This one goes out for all the foot fetishists.
Impressions:
Date week continues, though if any show, this is the one most suited for it, and maybe not surprisingly, does the best job of them by a very, very long shot, weird shots of socks while sitting in a movie aside. The skeleton is generally here of hurt, talking through it, redemption. That said, I’m never a huge fan of the out-bullying the bullies schtick. I can’t help but think back to MM and how it handled its bullying stuff, specifically that the bully still won, and the pain was instead sympathized and shared rather than physically confronting and intimidating them which makes them run off in tears. It’s a nice fantasy that all bullies are secretly cowards who will fold when stood up to, but it’s a power fantasy about always having power when the crisis in the first place was being powerless and helpless.
Mashiro is also still not a very interesting or compelling character for all this to be happening with, or more specifically around, and her various infantilisms like referring to herself in the third person (common for Japanese children) aren’t helping. She’s been the lazy/bad version of the LN/VN girls who just need the MC to tell them to feel better and that fixes them. I know it’s hard since her whole schtick is helplessness and decision paralysis in general, but the bullies are so over the top and she gets ‘fixed’ from one little talk in the world’s quietest movie. In her socks, for the foot fetishists. Perhaps the very end of the episode is the first step in her changing and having a little more agency, but through the episode, she was just Iroha on mood suppressants, and that was literally just a cliffhanger text message anyway.
Next Episode:
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