Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? IV

Episode 7

Cry, Trojans, cry. Cassandra Ilion has dreamed, and her dream was a bloody one – broken Adventurers strewn on the Dungeon floor, glittering elvan eyes watch her destruction, and only the rabbit seems to escape unharmed, but not unscathed. But because of her curse, that cast upon her by the god Apollo, none will believe her words, and so Cassandra of Ilion is doomed to weep her tears dry, with none the wiser for her counsel.

Except this isn't ancient Troy (Ilion is another name for the city), and even if it was, Bell Cranell is around, and he's not going to be swayed by some crummy curse. While I fooled absolutely no one that Bell might possibly take the side that's against Ryu, there's an important flipside to his unwavering belief in the people he knows and cares about: he's also going to trust them when they start telling him that something may be a bad idea. He's more or less caught between a rock and a hard place when Cassandra asks him not to join the hunt for Gale Wind, because he desperately wants to prove Ryu's innocence while also doing Cassandra the favor of believing her prophecy, but he's still invested in finding a way to make both work. And while Cassandra doesn't expressly say that she doesn't want everyone else to go with Bell, she still manages to get that across – yes, she could have done it more tactfully when it comes to poor Haruhime, but between her ridiculous reason why Aisha shouldn't go and the special armor she asks Welf to make Bell, she's still getting it said without using her words. That may be why her curse (or bad luck, in the case of the show rather than the original myth) doesn't kick in: she's not, technically, saying why she thinks the way she does. She's just working around her dream to get her point conveyed.

In part this could be because she knows that Bell isn't going to back down as far as finding Ryu goes. But what's more important here is the continued mentions of Astraea Familia. That was the familia Ryu belonged to before they were wiped out, and she vowed vengeance after the deaths of her sisters-in-arms. We saw a bit of that last season, but most people, perhaps foolishly, assumed that she was done with that now. And she might well be – we don't know if the dead man was one of the people behind the fall of Astraea Familia. But we also don't know for certain that it was Ryu who killed him, and that's really the sticking point here. If he did help to orchestrate their deaths, then it's harder to blame Ryu for taking him out, at least in the context of a fantasy guild-based world. But if Ryu is being framed for the death of a guy who may not have been objectively good but had nothing to do with Astraea Familia's doom, that's a whole other story. While it might be hard to verify who precisely was behind their fall, just killing random semi-bad guys and blaming it on Gale Wind is a fairly effective way to sideline, if not straight-out get rid of, someone who could be an obstacle to their plans.

That all of this is heading deeper into the Dungeon isn't great. Cassandra's prophetic dream foretelling everyone's deaths could easily have less to do with Ryu and more with the fact that the lower levels are where things look to be going down. Bell has the best chance of coming through intact (or at least alive), which could be why he's the only one she sees living. But either way, they're all going, as Edna St. Vincent Millay said, into the darkness. Whether the wise and the lovely or the lovers and thinkers will reemerge into the light is still up in the air.

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Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? IV is currently streaming on HIDIVE.