Chatty AF 85: Yona of the Dawn Watchalong – Episodes 7-12 (WITH TRANSCRIPT)

CAITLIN: Hi, and welcome to Chatty AF, the Anime Feminist podcast. Welcome to the second episode of our watchalong of the shoujo series Yona of the Dawn. My name is Caitlin, and I’m a writer and editor for Anime Feminist as well as writing for The Daily Dot, and my own blog. I Have a Heroine Problem. I’m joined today by Peter Fobian and special guest Gabriella Ekens.

GABRIELLA: Hello, I’m Gabriella Ekens, I’ve written for a few years for Anime News Network. I think my most highly traffic stuff is like… Unlimited Blade Works from a few years ago, I did the Pop Team Epic reviews last winter, and that’s the most recent, notable stuff. Unless you’re a religious Shelf-Life reader.

PETER: And I’m Peter Fobian, I’m an associate producer at Crunchyroll and a contributor and editor at Anime Feminist.

CAITLIN: So, we are on… We just watched episodes seven to twelve of Yona of the Dawn. Do you guys remember what your predictions were last time?

PETER: I think I predicted the chipmunk would show up and it totally did, so I knew what I was talking about.

CAITLIN: Congratulations

PETER: Thank you. I was pretty confident about that one.

CAITLIN: Gabbo, did you make any?

GABRIELLA: I don’t remember, but I’m gonna guess that I predicted that she’d begin accruing an anime harem, and that did happen.

PETER: Also true. Chipmunks and reverse harems.

CAITLIN: All right, you guys did good. I feel like there were a couple that I was sitting in there smiling at because like, “Ahaha that’s not right,” but I don’t remember what they were.

PETER: Might want to write them down if you wanna use them against us in the future.

CAITLIN: That way I will crow about them next time.

GABRIELLA: I believe Yona will die.

CAITLIN: Alright, there we go. That sounds like a prediction made in good faith, an accurate and likely one.

All right, so in these episodes seven to twelve, Yona did survive her fall and she met the prophetic priest Ik-Soo and his young and brilliant caretaker, Yoon. And Yoon joins Yona and Hak as they go out to search for the Dragons. And the first one they meet is the White Dragon Gija, who has a giant monster claw. And he, of course, joins the team, and then they go and use his dragon powers to find the Blue Dragon. And that is sort of where episode twelve leaves us.

So, I was looking at my manga. And one of the most common complaints about Yona is that it’s really slow-paced. I remember even in the first episode, we were talking about— I mean, first watchalong episode—we were talking about how it takes a really, really long time for things to actually get going—

PETER: After the first episode. I think in the first episode a lot happened and then after that it slowed down.

CAITLIN: Yeah, like it slows down so quickly.

That is because, I think, most animated adaptations of manga, they go generally one or two episodes per volume is my impression, but the first six episodes [of Yona] are two volumes.

The next six episodes are one and a half volumes. It is going at—it’s not just you; it is going at a super slow pace. And I have really mixed feelings because I can’t think of too much that I would sit there—like it all feels like it’s character building. It is action-driven and story-driven but it also very character-driven. But also very little gets accomplished in each episode, sometimes, and it feels really frustrating. I don’t know, what do you guys think?

GABRIELLA: This seems like the type of show that I would be a little more into it if everything was like 1.5 times a little more dense, but that would also break up the even episode counts. So maybe if this was like 40-minute HBO episodes that be better.

CAITLIN: Oh man, HBO Yona of the Dawn would be…

GABRIELLA: That’s called Game of Thrones.

CAITLIN: I guess it does have a little bit in common with Game of Thrones.

PETER: If it was just about Daenerys, I guess.

CAITLIN: Well, the king dies in the first episode.

GABRIELLA: She’s the chosen lady of the dragon.

CAITLIN: There’s no incest so far, though. Well, I guess, Yona and Su-Won are related.

PETER: Are they?

CAITLIN: They’re cousins.

PETER: That was normal back then though, right?

CAITLIN: But no twincest.

PETER: That is something I wanna talk about. The divine mandate that seems to be becoming a big theme in the story.

CAITLIN: Yeah. Well, I think we can get to that for sure. Actually, we can talk about it now. Yeah, I never really thought about the divine mandate as a part of the story, but like… Yeah, go ahead, Peter.

PETER: I don’t know if it’s something that’s been bothering me more recently ’cause I keep seeing it come up, but… And maybe it’s just ’cause it’s contrasted against Su-Won, who’s kind of trying to defy fate to do something that he believes is right. I’m a little bit gray on what my point originally was, but—it’s been, it’s been a week or two.

