Today we’re diving back into Chihayafuru! I was expecting last week’s episode to get us into the meat of the team tournament, but instead it used the first round more to celebrate the individual strengths of all our leads in a very low-stakes competitive situation. The charming team of ostensible foreigners were a fun group, and I appreciated how Tsutomu has naturally settled into a support role for the team, but I’m frankly ready for some blood. This annual team tournament is perhaps the only time Chihayafuru can fully make use of its ensemble, team-focused setup – every member of the team is simultaneously crucial here, leading to matches that can sometimes struggle to highlight everyone, but are always rich with drama worth mining. The regional matches leading up to that showdown with Retro were some of the most exciting the show has pulled off yet, and considering how well the show has built up Chihaya’s teammates over these thirty-some episodes, pretty much every team match episode feels like a direct payoff for all the training they’ve suffered. With the opening match cleared and Tsukuba having already gotten his chance to shine, I’m ready for the original five to turn some heads. Let’s get right to the action!
Category Archives: Episode Writeup
Princess Tutu – Episode 7
Princess Tutu’s seventh episode begins with Mytho once again expressing how Ahiru’s actions have made him genuinely afraid of Princess Tutu. A stark profile shot illustrates how Tutu exists within Mytho’s world, an ominous figure with a menacing smile, pressing a heart shard upon him as he fearfully retreats. All stories are artifacts bound by their teller’s perspectives, and from Mytho’s perspective, Tutu is indeed a terrifying presence. Though Ahiru attempts to editorialize, desperate to assert the nobility of Princess Tutu, her words ultimately fade into a helpless quacking. Regardless of her feelings or actions, Ahiru rarely has the power to assert the definitive interpretation of her own narrative.
Chihayafuru S2 – Episode 8
It’s time for Nationals, everyone! After an extremely close loss in the regional tournament against their fiercest rivals, Chihaya and the gang are setting off for the national-level team tournament for the very, er, second time. The last time this tournament came about, Tsutomu and Kana were barely integrated into the team, and Chihaya’s collapse due to injury prevented the group from really getting anywhere. That collapse was a fairly natural narrative twist at the time; after all, Kana and Tsutomu weren’t nearly good enough to compete on a national level then, and their arcs needed a great deal more fleshing out before Chihaya’s crew could compete as a tactically cohesive group of five.
In contrast, Chihaya’s current team is composed of characters who’ve all survived individual arcs, all committed and recommitted to karuta, and all grown closer over time. This tournament is no longer dramatically hamstrung by the imbalanced dynamic of Chihaya’s team, and given this is the biggest team tournament they’ll experience this particular year, it seems very likely that the story will now embrace all the match-by-match theater it skipped over last time. Chihayafuru has essentially set up its dominoes to allow this tournament to be payoff after payoff all the way through, and I’m very excited to see just what’s in store. Let’s settle in for another episode of Chihayafuru!
Simoun – Episode 12
Let’s continue our journey through the strange and fascinating Simoun! Last week offered our first Floe-focused episode of the show so far, and it certainly didn’t disappoint. Floe has always been one of my low-key favorite members of the cast, not necessarily because she herself is charming (I mean, it’s obvious she’s kind of a pill), but because she’s willing to be expressive and needy and petty and generally a full-fledged person in a show where so many of her compatriots work hard to maintain their above-it-all priestess persona. The cast of Simoun are teenage girls who’ve been taught to present themselves as flawless religious icons, and Floe refuses to stop being a teenage girl.
Of course, Floe’s actions aren’t some thoroughly intentional choice designed to undercut the sanctity of her position – she simply does what she wants to, and doesn’t really consider the consequences. It was thus the same qualities that make her such a welcome antidote to the usual priestess image that also put her in a terribly vulnerable position last episode, where she was forced to reckon with the immediate consequences of what priestesses do after developing feelings for an ordinary soldier. Floe has been able to maintain a certain distance from the reality of her situation, but having now destroyed her lover’s home town, I’m guessing she’ll have to finally reckon with her unconsidered feelings on the nature of priestesses. Floe is certainly headstrong, but I feel that her act first, think later philosophy could actually help characters like Neviril, who have many of the same disagreements with Simulacrum society, but less willingness to break protocol in order to voice them. And with Kaimu also being shaken by last episode’s violence, it seems likely the whole team will have to question how they feel about their own work. Let’s dive right back into Simoun!
ef – A Tale of Memories – Episode 11
Let’s roll on into the next ef – A Tale of Memories! There’s usually a pretty significant break on my end between watching these episodes, but right now I’m carrying on the momentum from yesterday’s writeup and rushing right into episode eleven. The show’s last episode didn’t feature the Chihiro-Renji story at all, and instead focused on resolving a great deal of Hiro’s conflicts. Having slept with Miyako and been confronted by Rei, Hiro was finally forced to make a definitive choice about his life course. Ultimately, while acknowledging he really had loved Kei in the past, he chose to actually pursue Miyako.
This choice fits perfectly in line with ef’s overall heart-on-sleeve infatuation with living for your art, and turning yourself into a monument to creativity. While Rei consistently urged moderation and making sure to balance his work and school life, Miyako was absolutely ready to join him in self-immolating for some wild ideal. I frankly don’t think picking Miyako was the healthy choice for Hiro, as not only is Miyako herself an incredibly unstable person, but Hiro has already demonstrated that pushing too hard in his career has left him burnt out and exhausted. But Miyako is still probably the “right” choice for this story, which overall takes an extremely romantic view of the artist’s plight. And the actual evocation of Hiro’s choice was one of the show’s standout moments so far, a thrilling mix of well-built character turns and evocative aesthetic tricks. Of course, we’ve still got two episodes left and a sequel besides, so I can’t imagine Hiro and Miyako have reached any sort of happily ever after quite yet. Let’s see what episode eleven brings!
