Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA☆ILLYA 3rei!! Episode 06 REVIEW
Fate/kaleid liner プリズマ☆イリヤ 3rei!!
Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya 3rei!! 06

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

With Darius having set off the alarm, Bazett races out. Darius drops a card into the ground and activates the Nobel Phantasm Apneic Beauty. This erects a large ice dome over Darius, Ilya, and Erika (Erica). Neither Bazett nor Kuro can scratch the ice dome. Inside the dome, Ilya is running out of air. Tanaka emerges as if in a trance, producing a large amount of heat. To Darius’s shock, Tanaka destroys the indestructible ice dome. Now free, Ilya combines with Ruby and installs Saber. She swings Excalibur over Erika’s head to kill Darius, but Darius stops the blade with one hand.

Darius activates a second Nobel Phantasm called Authoritarian Personalism, which causes everyone but himself and Erika to drop to the ground. He’s about to kill Tanaka when she calls him a Counterfeiter. This causes him to change his mind and allow all these “players” onto his stage. He takes Erika and they leave. At the Ainsworth estate, Darius performs a bloodletting ceremony on Miyu to have another giant stone tablet to reveal its text. When Miyu is returned to her room, Erika greets her. Erika was lonely without Miyu. Miyu does care for this twisted but innocent girl. When Erika learns that Miyu would like to be with Ilya, she leaves to take care of things. The next day at school, Ilya is missing from her bed, the Class Cards left behind.

Thoughts/Review:

Well now, well now. There was a lot that happened in this episode.

Darius is certainly a villain that is over the top, yet he has some depth. One one hand, he does seem to care greatly about his daughter. I’m not sure that he would have come out to see Ilya had Erika not come out on her own. And when Ilya attacked him, part of his irritation was Ilya doing this with his daughter at hand.

Darius is clearly insane. We see flashes of that during his brief encounter with Ilya and company. Only Erika seemed to allow him to keep a grip on things.

Darius is insanely overpowered. Whatever Class Cards he is using to activate these Nobel Phantasms are one thing. The fact that he could stop Excalibur with one hand and take no damage is something else.

The writing trap that happens with a villain so powerful is coming up with a reason for the villain not to squash the opposition. In this case, Darius seems to regard Ilya, Bazett, Kuro, and Tanaka as performers on his stage. As such, they seem to have a role in whatever insane plan he has in store. It is still a cliched mistake on the part of Darius, but I’m interested to see how the others may end up aiding Darius’s plan.

I noticed that Darius transformed into a different form as he walked Erika out of the school grounds. Maybe the form of Darius that we see is some kind of Class Card install, which gives him a different appearance. That could also explain why he’s so OP. He may use that to keep Miyu in check.

Speaking of which, the scene with Miyu and Darius disturbed me greatly. This scene smacked heavily of loli rape and it really bothered me. The ecchi loli content of the series has been bad because of its obvious sexual titillation. This was bad in the opposite way. I don’t think it was done for sexual titillation (I could be wrong), but the way Darius treated Miyu came off as if he were raping her. In a sense, I guess he is since he’s bloodletting her, thus violently violating her person. Regardless, it was a horrible scene for me to get through.

Erika (or Erica as the official subs call her…not sure which is correct) may turn out to be as innocent as she seems. She clearly loves her papa dearly. Seeing her with Miyu, it is clear that she loves Miyu as an older sister. It is clear that Erika is lonely and wants people around her.

The problem is Darius’s insanity has affected Erika and made her somewhat twisted. Erika thinks Ilya lied to her about using violence when Ilya attacked her papa. In Erika’s mind, Darius is a good man and father. He just wants to talk to Ilya and Ilya attacks him. It is twisted, but I can see where Erika is coming from.

I don’t think that Erika understands that what’s being done to Miyu is bad. If Miyu becomes the Holy Grail, she will vanish, right? That being the case, Erika likely doesn’t understand that Miyu is about to be eliminated and then where would Erika be?

Ilya having disappeared at the end of the episode combined with Erika implying she’d do something about letting Miyu see Ilya makes me think she had something to do with the disappearance. Clearly, Ilya has been taken or else she wouldn’t have left her five Class Cards behind. Erika could have talked her dad into waltzing back to the school and grabbing Ilya. That would be an easy task and it wouldn’t surprise me if he did it without setting off an alarm. It is also possible that Erika got Angelica to do it. I can’t imagine her getting Beatrice to do something like that. Well, we’ll see what happens.

It is really interesting that Gil-kun doesn’t know anything about Darius’s Nobel Phantasms. That plays back into the notion of just how overpowered Darius is. If Gilgamesh is clueless about something, it means something bad.

Finally, we got to see Tanaka do more than just take a beating, feel the pain of it, but take no damage. If Darius is the Ace of Spades trump card, Tanaka is the Joker, both comically and physically. Whomever she is, she wasn’t created by Darius and Gil-kun doesn’t seem to know her either. I think she’s a kind of Counteractor (to use a term from the canon Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-ohki universe). She’s already stated that her purpose is to destroy the Ainsworth. As such, it is only natural that she would be equal and opposite to them in terms of power. She just doesn’t have conscious access to that power.

What did Tanaka mean when she said Counterfeiter? I took it to mean she’s calling Darius that. Is it because the Class Cards he’s created are kind of like counterfeit Heroic Spirits? Either way, Darius’s reaction to that was interesting. I look forward to seeing where that goes.

Speaking of Tanaka, she provided one of two comedy moments in this episodes. Tanaka’s comedy moment was to be radiating so much heat after the battle with Darius, Gil-kun complained about the heater being on too high.

The other comedy moment came unexpectedly from Darius again complaining about the cold within Apneic Beauty, followed by Erika’s plea to NOT give her a blanket because she’s not cold.

In the end, Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya 3rei!! 06 is a very good, dark, and sometimes disturbing episode. It makes me glad I stuck around through the ecchi loli crap to keep watching for the story.