Nanatsu no Taizai 140 Review: Ban's Foxy Daddy

Nanatsu no Taizai, Chapter 140: The Bandit and the Boy

Yeah these reviews are all a bit shorter than my normal ones. Sorry about that but there’s a lot of chapters I missed last week. Anyway, this week on Nanatsu no Taizai we get a flashback about Ban’s childhood with this Zhivago fellow, and it is done really well when initially it looks like we’re going to get a parallel between Ban and his father-figure Zhivago, as well as this werefox and his two (apparently) deceased children… only for it to become apparent in the last four pages or so that the werefox is Zhivago. It’s pretty well done, and really just feels like the ‘coincidentally similar backstory’ thing that fiction is so prone to using. (*cough*Arrow*cough*)

The flashback about little Ban is fairly interesting and the poor kid really did have a harsh life, getting beaten up by these jackasses and having to eat his own vomit to survive and nearly getting his virgin butthole sold off to some perverted noble. He gets rescued by Zhivago, and learns how to steal – those two panels showing how great Zhivago is at basically daylight-robbery-ing a bunch of people is pretty well done.

We get a little tie-in with the Fairy Fountain of Youth thing (which, as someone told me, name-dropped Zhivago way back during that arc). Anyway, after some bonding moments with Zhivago and how Zhivago considers Ban his second son (his real son is Therion, who is a werefox) there came a moment where Zhivago was cruelly forced to choose either to save his ‘adopted’ son Ban, being brutally beaten up by a bunch of people at the place that Ban was trying to rob by himself, or save his real son Therion, being hunted down by a bunch of dudes, and the art makes it look really, really brutal on Ban’s side and really sad on Zhivago’s side.

Ban obviously survived, but Zhivago came back too late to save Therion, who dies in his arms, but is too ashamed to go back and see Ban… and has been living with this burden that he sacrificed both of his sons until this moment, when Ban drops the bombshell that he survived and he had never held a grudge against Zhivago – quite the opposite, since Ban claims he would’ve lost respect towards Zhivago if he chose him over his own real son. And we get a touching reunion.

Overall, yeah, it’s definitely a distraction from the Ten Commandments thing (and I’m still iffy over the Azure Sky dweebs beating down Dreyfus) but since Ban is my favourite character and this is indeed a great touching backstory, I do quite enjoy myself reading these. Still wonder what the whole point of all this is, other than Ban possibly learning how to become a werefox as his own power-up? I dunno. We’ll see next chapter, I guess.