天下制覇

My money’s on Mafuyu.

Impressions:

Another fairly average episode thanks to about a third of it being sunk into the angst of a throwaway character. One of Chizuru’s old friends is feeling sorry for herself again, so Chizuru takes some time off to go say hi. Thankfully, that does come after focusing most of the first half on what each person is reading. Mafuyu’s entire BL versus Ken’s loli world bit was great. It was also strangely overanimated, especially for this show. The rest were reading more or less what you’d expect. Minatsu had her action/fighting stuff, Sakurano was reading Little Red Riding Hood and convincing herself it was adult, and Chizuru was plumbing the depths of the human soul before using Ken as her own personal psych experiment.

The bit at the start with the letter was also pretty great. It’s from a girl, therefore it must be a love letter for Ken (complete with Tokimemo background). Unless… it’s a love letter for Minatsu. Oho! Magiru’s little made-up America story seemed a bit shoe-horned in, particularly because she literally showed up, delivered it, and then disappeared again without any compelling explaination to any of it. Unfortunately, the angst that followed that was tiresome at best and the cowering from Chizuru bit at the end was pretty weak. I’m also not sure if we’re supposed to be reading anything into Chizuru being the original "Aka-chan" (Akaba), but that seemed a bit superfluous to me, and possibly designed just to stretch out the original letter reading scene an extra 45 seconds to make them explain why it’s not Sakurano.

I also can’t be the only one who was thinking about School Days with the two black haired, angsty girls on a bridge for that matter. If only Chizuru had decapitated Kaede, that’d have taught her a lesson. Or something.

Preview:

Dark despair for the council.