Usagi Yojimbo: "Horse Thief" and "Village of Fear"

Two Samurabbit shorts today.

Horse Thief​

The next Usagi Yojimbo story looks like it's going to be another one-off. And also another bandit-centric adventure.

Damn are there a lot of bandits running around boldly attacking villagers out in the open.

Hmm.

So, part of this might just be the comic prioritizing genre conventions over historical fidelity. There are implausible numbers of armed villains who can be killed without any moral ambiguity erupting out from behind every tree, etc. But there may also be another factor that I overlooked because of the author's note at the beginning being so fixated on the historical Miyamoto Musashi.

Musashi was born at the very end of the Sengoku period, and thus didn't get to take part in most of the Warring States shenanigans. Given that his anthropomorphic rabbit expie seems to have been a soldier in an open war between major lords, though, it's possible that the author moved Usagi's birth date a decade or so earlier. That would explain quite a lot of things. The battle in which he failed his daimyo would have been one of the last major conflicts of the Sengoku, before the Tokugawas came out on top and stabilized the manorial borders. The rampant banditry we're seeing is the plague of deserters, opportunists, and governments-in-exile that tend to persist in the immediate aftermath of major feudal conflicts. The shogun might still actually be Tokugawa Ieyasu himself.

So, this is taking place in the furry version of 1600-1610 or so, rather than the 1620's-30's I expected from a grown up Musashi expie. Or else I'm just really overthinking it.

Well, back to the story! Usagi looks at bandits attacking herdsmen, and sees walking bags of XP and a monetary reward from some grateful herdsmen. So, he draws his katana, descends into the glen, and starts doing his thing.

That's quite a bit cartoonier than violence has usually been depicted in this comic, heh.

Unfortunately, Usagi arrived a little too late, and this bunch of bandits were a little too mobile thanks to their mounts. He kills a few of them, but by then they've already wiped out the convoy and gathered up all the valuables. The bandits' leader (another rabbit, interestingly enough; don't think we've seen any others until now) tells Usagi that he's a dead man as he leads his remaining men away across the hills. Not sure if he has any way of making good on that threat, but it might just be a neccessary face-saving gesture.

Usagi doesn't have much to scavenge, and since the victims are all dead there's no one to reward him for saving them. Still, he at least managed to nab a horse.

So, resolved to make the most of the situation, he rides the horse to the nearest town. While lunching at an inn, he happens to overhear a local magistrate bemoaning the recent loss of his horse. Thrilled with his luck, Usagi makes a sales pitch. A surprisingly oily one.

Huh. I'd have thought Usagi would consider this sort of behavior beneath him. Then again, this might just be born of desperation depending on his financial situation; if this is happening right after the rhino screwed him over I could see him sinking to this. Anyway, I love his expression in that panel. Between it, the dialogue, and the way the fight scene was illustrated, this story is definitely giving me a more comedic vibe.

Hah! Well, the joke ultimately ends up being on Usagi. As soon as the magistrate sees the horse, he recognizes it as the one that just got stolen from him by a gang of bandits.

In retrospect, it might have been a better idea to take the horse a little further away before trying to sell it. Bandit treasure more distinguishable than coins or food does have this issue associated with it.

Usagi rides out into the woods, a hanging posse led by the magistrate behind him. He manages to elude them after a while, but he and his horse are both exhausted, and the cheap saddle has left him sore and irritable. Luckily, it isn't long before he finds a lodge with stables. Stables that seem to be quite populated, to the point where he infers that there must be some horse traders or at least people with horses to spare here at the moment. If he's not able to sell his horse here, then maybe he'll at least be able to get a more comfortable saddle.

He enters the building and...well, the current inhabitants DO have horses to spare, but Usagi has already gotten off on the wrong foot with them.

Heh, well. Depending on how many of these guys there are at the base, Usagi might be able to come out of this with a LOT of horses, not to mention other loot. Though pawning it all off is going to be every bit as difficult as the last horse of theirs he tried to sell.

Well, unfortunately, it seems that the full gang is quite a bit larger than just the group Usagi encountered on the road. And they have him flat footed. They press in around him, crushing him with the sheer weight of their bodies before he can even fully swing his katana. Now wouldn't that be an ignoble way for Miyamoto Usagi to go out? Crushed between the bodies of poorly trained thugs who just press in too close for him to move his limbs? Obviously he's not going to die here, but still, it's kind of a funny thought.

Usagi's reprieve comes in the form of the magistrate and his entourage, who he apparently didn't lose as completely as he thought he did.

They all want to kill him, but they confuse each other for his allies and hack at each other for just long enough for Usagi to give them the slip. Granted, the bandits pretty obviously have a lot of missing goods in their hideout, so it's not like they're about to join forces even then, but they each at least think they have something personal against Usagi so he'd still be a prime target.

Riding away from the clusterfuck, exhausted, hungry, and enraged, Usagi finds his way blocked by a pair of woodcutters miserably pulling a wagon that takes up the whole road. When the irritable ronin yells at them to hurry up and get the fuck out of his way, they tell him a little story.

