Nanatsu no Taizai 196 Review: Loss of Emotion

Nanatsu no Taizai, Chapter 196: As Long As You Are Here

Honestly not really much to say in this chapter. It's a bit of a long conversation, a short funeral for some minor characters and Meliodas talking to Elizabeth and confirming things that we're more or less sure about. Hawk's mother is alive, Escanor and Merlin have a brief (and honestly nowhere as epic or hammy as I would've liked, considering Escanor's there) reconciliation and short discussion about Meliodas -- and, no, Merlin, Meliodas killing Fraudrin last chapter was totally necessary. Yeah, he might be a bit of a dick about it, but the fact that Merlin finds a problem with the way Meliodas killed Fraudrin (a single punch, which is honestly not that horrible) instead of, oh, not doing a thing and goading Fraudrin to basically nuke Britannica, is a bit suspect. I mean, what are you going to do with Fraudrin? This isn't Batman, you can't just tie him up and leave him behind for Commissioner Gordon to put into a jail. Or is Merlin just upset she's not allowed to suck another demon to use as an experiment?

Apparently Marmas (the dude with the funny roly-poly armour) died off-screen, and is buried alongside Denzel, Dogget and... Jericho's brother? I didn't remember him dying. Either no one cares about Zaratros or they can't find his body, but he's not among the dead. Jericho is absolutely upset about that, while the lady from the Pleaides throws rocks at Dreyfus and Hendricksen in anger. The king gives a speech. Honestly I don't really care for any of these four (and Zaratros, too) because we don't really spend that much time with them. I barely even remember Dogget dying, and Denzel was more of a plot device than an actual character. So, eh. Whatever.

Then we get a super-long shippy scene between Meliodas and Elizabeth, where Meliodas is absolutely scared at the changes happening to him, how he's unable to see the subtleties that Ban was probably trying to tell him without saying a word, about how he enjoyed killing Fraudrin and still feels giddy about it, and how his curse of immortality will slowly corrupt and eat away his emotions every time he's brought back to life. And he's aware of this, absolutely scared that he'll turn back into his old self.

More or less a very uneventful chapter, really. I don't have much to say about it. It's just a breather chapter after so many fight scenes.