Chihayafuru S2 – Episode 7
It’s time for more Chihayafuru, ya knuckleheads! With the regional team tournament now complete, the doors are open for this episode to prioritize basically any drama it wants to. Just like how the regional tournament last year was the moment that fully integrated Tsutomu into the group, the last scene of our last episode seemed to imply that both Hanano and Tsukuba are now invested in the team for genuinely karuta-related reasons, and no longer simply hanging around to achieve their own peripheral goals. That means it could easily be time to begin Hanano’s competitive arc, where we establish her style of play and explicate more karuta fundamentals through training, but we could just as easily leap straight from the regional to national tournament, and keep up the focus on our main team. After the satisfying but almost exhausting run of matches at regionals, I’d actually be fine with an episode that slows down a little, but Chihayafuru has never been one to slow its roll. Let’s dive right into one more episode of Chihayafuru!
Princess Tutu – Episode 6
Princess Tutu’s sixth episode opens with a new fable, a story about a princess trapped in an eternal sleep. The story is a familiar one; Sleeping Beauty, the tale of the princess Aurora and her noble savior. But in this version, when a young man arrives to wake Aurora, a voice whispers “awaken the princess from her sleep? What a cruel thing to do. Is the princess not wishing for the kiss of awakening, but rather to continue to sleep forever?”
Flip Flappers – Episode 11
Flipflap has been destroyed! Mimi has revealed herself! The end is nigh! With three episodes left to go, it appears that Flip Flappers is already barreling towards the finish line. So what bombshells are dropped in this, Flip Flappers’ second-from-penultimate episode!?!
Well, mostly a bunch of sad stories from long ago. Though we open with the direct aftermath of last episode’s Mimi reveal, the better part of this episode is spent elaborating on the shared history of Mimi, Papika, and Salt, giving us context for both the modern Flipflap organization and their nefarious nemeses. As with the last episode, this context often feels dramatically rushed, and the show’s structural messiness continues to add a sense of “and then this happened” shapelessness to the dramatic proceedings. We’ve reached the point where characters don’t necessarily exist in a shared physical reality so much as they inhabit a shared dramatic space, and thus characters like Salt will jump from vaguely defined location to vaguely defined location in whichever way the narrative demands.
Ojamajo Doremi – Episode 27
We return at last to Ojamajo Doremi! It’s been a little while since I spent time with these ojamajos in the real world, and I am beyond happy to return. This is my first Doremi post of 2018, a year that I’m hoping will somehow turn around the global inferno that was 2017, but considering this year started by the heat dying in my apartment followed by a blizzard sealing me in my apartment, I’m not entirely optimistic.
Enter Doremi as a ray of sunshine, a show that’s still charming and well-crafted and full of heart no matter how bad things are out there. Doremi’s last episode saw the show seemingly jumping subgenres entirely, as the introduction of “bad items” and “bad cards” offered Doremi a dash of Card Captor Sakura. I’m not yet sure what to make of Doremi and her friends being dubbed Pureleine card-hunters – I generally prefer when the show’s drama focuses more on grounded human problems than fanciful issues specific to the witch world, and this whole bad item business seems as fancifully arbitrary as they come. But I highly doubt Doremi could have given up its moral ambitions partway through its first season and still be considered such a classic, so I’m less worried and more intrigued as to how these new elements will interact with the existing formula. And either way, Pop is still a magical girl, so I don’t really get any more narrative requests for at least another season. Let’s dive right in to one more episode of Ojamajo Doremi!
Chihayafuru S2 – Episode 6
HOLY CRAP YOU GUYS THEY APPROVED A SEASON THREE WE GOT MORE CHIHAYAFURU COMING WOOOOO. After a five year break for some live action adaptations, it is somehow miraculously time for more animated Chihayafuru. Having already passed the halfway point of the existing material, I was already getting a little misty-eyed about my upcoming goodbyes; but now there’s a new season coming, everything is wonderful forever, and Chihayafuru will continue to brighten our days for many seasons to come.
No need to thank me, incidentally. I’m well aware of all the buzz these writeups have been generating, but it’d be a little gauche of me to take all the credit for getting this one greenlit. It’s just something that comes with the territory, after all.
Anyway. Marvelous news about Chihayafuru The Franchise aside, right here in Chihayafuru The Show we are currently in the midst of a heated battle with Chihaya’s first rival Retro-kun and his merry men. Our last episode didn’t have any one clear focus, and instead dabbled in some bouncing around the board, offering some unexpected character development for the key Hokuo rivals while also progressing Chihaya, Taichi, and Kana’s ongoing narratives. There was a lot of setup, but not so much payoff, and I’m guessing that means this episode will hone itself into a tighter showdown between Chihaya and Amakasu. Frankly, there are just only so many opportunities for these characters to clash – if they’re spending all this time building up Amakasu’s weaknesses as a player, I have to assume they’re also going to cash in on those weaknesses for character development here, and not keep following him as a parallel thread through nationals. That means this is likely to be a Chihaya-focused match episode, and those are always a treat. Let’s get right to it!