Reply To: Anime Challenge~

I’ll choose shocking (as in not “epic” in a good or cool sense). A lot of moments from Eva are contenders, but I’m going to go with a scene from Black Lagoon: Roberta’s Blood Trail.

Use discretion because not only are there spoilers, but this one ain’t pretty folks, so consider yourselves warned:

As Roberta is on her murderous trail of carnage and spiraling ever further down the path of psychosis, Garcia Lovelace–a young boy who is the anchor of her sanity and focal point for her protective zeal–obliviously follows her trail of destruction to find his beloved matronly figure (whom he naively sees as being incapable of such atrocities) engaging in animalistic, depraved sexual acts with a guerrilla soldier in order to lower his guard and ultimately kill him in the most brutish, gory manner imaginable. What’s more, as evidenced to us viewers and likely to the discombobulated Garcia by this point (I don’t wish to check again, but if I recall there were already multiple corpses littering the dimly lit room before his arrival), this tactic was not employed out of necessity: Roberta’s physical prowess, mental instability and razor-honed killing skills means she can pretty much wipe out whomever she damn well pleases in an instant, meaning no need for the token femme fatale or feminine wiles…meaning she did it for sheer amusement and sick thrills. Kill a man? Sure, okay…get him hot and heavy and then kill him during the heat of the moment? Now THAT’S hot! (That’s as best as I can imagine what must have been going on in her depraved mind.)

It’s only after the deed is done and Roberta climbs down from the high of her blood lust that she notices that the last person in the world she would ever want to have witnessed such an act, let alone from her, did just that: the child she was avenging and had looked after for so many years saw her dark side. Can it get worse? Yup. Because at the shock of seeing Garcia in the last place one would logically expect him to be, Roberta maddeningly concludes that he’s just a hallucination (she’s been struggling with those up to this point), picks up a gun, and hysterically decides to prove it by shooting him. Stunned by the events he’d just seen, and coupled with being confronted by the woman who had dotingly raised him since infancy, Garcia is too numb to move: to prevent us viewers from being reduced to a complete pile of blithering mush, Garcia is saved at the very last second (by U.S. soldiers if I recall, the chief cause of Roberta’s rage). But for Garcia, as for me and many other viewers, it was a moot point: the damage was done.

wth2 That one’s gonna’ stay with me, as will Black Lagoon as a whole.