The alternate universe/metaphor for feelings/dream world/whatever it is continues to be the best stuff in this show.
Last week I complained a lot about how it was hard to care about the "real world" conflict when I wasn't watching the show primarily for that reason. This time around, that problem was mostly solved by showing that Kagari was even crazier than she first seemed, and that's saying something. My hunch about her blaming Yomi for her injury and subsequently guilting her into spending time with her turned out to be right, but I wasn't expecting her to have been faking her injury the whole time. Yomi's mom says that it's psychological, but judging from the events of this episode, I don't buy it. Kagari's action and her possessive behavior said to me that she was just a brat who had found a way to get what she wanted all the time. She wanted Yomi and she didn't want to share, so once she figured out that her "injury" caused the adults to pity her and force Yomi to take care of her, she ran with it. At my university's anime club, we had a running joke that all anime parents were bad (with very few exceptions to that rule). This episode was a prime example of that, with Yomi's mom brushing off all of Kagari's strange behavior simply because she felt sorry for her. Yomi even says towards the end of the episode that the reason she was still with Kagari was because of that pity. Overall, I was much more involved with the story this week since I really just wanted to see Kagari not get what she wanted for once. As the first "villain" in the show, she did a pretty good job.
But to be completely honest, a lot of my increased interest in the plot had to do with the fact that the "real world" and BRS's world were more clearly connected in this episode. By "clearly connected," I mean in the action; one thing happens, we see its repercussions as a cool fight scene in the other world, and so on. However, I couldn't help but feel exasperated when they made the "dream world" connection (which was largely unnecessary anyway; Mato already knew that there was a problem with Yomi's friend without noticing the similarities between the real world and what she saw in her dream). I hope that in future episodes the show will decided to tell us whether that world is an actual place or not. Watching Dead Master break free from chains connected to a heart in the sky was cool and everything, but if this really is all supposed to be a metaphor then it's more than a little over the top. I guess what I want to know is if BRS's world carries repercussions with it as well or if it's just a running plot excuse for the writers so that they can be "deep." But even with all of that said, and after the show going to some lengths to tie the two worlds together, I honestly have no idea what happened at the end of this episode. The "alternate world" stuff was clear enough: Black Gold Saw shows up and Chariot gets her head cut off by BRS. What in the world it was supposed to be representing, metaphorically or otherwise, I can't tell. From the way Yomi looked when she came out of the hospital room, I was half-expecting the Kagari had been decapitated in real life as well, but that wasn't the case. I don't know what I was supposed to get out of that ending, or why Mato looked so shocked. If something was supposed to be obvious, it wasn't, or at least it wasn't to me. Hopefully we'll get a quick explanation next week. In the meantime, I'm going to speculate on who Black Gold Saw is (my money is on this chick given the way everyone else is related by color).
Additional Screenshots
Images from Nico Nico Douga.
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