...fucking seriously?

Well, Usagi wordlessly slides off of the horse's back and walks away, laughing uproariously to himself. The peasants are left wondering what the actual fuck just happened and how it resulted in them getting their state-sanctioned-stolen horse back.

The end.


Definitely the silliest one so far. It has a comedic fairy tale or fable like feel to it. An enjoyable change of pace.

Village of Fear​

Ominous title, but it could turn out to be a fakeout.

Usagi starts this story, as he starts nearly all of them, by walking alone down a scenic country road. This time he's playing a flute though, so that's cool. He's startled out of his flute playing by the sight of a dead dinofrog in the middle of the road. Some other dinofrogs are plucking at its corpse, so I guess they're cannibalistic. More urgently though, the scavengers are being joined by skull-faced cat monster the size of a warhorse.

Ooh, looks like we're getting back into the supernatural side of things! It sure took long enough.

...hmm. I'm curious about what Usagi thinks of the creature in front of him. We've never seen normal-sized cats, or even normal-sized tigers or leopards or the like, before. Only cat-people. Do nonsapient, quadruped cats exist in this world, aside from monstrous specimens like the one in this panel? It's not clarified by his exclamation that he's never seen "a beast like that one" before, which is pretty general. Is it just scary because it's big and dangerous-looking, or is it freaking him out extra because it looks like a giant deformed catperson running around on all fours like an animal? Is this legit body horror for him?

Not sure if the author intended for me to think so hard about this, but I can't help it.

The beast pounces at him, but he dodges it, managing to rake it across one of the forelegs with his katana while it shoots passed. Fortunately, it isn't hungry enough after that dinofrog to bother continuing the fight against prey that has proven difficult, so it leaps upward and vanishes into thin air. No trace of it. No sounds. No footprints left in the road. Usagi would almost be able to think he hallucinated the damned thing, if not for the splatter of demonic blood dripping off of his blade.

He gets his bearings again, and continues on his way much more cautiously and quietly than before. The yokai-tiger beast watches him silently from behind a tree, as if planning revenge against the man who dared injure it.

Don't start shit if you don't want to get shit, cat demon.​

Usagi soon comes to an eerily silent, melancholy village. In fact, it looks half-depopulated, with fields untended and houses falling apart. Granted, we're in an immediate postwar period with bandits running around everywhere, so this sort of scene might not be uncommon, but this is an unusually extreme case with an unusual lack of obvious battle damage. The proximity of the yokitty is probably not a coincidence.

As he enters the town, he sees a villager in cobbled-together armor crafting a set of memorial stands while babbling to himself about how the clawed beast killed them all. The local just babbles more manically, about how he's finally finished all of them, the beast's victims can rest easy now, and tonight it all ends.

He either means he's finished memorializing the last of the victims, or that he actually has a plan for getting rid of yokitty tonight. Possibly both.

Looking around, at the traumatized villagers commemorating the victims and the handful of other locals shuffling morosely about their daily routines, Usagi decides that he might be able to turn a profit here. Whatever the "beast" is, his katana was able to hurt it, so theoretically he could finish the job if they paid him to. He also isn't very polite to them.

Hmm. Between this story and the last one, it's feeling less like Usagi is desperate for money and more like he just plain has a greedy streak.

...

Actually, between one thing and another, I'm becoming more sure that these last couple of stories really are about a younger Usagi early in his ronin career. He's seemed brasher, ruder, and more self-centered in these stories than he was in the initial few. It's definitely easy to read that as a young bravo out looking for trouble, who eventually wizens up and becomes the paragon of bushido ethics (for better and for worse) that we were first introduced to.

...

Well, Usagi's attitude isn't rewarded here, though to be fair it doesn't seem like being polite would have worked either. As soon as Usagi mentions the possibility of fighting the beast, everyone screams and tries to put as much distance between themselves and him as possible, as if afraid that the monster is watching and will confuse proximity for agreement. As Usagi looks around in silent shock at their reactions, he's approached by a lone villager who doesn't seem to be afraid like the others. She introduces herself as Ocho, and claims to be a new arrival in town; unfortunately, the beast started terrorizing the region shortly after she moved here, and it seems to preferentially target people who try to leave and alert the outside world. So, she's stuck here just like everyone else.

Also, she has a bandage around one of her hands that she attributes to a kitchen mishap.

Also also, she looks like this:

Okayyyyy. This has implications. I'll get back to this at the end of the story.

Ocho tells Usagi that no one's been able to put up meaningful resistance, and those who try to fight back or even inconvenience the beast are always the next to be found torn apart in the morning. Usagi asks if they've tried using force of numbers to overwhelm the thing. She says that they did, in fact; two dozen men went out, and only one, a fellow named Gon, came back. He's been traumatized and babbling ever since, and can do nothing but obsessively commemorate his fallen friends as we saw.

