Careful, Sarasa, that’s Craft Lawrence talk.
In this episode, Sarasa finds she has a business rival trying to corner the market on the ice bat fangs that allow her to keep making cooling hats. He overpays gatherers for the fangs, hoping to drive her out of business. Sarasa, however, knows exactly what she’s doing and when the price gets too high for her to offer to match it and still turn a profit, she turns to farming fangs herself in order to drain the guy’s coffers.
A visit to the friendly alchemist next town over reveals that his punny name is Gree Dilly, and that his business is to, as a merchant, basically own alchemists through debt and make a killing on trading potions and artifacts. He’s also not above hiring bandits to intimidate (or even eliminate) the competition, something that really gets Sarasa and her friends down since “parents killed by bandits” is a pretty common backstory in this setting, apparently.
Sarasa, though, is more than capable of handling the bandits. Fitting with this show being rather light and fluffy, we don’t exactly see her slaughter them, but it’s still clear when she’s aggressively ignoring pleas for mercy from brigands so stereotypical the bandits who get two lines in a Fire Emblem game are calling them hacks, that they’re probably not walking away from their encounter with an actually skilled and powerful alchemist.
With his hired goons strongly implied to be worm food and Sarasa’s fang farming set to aggressive, Gree Dilly ends up breaking first, having to sell his massive stockpile of fangs to Sarasa for a song, which allows her to buy out the debt of the other alchemists he bullied into service (never seen) and give them much more reasonable terms under her and her ally in the nearby town instead.
Thus we have our episode, kind of sort of addressing Sarasa’s bad history with bandit types and generally just serving up just desserts to an all-around unpleasant character. It’s not bad, but it is noticeable that the show is straining its limitations. It’s bright, chipper, Atelier-inspired fluff, so there’s only so dark it can go with this kind of drama, and the show has to awkwardly cut away since these are humans and not silly monsters in combat. Similarly, the bandits are over-the-top stock evil. Far be it from me to say that hired goons need to have their motives explored (they don’t) but in a sense they make the world feel less like it’s living and breathing. They’re bad for the sake of being bad and because they like stealing, without even hinting at any issues with the world around them that could drive such large groups of armed men to crime.
Last episode, when we were dealing with Sarasa’s emotional turmoil and getting some insight into Ophelia as a person, it was a good kind of overreach. Here, the show’s reach kind of exceeds its grasp and throws you out of the moments, in part because there’s this disconnect between tone and fact.
But that aside it’s a basic “wormy guy gets what’s coming to him” kind of entry that does very little on the larger scale but is passably entertaining for what it is. For this show, I’d call it about par for the course.