So I was getting ready to give up on Blue Exorcist on account of it getting borderline maudlin which is pretty bad in combination with upping the ‘drama’ to some pretty dark yet soap-opera-esque levels. I’m actually pretty sure I may have skipped a volume, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t miss much. It’s probably just as well because it looks like things are finally turning a corner with a lot of the things that were turning me off on the series.
The basic story is that twin brothers are raised as orphans by a priest Father Fujimoto who dies when Satan tries to take over his body; it turns out that Rin and Yukio (the twins) are actually sons of Satan. They end up in the guardianship of Mephisto Pheles aka Samael (aka brother of Satan), and in exorcist training school, Yukio as an instructor, Rin as a student.
The backstory of Father Fujimoto and Rin and Yukio’s mother Yuri is where things got pretty dark and soapy; let’s just say it involves clones and experimentation/torture with kids in the name of creating bodies for upper level demons like Satan and Lucifer to stay in so they can hang out on Earth since Gehenna (aka Hell) just isn’t that interesting. The level of connection and depth of possible complicit with the exorcist organization is naturally part of this whole thing. And then there’s the personal junk that has been drawn out for way too long; mostly it’s Yukio the twin who was the one who knew about the demon world since childhood (Rin only finds out at the beginning of the series) is struggling with his heritage, and you can totally see the cliché descent to the dark side going on, and that it happens isn’t so much the issue as how drawn out the whole process has been.
The whole time Rin has been learning about all the stuff about his past including his birth and his foster father and the world he’s now a part of, and thankfully it seems like he’s getting ready to finally do something about it, which hopefully involves pulling his twin out of the path to darkness etc. We’ll see on that; the brotherly confrontation is set up pretty clearly, as are some things hinted at about other characters and their ancestry, which obviously is going to affect them now if it hasn’t already, but now we’ll all know why. There is most certainly going to be a lot of reckoning both personal and otherwise going on, but I’m actually interested to see how some of that works out.