He kind of… There’s the big prophecy about the ruler coming down from heaven and helping everybody out. But I guess, I don’t know, it’s because Su-Won, the way he’s acting, it doesn’t seem like that’s working out; like he feels like he has to be in charge to run the country properly. I guess it’s because of the foreign threat or something, ’cause it seems like he didn’t betray the King because he wanted the power; he wanted the power so that he could run the country in a way where they wouldn’t be under threat of foreign attacks. Am I getting that right? He seems unhappy with the way the country was being run. He felt like it was going to destroy the country, right?

CAITLIN: Yes.

GABRIELLA: I’d say that seems like what’s happening.

PETER: So he obviously has… It seems like altruistic motivations for what he did. But then you have like this, what do you call that? Divine rulership. So he’s breaking that because he thinks that the ruler is inept despite the fact that they have the divine mandate.

And now there’s this whole: “But Yona was ordained by the gods to come back in and run the country and there’s nothing you can do about it.” So I don’t know if that’s going to come to a head later, but it seems like maybe there’s a problem with this whole divine mandated rule type thing, because the leader isn’t always great.

Although then they have this third storyline running with the fact that her dad actually wasn’t that bad. I guess it’s ’cause we don’t know a lot about what’s happening outside the country or what happened previously between their fathers.

CAITLIN: Yeah, it’s definitely the divine mandate sort of thing is… I never really thought about it, but I guess it is kind of anti-revolutionary.

It’s a popular fictional trope, but the whole thing is that King Il wasn’t doing a very good job as King and so Su-Won did what he felt like he had to do and killed him. But even though Yona was spoiled and didn’t know anything about anything, she was on track to become ruler of the country. And even if she’s learning now, if it hadn’t happened, then she would have had that divine right.

GABRIELLA: I’m interested now if this show is gonna do anything commentative on that or if it’s gonna be a fun adventure that’s a little mixed messages and all on that front. I’d be fine either way, but it would be cool if we got one of those shows that’s actually commenting on the thematic of who should rule, can Yona atone for this, was Su-Won in the right, things like that.

PETER: I think they definitely did show that Su-Won has jumped the gun since if he’d waited like a day, he might have become king anyway. ‘Cause Yona was gonna convince her father to let them get married, right?

CAITLIN: Well, she was gonna try, but it was shown that King Il is pretty stubborn himself.

PETER: Yeah, I mean it was a maybe, but definitely that would’ve maybe been the first thing to try rather than regicide. That would usually be the last option on my flow chart of possible ways to wrest control of the kingdom. So he’s definitely a jumped-the-gun type, so that might be setting the groundwork for why he maybe isn’t a great ruler, ’cause he definitely jumped to the worst thing you can do first, right?

GABRIELLA: Didn’t something happen too between the brothers? We got hints of that. I don’t remember if it was communicated clearly.

CAITLIN: It’s not clear exactly what happened, but by all expectations Su-Won should have been the crown prince. His father was the older brother, he was a war hero and a powerful leader. And for some reason, their grandfather chose Il to inherit the throne instead of Su-Won’s dad.

PETER: So I guess a lot of the divine mandate “who’s right” type of thing really relies on how they reveal the backstory regarding whether her dad was a good person or a bad person, since they’ve given us hints that he was one or the other

CAITLIN: Right. And these are things that, honestly, I don’t have answers for. This has not been addressed in the manga so far. I don’t know if it will be addressed.

But it does address Yona’s need to learn about her country and learn about what is going on, which I really appreciate. She’s not just the deposed princess, but she is learning how to be a leader and learning about her country as she goes out and finds these dragons. Like, she meets Yoon and Ik-Soo and she learns that they were facing this terrible famine not too long ago.

PETER: Yeah, It seems… she’s sheltered, too. So a lot of this stuff, I think they’re trying to give Yona’s perspective, and she didn’t know shit. ‘Cause the only thing she really was paying attention to is whether her hair looked good or not for Su-Won before, so she’s probably gonna learn—

CAITLIN: Her “unruly and unusual red hair.”

PETER: Yeah, so she’s gonna learn a lot about—

GABRIELLA: She also has “splendorous orbs.”

PETER: Yeah, good eyes.

CAITLIN: But not as good as the blue dragon’s wonderous orbs.

PETER: So we’re probably gonna get her finding out that maybe the kingdom isn’t having fun all the time like she is.

