Anime Pilgrimage RTT

Black Lagoon – episode 3

“Ring-Ding Ship Chase”

This episode displays many kinds of sadism, and it berates itself for doing so. The world of pirates is a world that is far dirtier outside of the context of the Black Lagoon crew.

The Lagoon company have no jobs, so they temporarily retire to their ground base in the port city of Anbapara. Due to Dutch’s links with Balalaika, the Lagoon company are remarkably unpopular with all of the local crime lords, and one is stupid enough to take them on.

Rock is unimportant for once, as we watch Dutch negotiate his way around the city and Levi explain that she has always been a pirate: stealing, killing and doing “other bad things” since she was a child.

Some episodes can be broken down to key ideas, and this one is Rock’s thought about Levi’s skills: “While I said that, I thought to myself ‘what must have happened to her to break her in such a way? How broken am I that I praise her for it?'”.
If you consider the reality of piracy too heavily, this show can’t be fun at all because these characters are shipping heroin, explosives and generally creating havoc in the free world. We’re not broken for enjoying this, although perhaps Chin’s fate was taking it too far. The show is, without doubt, a more tasteful look at this sort of subject matter than the Hollywood movies of the late eighties and early nineties that it emulates; the ruined Buddha is so metaphorical for the whole idea of this show I can’t even begin.

It is, therefore, a godsend that Levi can jump from ship to ship on the ocean, blowing people up all over the place without suffering a scratch. We need her to remind us that excess is the key, because the understated violence of real life is just too much for us. Keep on blowing things up, Lagoon Company. Keep on blowing things up.