Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Turn. Today we’re returning to the adventures of Jogoro and Osanai, as they recuperate from a potentially devastating moment of crisis. Moving far beyond questions of who ate which cake, their last adventure found Osanai outright kidnapped by a group of drug-dealing students, and almost stabbed by their leader. It was only through the swift intervention of Jogoro and the police that Osanai was rescued from a dangerous situation entirely beyond her control.
Though of course, it wasn’t entirely beyond her control. As Jogoro subsequently pointed out, it seems likely Osanai provoked this situation intentionally, knowing she would be kidnapped in the process. This forms a natural parallel with the sixth episode’s conflict, wherein Jogoro intentionally misled Osanai about her cakes in order to provoke a fun mystery – but the clear differences between these two scenarios emphasizes the wildly differing stakes of their “becoming ordinary” mission. For Jogoro, indulging his allegedly “anti-social nature” means slightly misleading a friend in order to instigate a battle of wills – for Osanai, it means picking fights with criminals who are known to employ violence and intimidation, purely for the thrill of the conflict.
That is not a safe, sustainable hobby, and it points to a destructive instinct that clearly must be either denied or at least guided towards a different, less dangerous form of fulfillment. As Jogoro is our perspective character and Osanai generally keeps her own council, we haven’t had that many opportunities to dig into the psychology of the wolf, but we’re clearly reaching a breaking point. Let’s see how the pair handle this latest backslide towards the extraordinary!
Episode 9
We open, unsurprisingly, with Osanai’s sharp yet curious eyes, her expression upturned, signaling something close to a warning. As always, the particularly focus on her eyelids does an excellent job of adding a certain nuance to her expression; Osanai often looks like a predator who’s deciding whether she’s looking at a curiosity or a meal, and now she’s applying a softer version of that expression to Jogoro himself
At an emotional crossroads, they are again transposed to a new mental landscape – this time the empty market, the center of so much recent drama. A location that calls to mind Jogoro first seeing Osanai lit up in the spotlight, and also their broken promise to attend the festival together
Their conversation is interrupted by the arrival of the parfaits, which are truly preposterous. There’s like an entire cantaloupe in there
“A certain level of resolve is required to order this parfait.”
“You need an empty stomach and your desire dialed up to 11, then you just go for it.” Osanai is both dodging the original question and revealing her general philosophy – whether it’s sweets or revenge, if she wants something badly enough, she’s just going to take it
“The trick is to eat the watermelon first, as it doesn’t go well with the cream.” Yeah, that one did seem like a weird choice. Hard to match a fruit that’s essentially water with a cream-based dessert
As Jogoro explains the parameters of Kengo’s situation, we see Osanai from behind, caught between the bars of the entrance frame. A composition that emphasizes how Osanai is carefully constructing his argument, putting Osanai into a position where she can’t reasonably deny the form of her own involvement
“Can you believe how good this melon is for the price?” Osanai defiantly ignores the trap, focusing on what’s important
Jogoro can explain why he and Kengo both ended up at that hamburger place, but he cannot explain Osanai’s presence. There’s always a loose thread somewhere, some odd fact that doesn’t fit in with the established understanding of a situation, and pulling on that thread is inevitably how the whole facade unravels
Osanai explains that she actually knew Isawa Hasemi from earlier, as they attended the same middle school
“Anyway, go on.” “You haven’t answered my question.” “It’s fine. It doesn’t bother me.” A funny illustration of the differences between them. On some level, Jogoro believes he has a right to the truth, and that can make him push others when he feels they’re concealing it. But Osanai feels no obligation to clear the air just because Jogoro wants a clean solution
“Did you pick that outfit to go with the parfait?” “Did it work?” “Pretty well. But your outfit when you got kidnapped worked even better.” He attempts another method of drawing Osanai into his investigation, exploiting her clear willingness to talk about parfait-related matters and then immediately steering the conversation back to his deductions. It seems like he might not even care that she was doing something so dangerous; he just sees that too as another puzzle to solve
He notes that while she normally dresses to disguise her presence, that day she dressed specifically to be recognizable, to potentially catch a fish – a similar process to what Jogoro is doing right now, baiting various hooks to capture Osanai’s attention
Osanai’s savoring of this parfait continues to double as defiance in the face of Jogoro’s questions; in fact, it makes it seem like she’s actually enjoying the “praise” of having her scheme articulated
Jogoro points out another loose string – how was Osanai able to send that text while being restrained and guarded by her kidnappers?
