Recap: The Crescent Moon Alliance negotiates with the other crafting guilds.

Iro’s Thoughts:
Words, words, words. The bulk of this episode centers around a round-table meeting between the Crescent Moon Alliance and several other guilds, which means a whole lot of talking, a whole lot of internal monologuing, and a whole lot of pushing up glasses. Thankfully, it’s all presented without really descending into becoming boring, though I’m sure part of that is because I’m invested in the story by now. Few stories can take a verbal back-and-forth and make it interesting, or even just make long dialogue scenes enjoyable to watch.

Every episode I think that the author is showing off his inclination towards economics and logistics as he did in Maoyu, but this week takes the cake so far. The sheer amount of verbal wrangling on show here is staggering. Playing off the assumptions and expectations of the other guilds was particularly fun to watch, as was seeing that Shiroe’s reputation precedes him. Sword Art Online had a minor thing about players receiving nicknames, but that took place in a closed circle. Shiroe and the Debauchery Tea Party became infamous while Elder Tale was still a regular MMORPG, lending substantially more weight to the revelation.

The intermittent cuts into the twins’ plight break up the negotiations just enough to prevent that plot from being tiresome, but not necessarily theirs. They seem to fall into that highly Japanese way of thinking where they feel they don’t deserve to be rescued until they can rescue themselves under their own power, or something? Thankfully by the end of the episode they’re all on board with this rescue plan and toning down the anime brooding. Less thankfully, we end on a promise of another whole episode of talking and negotiations. While both of those are clearly on the list of Log Horizon‘s strengths, the show runs the danger of slowing down too much. I hope things stay interesting.