CAITLIN: Yeah. But we do start to see Yona’s development in this stretch of episodes, like her starting to learn archery.

GABRIELLA: Yeah, which gives Hak a boner.

CAITLIN: [laughs] Yeah, it stirs his desires.

GABRIELLA: She almost shoots him in the face, and he’s like—he hugs her and he’s like, “I wanna do more…We should go.”

[Brief pause]

PETER: Hey, this is Peter from the future. And no joke, this is the last thing Gabriella said before her recording cut out. She stayed on the call, so the episode was finished and at this point it would be really awkward to go back and re-record the second episode when we’ve already recorded basically the rest of the series.

To keep the watchalong moving, we decided to put out the cast with just the audio from Caitlin and myself, and I did my very best to keep out moments where we ask Gabriella what she thinks and there’s an awkward silence. Apologies for the inconvenience, and hopefully, you’ll get episode three and four without any issues. So without further ado, the rest of the cast beginning with Caitlin and my own reaction to Gabriella’s comment.

[Brief pause]

PETER: Definitely… You’re getting kind of a mixed signals from Hak, right? Well, I put up an image set. He said, “think of me as a tool” or something like that.

CAITLIN: He just really wants her to domme him is, what I’m getting here. This is a shoujo and I appreciate it being low-key horny. Romance isn’t at the forefront of the conflict, but it is not subtle about Hak not just being in love with Yona but being kinda turned on by her and by her growth. And Yona has no fucking clue.

PETER: The series would be a lot hornier if he was brave enough to say something… but we’re just let into his horrible thoughts while he remains stoic. Yeah, I honestly don’t know why he’s thought of as a jerk, maybe stuff happens later. Maybe people don’t appreciate a dude who’s been thinking some of that stuff.

CAITLIN: It’s mostly him being rude and teasing her. I think, I don’t know, I’m sure people will… will explain it in the comments about why Hak is actually terrible and possibly some of them will explain why we’re a terrible person—people—and terrible feminists for not seeing why Hak is terrible. I don’t know. No, but I do enjoy her relationship with how Hak.

I mean Hak’s just kind of a butt in general. He teases Gija all the time. But one scene I really appreciated was the scene of her practicing archery at night. She doesn’t just pick up a bow and arrow and all of a sudden she’s a cool warrior princess; she works so hard.

PETER: Training arc.

CAITLIN: Low-key, yes. We don’t get the whole “I’m going to do this special thing to learn how to do this,” but she has to really, really work for it because it doesn’t come naturally to her. Unlike Hak “Oh, I just kind of do it.” Okay, thanks, very helpful. She realizes that this is who she needs to be, and so she puts in an incredible amount of effort to do it.

This show definitely excels at character growth. And speaking of character growth: we met a few new characters this time around, didn’t we? First, she meets Ik-Soo and Yoon and learns from them about how real people live.

PETER: Like starving to death.

CAITLIN: Yeah. I really like Yoon. I like how he is egotistical and arrogant, but he is also really driven by a caring… What’s the word I’m looking for? Nurturing. He’s a really nurturing person. Contrast it with a lot of these similar shows and a lot of them are just different varieties of jerks, whereas Hak’s the only real butthole of the bunch.

PETER: Gija was kind of a jerk, just very indirectly. He wanted to be the only one to protect Yona or whatever, so that’s as a shitty attitude I think, in the way he’s thinking about his relationship with Yona that he just sort of takes out on every other character.

CAITLIN: Yeah, no that’s true. He does kind of… Yeah, no, you’re right. Gija is actually kind of a butt, he’s actually probably one of the least popular characters.

This is a show that doesn’t really care about gender roles in masculinity. It doesn’t feel like it’s going to be like “Okay, well now I’m going to send these things up,” but it’s not concerned about Yona being feminine, being the feminine character. Probably the most feminine character is Yoon. He’s the healer.

PETER: The one who has all the practical skills that everybody else lacks ’cause they’re either an idiot or they just know how to kill people.

CAITLIN: Right? This is all very true. He is the only one who knows how to do chores or cook or take care of himself in general, ’cause Yona and Hak and Gija had servants to do all that stuff. And I like how with Yoon they got it out of the way pretty quickly where she’s like, “Yeah, I was bothered by the bugs at first, but now I don’t even care.”

The prissy one—that’s the word to describe Gija. He’s prissy—is a guy, and even though he’s prissy, he’s also extremely powerful and will slap you with his giant fucking dragon monster hand.

