Noragami Aragoto is the second season of the Noragami series, at first glance just your typical fantasy action anime, about a gods who armed with weapons created of restless spirits fight off demons and other supernatural menaces, loosely based on Japanese mythology/religion. What set it apart was the relationship between the three main characters: Yato, a god of war/misfortune, down on his luck and without any followers, his spirit weapon Yukine, a teenage boy turned restless spirit and Hiyori Iki, a normal school girl until an accident left her halfway between life and death and able to separate her soul from her body. The first season explored that relationship, the way each depended on the others, as well as Yato’s history as a god of misfortune and the way the gods worked in general. The second season just had its sixth episode, which concludes the first story arc, in which Yato’s past with Bishamon, a much more powerful and successful war god is used to manipulate the latter into self destruction.
And at the climax, it echoes one of the key points of the previous season, something that annoyed me at the time: the idea that the gods cannot do wrong, that the very notion of right and wrong is a human concept inapplicable to them. At the time it was presented as a justification for some of Yato’s less savoury behaviour, a fairly typical defense of the idea that the gods are above such human concerns. Here however we get the other side of the coin: if gods cannot do wrong, humans are allowed to make mistakes. You learn by your mistakes and if you’re never allowed to be wrong, you cannot learn or grow. That’s a theme that’s been present in the background of the entire series, now finally stated out in the open as the most destructive and unnecessary conflict in the series comes to an end. Where Yato and Yukine almost had to destroy each other to grow last season, here it’s Bishamon’s self destruction, fed by the villain’s manuipulations that finally forces her to grow up.
It’s this sort of thing that makes Noragami Aragoto my second favourite anime of this season, after concrete Revolutio.