“A girl must have her secrets.” “And I’m trying to reveal those secrets. Though that’s admittedly not a classy thing to do.” As with these parfaits, both of them feasted indulgently over the summer, embracing the instincts they’d sworn to suppress
He does offer an off ramp, saying he’ll only continue if she’s comfortable, but she quickly calls him a liar. For both of them, their instincts seem close to an addiction – they’ll pursue their passions at the expense of those around them, or even at their own expense
Jogoro now suspects the entire sweets tour was a setup to facilitate this rescue, possibly to force him to indulge in his own nature as she was doing. The games they play, whether lighthearted like the Charlotte or serious like the abduction, are enjoyable to both of them, but could also signal an underlying lack of mutual trust. One puzzle that shouldn’t remain mysterious is how they genuinely feel about each other – something that Osanai has clearly been pushing at, with her constant date setups and regular affirmations of them being on the same page
“It was all delicious.” I suppose that’s the question facing Osanai – did it work? Fooled or not, was he convinced by this summer manipulation to embrace his nature, and to draw closer to her?
“By having me follow the map, you were putting it all in my head, and priming me to recall it as soon as you needed me to.” Osanai was basically pulling a The Rehearsal on Jogoro
“Why didn’t you tell me? You were being targeted for an old grudge and knew you might be kidnapped. Why didn’t you just ask me for help?” The key question, asking why they haven’t achieved this level of mutual trust
“Didn’t you even once consider how I would feel?” Genuine anger and betrayal. Is indulging their games more important than respecting how they feel about each other?
Osanai states she acted as she did to keep Jogoro and Kengo from potentially getting hurt, though of course that happened anyway. And ultimately, the issue here is mutual trust – Osanai needs to trust Jogoro enough to give him the information necessary to make his own decisions
Fittingly, Jogoro doesn’t want an apology, but an explanation as to what happened between her and Asemi. Osanai always holds her feelings close, but can’t she at least share her pain with Jogoro?
As she starts to cry, the composition conveys her as pinned to the wall, Jogoro actually rising up to corner her all the more completely
“I’m still stunned by your willingness to take action. I find that I tend to stay put and think.” Jogoro realizes he’s pushed her too far, and backpeddles, first again acknowledging the parfait, and then admitting he respects part of Osanai’s intentions with this summer program. It’s true, he does need her there to push him into active engagement with the world
The rush of intimacy as Jogoro reflects on all the happy aspects of this summer is represented through rapid cuts, flashing between them again and again, as if they’re growing closer with each cut
But this, too, is all to further his case – he ultimately proposes an insider, through whom Osanai was able to precisely engineer all the details of the kidnapping. She essentially designed her own kidnapping in order to lay heavier charges on Hasemi
And again Osanai gives him That Look, a predator assessing a potential threat
“You don’t proclaim so pretentiously that you want to be ordinary for nothing.” Osanai’s congratulations on a case solved is as backhanded as everything about these two. It seems even they cannot separate their perpetual subterfuges from their earnest feelings; in fact, earnest feelings are often great resources for subterfuges (as Osanai exploited in setting up this situation, and Jogoro manipulated in resolving it)
“Is this the crazy guy you were talking about?” Osanai’s accomplice makes her entrance, swiftly revealing how Osanai talks about Jogoro in his absence
Her insider was Sanae Kawamata herself, the very girl Kengo was hoping to extricate
Apparently Osanai also helped extricate Sanae from the group back in middle school. Once Isawa started suspecting an insider, Sanae threatened Osanai in order to force her to help again
In order to defeat Isawa permanently, they needed to up the stakes on her villainy, to ensure she got criminal charges. Thus Osanai and Sanae engineered the ransom call themselves
As Jogoro said from the beginning, Osanai isn’t here to solve mysteries. She knows this is a world of violent animals, and she is ready to rip out their throats
“With that pretense, I had Sanae-san say all that.” She can’t help but revel in her victory
And Done
Oh my god, the truth was so much more ruthless than I’d expected! It was clear that Osanai was in some way manipulating the terms of the abduction, but I didn’t expect her to not only plant the idea in the first place, but also to engineer it such that Isawa would be slammed with a devastating array of trumped-up criminal charges. Jogoro plays fun detective games that might occasionally make someone mad – Osanai destroys people, apparently understanding that when you’re out for blood, nothing short of a total, permanent victory will keep you safe from reprisal. And what does this mean for Jogoro? Rather than trusting him enough to share her fears regarding Isawa, she manipulated him into complicity in her invented charges, essentially making him partially responsible for ruining Isawa’s life. The two often manipulate each other towards selfish conclusions, but this feels like a betrayal that extends far beyond that, putting both of them in danger for the sake of her violent desires. Is it possible to trust in someone who would so callously exploit you?
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