PETER: That’s a really weird power,

CAITLIN: ‘Cause they have dragon parts. He’s got the dragon’s hand.

PETER: His town was weird too.

CAITLIN: Yeah, everyone had the same hair color.

PETER: They all had a type, too. Like, hey did you know her hair’s red? It’s like, “What do you need me to do, Miss red-haired girl?” So, what’s the deal—so I guess, what’s his name, Sinha or something like that.

CAITLIN: He doesn’t have a name yet. Spoilers!

PETER: He paralyzes people by looking at them, so they wear masks, so they will randomly get paralyzed even though they also told him to get nowhere near them.

CAITLIN: I don’t remember if they explain the thing with the masks.

PETER: It’s like some high-key paranoia there.

CAITLIN: Yeah, his whole town is kind of a contrast between Gija’s town and blue dragon’s town, right? In the White Dragon Village, they all worship him, he’s basically a prince, they keep throwing women at him, he has a bazillion servants, he is spoiled beyond belief.

And in Blue Dragonville he is super stigmatized. Of course, this turns out with Gija being spoiled and Blue Dragon being very sweet, but also…terrified of people. I love the Blue Dragon, he’s such a good boy, he’s so sweet.

PETER: Now that’s a spoiler, because he hasn’t done anything.

CAITLIN: No! You’ve seen his backstory and he helps Yona… He’s a sweet boy.

PETER: I guess he helps her find her way out of the cave.

CAITLIN: Yeah.

PETER: I don’t understand what the deal with that is, because I guess they recognized that she’s the red-haired Yona, right—the rightful ruler? It seems like they have no awareness—like the other town knew what the dragon was and that he had to serve Yona… But the Blue Dragon Village, I don’t even know if they’re aware of that. Was that just lost to generations or something?

CAITLIN: Well, ’cause they recognized that the Blue Dragon was the Blue Dragon at birth, and it was such a disgrace that his mom killed herself.

PETER: I remember he said, in the legend, the leader died and then they kind of went to the four winds until they got called again. If it’s just whoever is the next in the line for the throne would be the next leader, couldn’t they just stick around and continue being servants rather than ending up out in the boonies where the meaning of their legends could get slowly lost history, and people would start to revile them for their power?

Like, you imagine your four greatest warriors… Their families might stick around in the palace and just continue serving whoever is the next divinely mandated ruler, unless they had a good reason to break up.

CAITLIN: It definitely seems to be a sort of divine thing. The country’s in such a mess that it’s time for King Hiryuu to—I don’t know if it’s reincarnation, but for someone with his spirit to come along and become a leader and gather the four dragons and fix the country, [imitates trumpet fanfare] buh bah bah!

PETER: So I think what we’re getting is there is a lot going on with this whole Arthurian legend that she has behind her bloodline, and the fact that it chose now to… She’s the nexus of all this stuff coming back together again. And some of it is potentially problematic, so there’s a lot of ground that could be tilled here. Or maybe not in terms of… Whether the divine mandate is good or bad.

Why now? When obviously the country wasn’t going that great before, was it just because the leader was deposed? Does the person come back to ensure the leadership continues or to save the country? And the reason they split up the Dragons: whether it was just a narrative contrived so that she has to go on the quest or if there was an actual reason that they had to not hang around the palace and let things get as bad as they were.

CAITLIN: So, I have a theory… And it’s not spoilers because it’s nothing confirmed and it’s… I just thought of it now. And it’s based on information that’s all been revealed so far.

So, I have a theory that the kingdom was already not doing super great. The reason that King Il inherited the throne might have been Yona was already born—’cause I don’t think Il was king for very long—but Yona was already born and they saw the red hair and they’re like, “This is the inheritor of… she is the inheritor of the spirit of King Hiryuu.”

So she needs to be on track to someday become ruler. But it is also—the story is regarded by most to be a children’s—like, a legend. It’s not taken seriously as historical fact by most people. I think Yona says that. “Oh, that’s just a story that we read.”

PETER: How isolated are these tribes, though? There’s like a dude walking around with a giant dragon claw.

CAITLIN: I mean, y’know, you saw… It’s a very mountainous region. Things can get pretty isolated then, it’s not like you had easy ways to communicate between villages. I think it would be pretty simple for a place to start being pretty isolated. So I don’t know, that’s my theory. And I think the world is more developed than a lot of these sort of series.

