Karen's Anime Blog

Last time, I said I wanted a certain character dead; how’s that for service?

For those who aren’t watching this show anymore but want to rubberneck, in this episode we see the specific acts of bullying that led to Shizuka committing suicide in the first episode– before Takopi started reversing time. Marina purposely starts beating Shizuka up in front of her dog, Chappy, so Chappy will defend his best girl and attack Marina, making it so animal control comes and takes the animal away. Then Marina taunts Shizuka over her beloved dog’s death while viciously beating her. In desperation, Tacopi attacks Marina with the “Happy Camera,” and apparently doesn’t know his own strength because he kills her. Shizuka then reacts with euphoric happiness that Takopi has used his “magic” to make her problems go away. Meanwhile, the Happy Camera is now broken, so there’s no going back in time and reversing this death–unless Takopi pulls another time-travel device out of his tentacles, which I don’t think the show would have him do. Looks like Tacopi’s Original Sin was murder. Wow, the OP that shows the two girls starting to get along sure was a liar.

There’s something going on here that didn’t quite work for me. We’re supposed to feel uncomfortable that we wanted Marina gone and now she’s dead– the show is giving us what we want, but making us choke on it. We’re supposed to be very unnerved by Shizuka’s overjoyed reaction to the murder. But I’m not feeling that way– they went too far with Marina. Instead of “Typical grade-school bully,” Marina was a budding murderous psychopath, and Tacopi might have unwittingly done the necessary thing.

I know, I know– she’s a child! She’s just copying the behavior of the (horrible) adults that she’s surrounded by! I should feel said about her fate, I just…don’t. Plus, I’m not surprised that Shizuka’s reaction was one of happiness– all she understands is that Marina is causing her pain every day, and now the pain will stop. I do think this development is going to take Shizuka and Tacopi down a very dark road; now that he thinks the way to make her smile is violence, he’ll probably take that as his model for all future problems. Killing Marina is likely going to lead to a lot of very dark decisions, so it’s obviously a bad thing– I’m just not shedding any tears over her. I’m worried about Tacopi’s future victims now.

Something else that didn’t quite work for me in this episode was Tacopi still being on the “Maybe now the two girls can talk and make up!” train. I thought it was made pretty clear that Tacopi knew there was no solving this problem through talking after Marina brutally beat him up (in Shizuka’s form) in the first episode; seeing him regress like this is kind of disappointing. I didn’t expect him to lose his cheerful demeanor entirely, but I honestly thought he was supposed to be smarter than this.

This boy is the only decent person besides Shizuka in the whole show. Protect him!

We also get confirmation that all of the adults in Shizuka’s world are completely useless when we see her Mom completely brush Shizuka off, apparently not even caring that it looks like her daughter has been beaten up. I was wondering if they were going to portray Shizuka’s mother as being particularly bad because she’s a sex worker, which would be unfair, but honestly, all of the adults are so horrible, she doesn’t seem to be portrayed worse than any of the others.

I don’t know if it’s appropriate to say I’m “enjoying” this show. It’s a twenty minute dread-delivery system. But I am impressed by its willingness to go there and do things that many consider unthinkable, and I want to see what Takopi does from here. Even if I end up watching through my fingers.