Red River ‒ Episode 11
This episode is a distillation of everything wrong with Red River's attempt to live up to its manga. It features rushed plot points devoid of emotional or intellectual nuance, ugly repetitive CG fights, lackluster animation, and Yuri acting as if she had the brains of a stinkbug. I usually try to separate the source material from its adaptation when I write reviews, since not every viewer will come to a show having read it, but this is a case where I find I cannot. It's just so…egregious. But really, how are we supposed to believe that Yuri is brilliant when she's busy screaming, “Thanks for coming to Rescue Me!” after Zannanza has snuck into the Mitanni city and is busy sneaking back out? She's lucky everyone appears to sleep like the dead.
Part of the problem here isn't just that it makes Yuri look foolish, but that the quality of the adaptation really distracts from Chie Shinohara's research into the time and place. For example, Mattiwaza's sister, Tuduhepa (Tadukhipa) is sometimes theorized as being Nefertiti. It's not a particular popular theory, largely based on the fact that Nefertiti's name means “the beautiful woman has come,” which some people believe indicates that she was a foreign princess who married into the Egyptian royal family. More scholars tend to think that she was Egyptian and possibly (probably?) related to her husband because of the way Egyptian royal marriages often worked, but that Shinohara found and incorporated the idea that she could have been Tadukhipa is still interesting – and it has some implications to what's coming up in the story. You really can't talk about this era without Egypt coming into the story, can you?
Sadly, the way the Tadukhipa/Nefertiti link is brought up just makes it look silly. It comes on the heels of Yuri making the truly baffling choice to believe a random letter from “Kail” telling her to go into the one room in the seraglio she's forbidden to enter, when she knows from the heart letter that all official correspondence would come stamped with his seal. Then she swans around the Mitanni city helping Hittite captives, which is admirable, except that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that she'd be allowed to. Mattiwaza says that she must be supervised, but would his guards really let her just start carting rugs and pillows around and feeding the slaves? That's generally not how ancient world slavery worked. At least no one started calling her Kamrušepa (the Hittite goddess of healing) on top of everything else.
The implication, of course, is that the Prince of Darkness is fascinated by Yuri. He sees her as his lost sister, not because she looks like Tadukhipa, but because of her strength. In his telling of what became of her, he mentions that Nefertiti is now ruling over Egypt on her own, a nod to the theory that at one point she may have tried to set herself up as Pharoah. (Because that worked so well for Hatshepsut in the end.) This is a complicated bit of Egyptology, so I'll leave it at that, but the relevant piece for Red River is that by seeing Nefertiti in Yuri, the prince is tacitly acknowledging that she has what it takes to be a queen. While this is important to his apparent decision to snatch her from her horse at the end of the episode, it's greater import in the context of the series is that he's a foreign ruler admitting that, despite her common status, Yuri could easily become the Tawannana of the Hittites. Since Nakia is so fully against this, the more important people recognize Yuri's worth, the better it is for Kail – assuming Yuri doesn't go through with going back to Japan, of course.
That's meant to be what we're worried about. Yuri's survived several unfortunate encounters with rapacious men (including Kail), so we know she'll likely evade Mattiwaza, if only because he's clearly more in love with his sister. (Ancient world, different values.) But will her inevitable rescue or escape mean that she chooses to stay with Kail? I know the answer, but I wish I cared more about seeing it play out on screen.
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Red River is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.
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