The easy comparison is Fushigi Yugi. A lot of people compare these two series, and I don’t know hardly anything at all about the countries where that series took place. I don’t know anything about the Konan empire; I don’t know everything anything about the Kutou empire. But I really feel like I am learning a lot about Kouka and what’s going on in Kouka. And the different tribes have kind of different cultures, but they are all within a single nation.

So you can see the difference between the Wind Tribe and the Fire Tribe, but the world is so much more developed and I think that… the character-driven parts, the characters feel very human, and I think those are really what sets the series apart.

PETER: Yeah, I mean we already—kind of seems… I don’t know, I’m not up to stuff on my Korean mythology or anything, but they definitely got some notes of Arthurian legend in here, so it’s definitely drawing on existing myths, it’s just the characters the author put in the center of it are very memorable. It’s fine to retell stories like that, so long as you make the characters interesting or put another twist on it, or something. So that’s what separates Yona, I guess. I wonder if there’s a similar Korean myth.

CAITLIN: Stories like that tend to recur in a lot of different places.

PETER: I have a question though, you can… Anybody can pop in and answer this if they want. So Su-no—Yona’s dad doesn’t want her to be able to fight or marry the man that she wants, so he kills her dad, who’s stopping her from living freely.

CAITLIN: You mean Su-Won.

PETER: So, is that feminist?

CAITLIN: [realizing she’s being trolled] For fuck’s sake, Peter.

PETER: [chuckles; deadpan] Well, he’s tearing down the patriarchy, and now she’s fighting and she’s dating Hak.

CAITLIN: For fuck’s sake, Peter. Yona’s not dating anyone, she doesn’t have time for that. She has more important things to worry about.

PETER: I think they’re starting to get into some kinky stuff, though, so.

CAITLIN: It’s all on Hak right now. Yona has bigger fish to fry.

PETER: Do you ever… You ever been just knee-deep in kink and just completely unaware of it? That’s Yona.

CAITLIN: Yeah, no, she’s the naive person who does not realize what she’s doing at all. He doesn’t do anything to betray her trust, ’cause she trusts him so implicitly even if he’s kind of a butt and jokes about groping her while she is in a bag.

I think that’s something else that Hak does that has people saying like: “Oh, he’s a jerk, he’s an abusive figure,” is he got handsy while she was in the bag. And that’s not good. I don’t want to downplay that.

PETER: Well, they both talk shit though. I feel like that’s just their relationship. I’ve met people like that who just like… You’d think that they hated each other, if they didn’t hang out all the time. Some people just like ribbing each other constantly. And I don’t know, this is just my perspective, so you can tell me if you disagree, but I feel like it’s pretty even between them.

CAITLIN: I mean, as long as it’s a give and take and they’re more or less equal in power—or if the woman is slightly more powerful, just as long as the guy is not more powerful. But anyway, I can see why people get upset about that scene. I don’t want to dismiss that as… Yeah, no, I don’t want to dismiss that. I agree that that is not a good look that he is doing that and it is not okay and it’s not cool.

But also… I pick my battles. I can understand that would have people totally turned off of him as a character, but I still like him, and I still like their general relationship. Y’know? While still trying not to be dismissive of that.

PETER: There’s one thing we didn’t really talk about. Was it Ik-Soo, the guy who could literally talk to… God, I guess?

CAITLIN: Yeah, Ik-Soo.

PETER: Is there an established God in this? I don’t quite get that. The Dragons came down from heaven, right? And one wanted to live as a human and then end becoming the ruler of the humans, then the other Dragons got lonely, followed that dragon down and became his like, holy warriors. Right? So, I’m getting that right?

CAITLIN: I feel like that’s… And God, I hope I’m not saying something totally incorrect and wrong, but in a lot of polytheistic religions it’s almost like the different gods are different aspects of a single figure? I mean it’s like people will talk about all the different gods and then they’ll talk about Kami-sama. I don’t know, I’m talking out my ass right now. It’s— [fumbles for a minute] it’s not like the Christian God.

It is a convenient device. But yeah, it also does go back to the divine rule. Yona is the divine ruler. The higher powers are on her side, she is the chosen one. But going back to Su-Won. Does Su-Won not knowing that, does that make him the bad guy and…? But I do think there is an ambiguity to Su-Won. I think he has the best motivations in mind, he just is on a different side than our protagonist.

PETER; Yeah, I mean I think they made it pretty clear that his motivations were not necessarily bad, he just… His means were murder.

CAITLIN: Cool motive, still murder. How many things can I quote in this podcast episode.

