neko’s thinkbox

Finally proceeded with episode 9 of Claymore. After the Teresa arc, we finally return to our Clare as we knew her from the beginning. And, to my huge satisfaction, everyone was right: it’s going to be even more awesome from now on. However, I am quite surprised, if not shocked, by all the new information that I got in this episode. As it’s an old episode, I’ll omit the summary. I think this makes this post also more legible and less tl;dr ^^

The first thing I saw was Clare getting back to the man from the Organization, to get Teresa’s flesh and body into her own body. So what I immediately thought was, heck, Clare will become as strong as Teresa, if not stronger! However, Clare’s discussion with that man later on soon made it clear that she’s far, far from being a powerful Claymore.
Actually, the Youma in the church back then wasn’t even a Voracious Eater… or rather, it was, but only for the public. Because the real ones are in fact Awakened Ones, like Priscilla. Considering that Clare nearly hit her limit during that fight against a mere Youma… And she wants to take it out on Priscilla? Looks grim.

Sparring match between Numbers 6 and 47… The difference is noticeable.

On a side note, can it be that lower-ranked Claymore’s power limit is much smaller than a higher-ranked one? As they said in the previous ep, you need to release over 70% of your power before you can’t go back to being human anymore. In between, your face distorts, your body distorts, etc. However, during Clare’s fight in the church, she was already about to transform, even though only her face distorted very little, and it didn’t seem as if she had unleashed too much of her power as well. Just making sure it’s not a flaw in the storytelling.

Nevertheless, the man in black allows Clare to join a Claymore squad that chases Awakened Ones. But as soon as she meets her new teammates, she’s immediately looked down on. In fact, Clare is Number Forty-Seven… the weakest of all the Claymore. The weakest… That really doesn’t sound right. But this is a fact, and consequently she doesn’t stand a single chance in a sparring match against Number Six.
This… is rather vexing. Clare, whom I thought had been granted Teresa’s powers, is truly weak. Exactly like Raki, all I saw was a strong Claymore, who could defeat the strongest Youma. But now, I realized that it had all been but an illusion. After giving some thought to it, it does sound logical though. Roughly said, new Claymores receive the power of one full Youma; Clare only received the powers through Teresa’s body, which means she got approximatively only half of Youma powers (of course, I don’t know any proportions, but I’d say it’s something like that.) Don’t take my word for it though, it’s just a random guess… discuss!
Even so… the fact that she’s the laughing stock of the group now is a bit enraging, after all she had to endure until now… I bet Raki will play a huge role in her future later on. Rawr.

Clare slept a whole night and saw a vision about Teresa. Clare=stronger?

After losing that sparring match, Clare collapses and sleeps throughout the whole night. During her sleep, she has a vision of Teresa fighting. Also, before engaging in battle, Number Six said she had the impression of Clare being the strongest one… This all suggests to me that Clare might have a hidden power after all…

Well, in the end they run into an much stronger Awakened One (AO) than they had been told of. A male one, on top of that! Now, how could that happen? In a previous episode (if I remember correctly, it was where Clare’s friend reached her limit), it has been said that there were only female Claymore because of some compatibility problem between Youma and men, or whatever the reason. However, we have a male AO. How did that happen? Was there a male Claymore, after all? Maybe a failed experiment? Otherwise how could it have been an AO? If a Youma had taken possession of someone, and then transformed into an AO, wouldn’t there be sooooo many more of them around? All those Youma we saw in previous episodes who had disguised themselves as humans would consequently be like that? Argh, I’m totally clueless. And in the end it’ll be a simple answer, I can sense it XD

In before that lame old “A new challenger appears” joke, etc.

Well, Number Six is already weakened by that surprise attack, and with that small and rather weak of a party, the more dangerous the situation is! How are our Claymores going to cope with this situation?
Tehee, it’s actually a good thing that I backlogged a bit, at least I can watch ep 10 right away :3
And I still am positive that Clare will kick everyone’s ass, sooner or later. Maa ii wa, on to the next ep! Otanoshimi~