Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok Episode 4 Commentary
Why is Loki going around exterminating evil, anyway? Does he expect to come across answers as to why he was banished, or to find a way back home? Or could he have been banishes for doing something evil, and this is his way of atoning for his sins?
Each episode so far has been very different from the prior episodes, but isn’t it a bit early to be delving into Mayura’s past? We can already determine her mother isn’t around from seeing her living with only her father. The scene with young Mayura falling into the hole and crying over not being able to reach her mother might would have had a lot more impact if Mayura had more time to be established, at least beyond being clumsy and liking mysteries.
If there’s one thing I learned from this episode, it’s that pink is Mayura’s natural hair color. Or she’s been dying her hair since before she could crawl.
This episode has a tiny bit of a hole: Mayura’s age. Her father says she’ll be graduating from high school soon. The prior episode with the after-school activity recruiting events suggests it’s early in the school year, putting Mayura in her final or maybe next to final school year. 16 or 17 years old. However, Loki says the memories they enter are from ten years ago, and Mayura in the memories looks about three year old. It’d be a stretch to label her as four years old, and even then going ahead ten years is only 14 years old. If Loki was rounding off years, it could have been memories from ten years prior, but even then the numbers should still be off by at least a year, if not two. Verdict? Loki being a god doesn’t know the first thing about human aging, leaving him to assume the memories were from ten years ago, but they’re really from 13 or 14 years ago.
Narugami appears in yet another part-time job which takes him to Loki. Surely it’s coincidence, and intended as a form of comic relief. Hopefully he’ll have more of a role than this in the series.
Loki’s voice is played by Yuriko Fuchizaki and Shannon Emerick. Yuriko’s voiced a number of characters in various series, but this is her first role I’ve heard (unless you count Ket in Kiki’s Delivery Service, but that was a super-tiny role). Likewise, Shannon’s dubbing roles have been for series I have not seen.
Yuriko is able to pull off a believable young, male voice for young Loki. I’ve already commented on Shannon’s voice for Loki sounding more feminine in comparison. By the second episode, she’d already begun to fit better as Loki’s voice, and I feel she provides an acceptable voice for him. The only remaining issue for me is her pronouncing of Norse god and place names sounds awkward, as if she stumbled through the pronunciation, and just wanted that part to be over with so she can continue on with pronounceable words.