PETER: You get deep in there, so. Yeah, I think there’s definitely one of the… I think in addition to kind of being a road fantasy and having interesting characters I think it’s also at least hedging whether… about the morality a lot of these characters are approaching it with and who… And it’s not really saying who might be right, although it’s really kind of—I don’t know.

It would be interesting if at the end it’s like, “Okay well, does it really matter what God wants for the country, is it important what the country wants for the country?” Something like that. I’m really hoping it takes that direction, ’cause I guess that would be like the most ambitious thing this story could do.

CAITLIN: Is saying like “even if Yona’s the divinely chosen ruler, Su-Won is the one who is taking the reins and fixing things” sort of thing?

PETER: Yeah, and I mean she’s obviously got some charisma; she’s already got the royal haki.

CAITLIN: Royal wuh?

PETER: Haki. Y’know, Haki is a thing in One Piece. Royal Haki, you can make everybody bend the knee to you.

CAITLIN: Oh right, that again.

PETER: I’m gonna keep making that joke, so just buckle in, I guess. But… So, she obviously has potential as an individual, but yeah, they never educated her on any of the important stuff you probably need to know if you wanted to be a good bureaucratic ruler. So maybe she’ll learn that in the forest. I don’t know, I’m pretty sure Yoon could teach her all about that. He seems to know everything.

CAITLIN: He is able to—he can pick up a book and understand it and completely remember it.

PETER: Oh, does he have eidetic memory? I didn’t write that down. Oh shit.

CAITLIN: Yes, yes he does.

PETER: That’s pretty important.

CAITLIN: It is, yeah. No, that’s established.

PETER: Damn, just straight up like destiny handed her a bureaucrat to handle the country.

CAITLIN: Yeah, no, he’s brilliant and kinda arrogant but also a sweet, sweet boy who loves his foster father.

PETER: Who is probably just dead in the forest now ’cause he didn’t seem to do too well without Yoon around.

CAITLIN: Who is completely incapable of taking care of himself.

PETER: When they did leave, I was like, “Well I guess Ik-Soo’s dead, ’cause he couldn’t walk down the street without almost dying before.” But he was like, “No, leave me I’ll be fine, live your life.” That’s very generous. He’s sacrificing his life.

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] “I’ll be fine, I didn’t fall off the cliff this time.”

But I thought that was one of the sadder parts of the series so far is, when Yoon realized that Ik-Soo was trying to make him leave. Because Ik-Soo knows that Yoon has a greater purpose in life than just taking care of this…than just taking care of this one person. [sadly] But Yoon love him, he doesn’t wanna go.

PETER: If he’s still alive, they could probably post him up.

CAITLIN: Yeah, but I… and this goes back to what we were talking about with this show kind of plays with gender roles. Is that Yoon…

PETER: He’s the cute, clumsy moe?

CAITLIN: No, he’s just, he’s someone who cares—he cares for other people. And they got over it, and Yona doesn’t care about bugs anymore. But Gija sure does. Instead of Yona being the prissy princess for the whole way.

So yeah, I really enjoy it. How it’s this very sort of casual disregard for gendered expectations. They’re not just the pre-molded archetypes, they have some complexity beyond their prescribed roles. It’s cool, it’s really exciting to see.

We should start wrapping up. Do you guys have any more predictions? I’m gonna make a note of it now.

PETER: Well, I think she’s probably gonna finish her collection for sure. I think it’s gonna… I will predict, cause I wanna make an ambitious prediction, that it is actually going to examine the idea of a divine mandate of rulership. And maybe Yona specifically will have to ask some questions about whether that sort of thing is just… And whether, Son-Wo is a good ruler, because I feel like that’s something that you would do as the plot turns into the second half, so that’s my prediction. You write that down, Caitlin.

Oh wait, final prediction. The chipmunk’s voice actor is Ryan Reynolds. Yeah, yeah, mm-hm. Yona of the Dawn: Private Eye. Detective Yona.

CAITLIN: All right, you jokers. I’m writing everything down, so you know.

All right, so… That concludes our second episode of the Yona of the Dawn watchalong podcast. Thanks to Peter and Gabbo for coming along.

If you like the show, go to check us out on our website, AnimeFeminist.com; and if you really like us, check out our Patreon. We have some really ambitious projects that we would love to do to grow as a website, and we need some financial support for that. Every little bit helps.

You can also check out our Twitter, or Tumblr, and on Facebook. Thanks for listening, everyone. Have a great whatever.

PETER: I like that.

CAITLIN: I always fuck up the sign-off.