Karen's Anime Blog

Did someone come over to CloverWorks and bring a dump truck full of money? Because this episode is really well animated, and to be honest, the material doesn’t even call for it; it’s just extra. I’m not complaining, but I do wonder why this show seems to be getting special treatment among the three CloverWorks romances this season.

Marin is eating dinner over at Gojo’s house, and we learn that the business produces 200-300 hina dolls per day. Marin thought it was more like ten, and to be honest, that’s what I thought too. It seems like it’s too painstaking an art to be done in bulk like that, but I guess skilled craftsmen working in teams can handle it. I would be really interested in seeing more of Gojo’s family’s traditional doll business, but I think we saw all that we’re going to see of that in the first season. To explain hina doll production, the show briefly turns into a puppet show, harkening back to the NHK network’s long history of the art form. It’s amazingly detailed– even Puppet Marin has two-tone blonde and pink hair.

Mixed-media is all the rage this season.

The next day at school, Marin is tired because she got up early making lunch for her and Gojo. Gojo is afraid she made something inedible, so he spends the whole morning dreading the coming of lunchtime. Finally, she reveals that she made Spam-filled rice balls, and Gojo is so relieved that he won’t have to eat garbage cooking, he’s floating on cloud nine. Something I’ve been wondering about for a while is that when they make bento in anime, those bento boxes (or rice balls in this case) sit in their bookbags for the whole morning without any ice packs or anything. How do they not spoil? I wouldn’t want to eat Spam that had been sitting unrefrigerated in my bag for six hours, but maybe I’m just being persnickety and it’s not that risky.

Marin is overjoyed that Gojo is excited about her lunch, and she freaks out a bit about how much she loves Gojo. If these two don’t start officially dating soon, I’m going to start a petition to get that going.

“This is my cooking skill level, it’s got carbs AND protein!”

What follows is a montage of Marin bringing in lunches for Gojo while he sews the suit for the PrezHost costume. Later, Marin eats dinner with Gojo and his grandpa again; she seems to have practically moved in there.

Fish and daikon radish for dinner. It looks so nutritious.

Okay, enough about food, I need to move on. Back in school, the girls are planning Marin’s minute-long performance for the pageant. She’s going to do something called the “Champagne Call” for hosts, only shortened and with the references to alcohol taken out. They get off track and start geeking out over PrezHost some more, and Gojo gets dragged into it. Gojo admits he finds it hard to relate to the “princesses” in the anime, which somehow gives Marin the idea to start acting like a host and treating him like he’s a princess. Nowa joins in, pretending to be another “princess” at the club. Gojo blushes and sweats like crazy and is relieved to be pulled away to help with the physical labor.

Marin has a plan. Gojo: run far, run fast.

After Gojo and the others leave the room, Marin tries to sew a button on the costume, and naturally fails miserably. To be fair to her, I wouldn’t be able to do it either. That night, Gojo looks through a crossplay magazine and wonders how he can make Marin look more manly, like the models on the page. He’s really invested in this cosplay now.

The next day, Marin puts on shapewear and it makes her bust practically disappear. That’s got to be uncomfortable if you have any chest size at all, which Marin does, but I guess she’ll accept pain for the love of cosplay. She comes out fully dressed in the Rei suit and her classmates are floored at how good she looks. Gojo realizes that when he took the measurements for the suit he wasn’t counting on Marin wearing shapewear, so the jacket is a bit too big and will have to be modified. That’s a pain in the butt, but mistakes happen. Gojo wants Marin to focus on looking more masculine, like the way Amane acted feminine the whole time he was cosplaying a female character. Classmate Morita sees the photos of Amane and wants an introduction, but is crushed to learn that Amane is a guy. Thinking about his grandpa’s advice that he needs to learn to ask for help, Gojo goes up to Morita and asks him to help Marin refine her posing, because Morita has a very masculine affect. It’s a small thing, but I’m glad to see Gojo make that step; I don’t think he would have been capable of that during the first season.

Marin-Rei, not quite masculine enough yet.

Another classmate, Murakami, wants a picture of Marin in costume so he can show his sister, but is embarrassed to admit that he’s a fan of Prezhost. Gojo of course thinks there’s nothing to be embarrassed about, because he’s internalized the key message of the show: enjoy the things you enjoy, and don’t pay attention to the limiting labels that people like to put on different experiences. Murakami goes for it and takes a pic, but hilariously, he crops Marin’s head out of the picture, because he’s primarily interested in the Rei-suit. Marin blows up at him a bit, and the rest of the kids claim they want pictures.

And we’re done! I was kind of surprised this episode was still focused so heavily on the making of the Rei costume, assuming we would gloss over that a bit and move onto the beauty pageant, but I feel pretty confident that we’ll see the beauty pageant next week.