Meiji Gekken: 1874 Episode 3 Discussion

So the Hunter's Club were a group of soldiers that kidnapped and killed people on the battlefield for fun during the Boshin war. Now they secretly kidnap and kill random people during the peaceful Meji Era. I guess Hinazume finally got a chance to exact her revenge after Shizuma rescued her sister.

I thought we had wandered into a side story of an alternate universe's Japanese answer to Zaroff and The Most Dangerous Game (Just looked this up and it's a weird coincidence that the original short story was published almost exactly 100 years ago, on January 19th, 1924).

At first I thought the Hunter's club had some greater political goal in mind but by the end it seemed decidedly apolitical, and if it ever started out as a political organization, clearly devolved and degenerated into a physical-pleasure seeking gang getting off on sadism.

This continues to be a pretty great and underrated show. Glad I picked it up and as usual ignored the MAL rating and distinct lack of preceding buzz and fanfare. I'm invested moreso in the story and setting themselves than the characters, as I saw some comment here and elsewhere when voicing one gripe about the series, but honestly that's not uncommon for Historical series in general in my experience, anime or not. Watching this really brings me back to when I first started to get really interested in various different areas of history on an obsessive level in middle school and into high school, and how I would just seek out Historical genre stuff in abundance then in whatever form it came. Besides documentaries, Historical genre was my bread and butter for a long time. And just seeing any characters navigate all the intricacies and complexities of a world I had hitherto mostly only read about on the page in textbooks or on the internet at that point was so mesmerizing.

I especially appreciate how the series doesn't seem to shy away from showing the real brutality of the period and the type of people forged as local legends in times of war, nor of jumping around a bit to different storylines to give us a wide eagle's eye view of the post-war society's transformation at the legal level, political level, how it affects ordinary people, etc. In some series I think that broader view is a detriment to character-focused development and intimacy with the perspective of a smaller cast of main characters, but here I think it works well enough, again, for a series which seems to be leaning into the strength of its plot and setting more than characters. And one which seems more in line with those chaotic sweeping period pieces I referenced above.