okumura, an abnormal high school boy who can see things others can’t, such as spirits and demons. It’s later revealed that he is the son of Satan and that his demonic powers were stowed away in a sword named the Kurikara. After unsheathing the sword, Rin regains his demonic powers and is sent to True Cross Academy to learn to control his powers and kill Satan after the death of his foster father Shiro Fujimoto. At the academy, his instructor is his younger brother Yukio, who wanted to become an exorcist to keep the human and demon realms safe. After waiting a decade, getting to see these characters again on Toonami was nice. It was like meeting up with old friends from school you hadn’t seen in years. 
(Rin and Yukio Okumura)
Moving to November 23rd, the first few weeks were spent just getting the set up out of the way. After we get introduced to the initial main characters, we have the rest of the supporting cast, the first of which would be Shiemi, showing up in week four.
(Shiemi tending to her grandma’s garden)
The episode where she debuts is about her taking care of a garden that she used to care for with her grandmother. Her grandma passed away some time ago and she now upkeeps the garden. Unfortunately, due to this obsessive behavior to uphold a loved one’s memory, it ends up attracting a demon that feeds off Shiemi. In the end, everything turns out just fine and she ends up joining True Cross Academy. Back when I first saw the episode in 2014, I didn’t think much of it. I can’t remember what I fully thought of the episode back then, but I did think it was good and it continued my interest in watching the show. Previous week’s episodes were fine, but this one was good enough to give me an idea where the rest of this goes. I think I associate positive memories when I first watched it, but it didn’t hit me hard emotionally. That was, at least, until my rewatch in late November. During Blue Exorcist’s rerun in 2024, I had gone through a death in the family. It was fresh at that time, and I vividly remember bawling my eyes out in my room while rewatching that episode and I think that’s where it fully clicked for me why I liked it in 2014 and why I still was enjoying my watch last year. Blue Exorcist‘s greatest strength is its cast of characters and its themes of family, loss, and love. For a show about the son of Satan, there’s a lot of humanity to these characters and it never becomes too cheesy or overly dramatic. After going through that rough patch (something that I’m still trying to fully process), episode four was refreshing to watch again because it’s hard for any show to hit me emotionally, but this series did it in one episode and it took ten years for me to fully understand that. After episode four, we are introduced to more characters from True Cross such as Ryuji Suguro, Konemaru Miwa, Renzo Shima, and Izumo Kamiki, aka the worst character in this show. Look, she may be better in later story arcs, but I did not like Izumo at all, mostly because she comes off as a bitch from her introduction. Not to mention, she bullied Shiemi despite her just wanting to be friends with her. Her whole tsundere schtick would be interesting if we knew why she’s like that, but the show doesn’t really delve that deep into her character, so instead of her being the mean girl who has a good heart, she’s just cold hearted and mean.
(Izumo)