She bids him sleep in her living room, as it's the best she can offer him, and also warns him not to do anything foolish that will end up getting himself killed. As she leaves the room, Usagi - suspicious about her hand injury - partially draws his sword and looks at her reflection on the blade. As per the folk wisdom regarding yokai, the reflection isn't fooled by shapeshifting or illusions.

I'm not sure why it's reflecting her face when she has her back to him, but okay. If she's actually facing the other way under her illusion, then she should at least be reacting to him pulling his sword, no?

He waits a minute and then tiptoes after her. He isn't especially surprised to see her footprints morph into giant cat monster tracks. Wait, I thought Ocho didn't leave tracks in that form? Weird. Well, before long he catches up to her, and she apparently didn't realize how obvious she was being lol.

Gee, I wonder how he could have figured it out. ​ :/

Ocho confesses that she'd been hoping to come back in a couple hours and kill him in his sleep, but since that plan is a bust, she'll just have to do this the hard way. She assures him that he's no match for her either way, which...isn't the entire reason this encounter is happening because he proved himself a challenge? He already knows that this is an empty boast on her part.

Still, either she's a bit more ready this time or the dark environment just favors her more, because this time she manages to put a nasty scratch on Usagi as they dance around each other. He actually drops to one knee; looks like she cut him deeper than I thought. Well, damn, maybe that wasn't as empty a boast as I thought, unless he's faking it. She taunts him, saying that no one is going to come and help him, as this is a village of terrified rabbits hiding in their burrows from her. Oh come on Ocho, there's no reason to be racist on top of everything else.

Then, suddenly, that Gon guy comes running up behind her with a spear and impales her with it.

...if all it takes to beat Ocho is have a few people distract her while someone else sneaks up with a spear, I'm not sure why those two dozen villagers couldn't handle her.

Though horribly wounded, Ocho manages to whip her impaled body around and get her teeth around Gon's neck. To do this though, she has to turn her back to Usagi, and sure enough that scratch she gave him wasn't as debilitating as he wanted her to think. He closes the distance lightning quick and, with a single well-placed blow, slices about two thirds of the way through her neck. Her physiology may be supernaturally tough, but there really isn't much that can survive a 67% decapitation. It's too late for Gon, but he made his death count.

And man, Ocho's corpse looks goofy.

The next morning, Usagi prepares to leave the village. He's not visibly hobbled or slowed by the scratch he got, so yeah, he was totally just trying to bait the yokitty into a false sense of security by pretending the wound was much worse than it was. He also spent the rest of yesterday evening making a grave marker similar to the ones Gon made for his twenty-three companions. He tells the villagers to honor the hero from among them; the one surviving man with any courage in him who gave his life to ensure their survival. Placing the marker next to all the others, Usagi does a little prayer, telling Gon's spirit to ride the wind with the other honored dead and be free. Then, he walks away, and the last panel is this incredibly unfunny and scene-breaking forced joke:

What, did they not know their fellow villager's name? Did they not notice he was missing today? Or are we supposed to infer that Ocho was lying about his name, for some weird reason? In any case, way too many questions raised for such a lame joke. End story.


I guess we've reached Usagi Yojimbo's first real dud. Everything in this story was either a less-poignant repeat of material from the initial short, or just boring.

The biggest failure point was with Gon. We never got to know the guy. Neither we nor Usagi ever got to make any kind of attachment there. If, say, Usagi had dismissed him as a useless bumkin and/or madman and poopoo'd his ability to help, only to be proven wrong too late to properly respect a fellow warrior, that could have been good. As it is, Usagi just made one or two classist digs at the townsfolk in general, and in fact was open until the very end to the possibility of them giving him combat assistance as well as (hopefully) money. What's even worse is that I'm not sure at all that Gon's sacrifice actually meant anything. Usagi clearly WASN'T doing as badly in that fight as it looked before Gon showed up. It's at least highly possible that he would have won that duel on his own, though he might have taken more wounds in the process.

Ocho was also just kind of a lame villain. Not much personality. No apparent motive besides "for the evulz," unlike the bitterness and misdirected rage that the (otherwise pretty similar) mutant general in the intro story was driven by. Not even all that intimidating or tactically interesting as an opponent, really.

The only thing about "Village of Fear" that really piqued my curiousity was the meta-signaling about Lord Hikiji. His reveal shot back in "Lone Rabbit and Child" made his non-anthro appearance a big deal. With Ocho's human form being the only other non-furry we've seen so far, it seems to be implying that he's also some kind of supernatural being. Which does make sense, narratively; having the recurring main villain of the story be *just* a mundane warlord when the story is set in a world with magic and spirits seems like kind of a waste.


Anyway, "Horse Thief" was amusing, and I do like how it (along with the stories that immediately predece and follow it) might be painting a picture of a younger, greedier Usagi who isn't ready to come back and face the Big Bad yet. "Village of Fear," well, they can't all be winners. Like I've said many times before, I'm much more forgiving of episodic media where the consequences of bad writing are usually confined to just the chapter they appear in, and UY is pretty episodic.