Nanatsu no Taizai, Chapter 245: The March of the Saints
I didn't really make a chapter review for the previous entry in Nanatsu no Taizai mostly because, um, I missed it. Whoops! Essentially it's a big 'remember these characters that haven't appeared in a while? Yeah, they're relevant now.' Margaret gets possessed by Reudeciel or however the fuck you spell that name. Ruedieciel returning is a plot development you could see from a mile away for the simple fact that he (she?) was never killed in the flashback arc. And now, well, he's gone and possessed Margaret!
And, well, for all her bluster, the only real 'evil' thing she's done as she appears to the human forces is taking over Margaret's body, keeping her more... evil undertones hidden from Dreyfus and Hendricksen. Of course, taking over Margaret's body is pretty evil in and of itself, which might be the thing that ends up causing Gilthunder, Dreyfus, Hendricksen and the others to rebel against Rudeciel.
We get a neat montage of other holy knights like Jericho, Guila and Hauser getting their asses kicked by a demon, before they're rescued by a member of the goddess clan. It's a bit sad that these characters, who used to be pretty dang important back in the pre-Hendricksen arc, is basically reduced to Worf Effect targets... but a lot of the human characters that aren't Elizabeth or a Sin ends up being shoved aside anyway, so... eh. Hopefully with the last arc thinning out the ranks of supporting characters, we'll get more characterization for Gilthunder and the others?
We get to see Slader, who I really like, and the unmemorable Azure Sky people (wasn't one of them named Death-Pierce or some metal name like that?) and they do see the members of the goddess clan as saviours... and honestly, other than the one crime of possessing Margaret's body (and, y'know, all their war crimes a couple thousand years ago), it's hard for the humans to argue otherwise.
We then check in with Gilthunder, who got his ass trapped in a weird mystical prison by Vivianne, which is easily one of the silliest and most out-of-nowhere subplot introduced to us during... the timeskip? There was a period of time when the mangaka was sick and had to make short stories, and Gilthunder being trapped was one of them -- that was like a year ago or something. They really didn't do anything at all with the subversion that it's the handsome knight that gets trapped in a tower, not the princess... and I don't really see why Gilthunder can't just kill the sex-crazed Vivianne. Or maybe it's explained and I forgot? I just don't like Vivianne as a villain.
And she just gets stabbed through the neck when Rudeciel-in-Margaret shows up with a magic portal, and we get an almost-reunion between Margaret and Gilthunder... and it's apparently a deal between Margaret and Reudiciel -- Reudeciel will help Margaret free Gilthunder from wherever he's trapped in, and Margaret will act as his (her?) host.
Rueduciel wants to bring the forces to fight against the 'three great evil stars' of Meliodas, Zeldoris and Estarossa, and is recruiting the human holy knights into a new version of Stigmata. And... there's a bit where Dreyfus is like 'oh my god, this is so cruel' in regards to Vivianne, but Vivianne has been portrayed as nothing but loathsome, psychotic and crazy (and also, absent for the last year of comics) so I really can't go "alas, poor villain" on her.
So yeah. We got rid of a couple of outstanding hanging plot threads, did a little plot twist and returned some older supporting characters to prominence. It's certainly a step in the right direction in my opinion, for the simple fact that I really feel that Nanatsu is so embroiled with flashbacks and Meliodas' backstory and the random introduction of Chandler and Cussack and checking the Ten Commandments off a list (and bringing them back to kill them off again) that it kind of missed what made the first 150 or so chapters that good. Hopefully they can get me to care about side-characters again while still introducing interesting new ones.
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