Karen's Anime Blog

I’m a little late getting to this episode; I wanted to sit on it for a few days and see if I could make more sense of my thoughts. But everything is still a jumble.

Shizuka’s trip to Tokyo went almost exactly how I thought it would, except I did not expect the earlier parts of the trip to be so beautiful. That several hour period was probably the most happiness Shizuka had ever known in her short life, which made it all the more heartbreaking when her father pretended he didn’t know her. I know the competition for the Takopi Worst Parent Award is tough, but Shizuka’s dad is coming in hot!

Hi Dad, don’t mind me while you parent your other daughters that you’ve replaced me with, I’ll wait.

You might wonder why I’m not on Marina’s mom’s case for being a bad parent, considering the abuse she hurls at Marina in this episode, but that’s actually different: Marina’s mom is seriously mentally ill and should be hospitalized, for her own safety and that of everyone around her. It is a failing of her family, and even her entire community, that she’s left free to abuse Marina. What makes it especially bad is that, if you pause your screen when Marina is reading an email from her father, you can see that he knows that the mother is delusional, yet he expects Marina to “talk to her.” Yes, make the psychological well-being of the wife you drove insane the responsibility of the teenager you abandoned, great plan there scumbag.

The never-ending cycle of violence. Mom hits Marina, Marina hits Takopi, Takopi hits his mom.

I wonder how much cultural differences come into play here; after all, it’s hard enough for people to admit to the existence of mental health problems in themselves and their loved ones where I live in the US; is it much harder in Japan? While I’ve been a fan of different forms of Japanese fiction for decades now, I realize I don’t know that much about this topic.

Getting back to Shizuka, once she’s rejected by her dad, she completely loses whatever tenuous link to sanity she had left and turns on Takopi. Once she klonks Takopi on the head, he gets his memories back and remembers that he was originally on Team Marina, and that was a twist I did not see coming. I made a mental note of the “To You in 2016” opening of the show, realizing it was probably an homage to Attack on Titan, but I never gave any serious thought to why the show took place in 2016; I should have. Now I’m left wondering if it was denseness on my part that I didn’t anticipate the 2022 “high school” plotline, or if it was genuinely a twist out of left field.

Evil Shizuka, Queen of my Nightmares for the next week or so. Poor Takopi.

So Takopi originally met Marina in 2022 and wanted to see her smile. We meet teenaged Azuma, who seems to have survived okay despite the pancakes torture, and he dates Marina for a little while, which leaves me with questions. The show implies that all the bullying of Marina to Shizuka still happened in the 2022 timeline, it’s just that Shizuka didn’t succeed in killing herself. So if everything went down mostly the same, up to the killing of Marina (which obviously didn’t happen in this timeline), how could Azuma date Marina knowing she was the one who viciously bullied Shizuka, who was the girl of his dreams even back in elementary school? I guess Naoki Azuma is just a very forgiving guy.

Evil Shizuka Vol. 2, High School Homewrecker. You can tell she’s 16 years old now because her limbs are more than one inch wide.

At the conclusion of episode 1, I hated Marina, like I was supposed to, and even wanted her dead at one point; that’s how visceral the memories of bullying are. What I didn’t want, even then, was to see her tortured, which is pretty much the theme of this episode. Marina is forced to be the parent in the relationship with her insane mother, thinks she’s moving on to something better when she gets her first boyfriend, then loses her boyfriend instantly to someone she has despised for her whole life– oh, and then she has to kill her mother in self-defense. I guess the message is to be understanding of everyone, because you never know what demons someone is battling, but I don’t know if I can fully accept that– I still hate the kids who bullied me in middle school. Intellectually I know those kids probably had their own problems, but when you’re a child and you’re getting hurt, it’s really hard to care about much else.

Getting back to Takopi, we finally see his home planet, and it’s wonderfully whimsical and strange, but I’m not sure I fully understand what happened. Takopi gets home, tells his mom “I need to use the Happy Clock to go back in time to kill Shizuka Kuze,” then his mother tells him she’s going to erase his memory, because he’s broken “the most important rule of Planet Happy.” Logically, I think the fact that he wants to kill another being is the rule that he broke, but she also says “You came back alone,” and the way she says it implies that may be the rule he broke. Also, it doesn’t seem like she would erase his memory for wanting to kill because at the end of that sequence, she says she doesn’t know what “kill” means. Not for the first time this season, I’m wishing my Japanese language comprehension was better than it is, because it would be nice if I knew exactly what TakoMom said and wasn’t relying on (increasingly) questionable subtitles.

Now Takopi knows his original mission was to kill Shizuka, but he’s killed Marina instead. He’s learned enough by this point, I hope, that he doesn’t think killing Shizuka is a good plan. But what can he do? He can’t turn back time to revive Marina, and Shizuka is someone he can no longer support. Back in town by the metal pipes where so much of the action takes place, Takopi is left questioning his future when Azuma shows up. Should Azuma really be walking free after admitting to having a part in killing Marina? I thought that maybe his brother Junja took his place and took the fall for him, but that seemed too horrible to contemplate. What can Azuma and Takopi possibly do at this point that would help anyone, even themselves?

Yeah, so I feel kind of out of my depth here with this one. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this all wraps up next week, although I’m guessing a happy ending is not in the cards for anyone.