It’s, ahem, another OVA ducks
Summary
Misaki Mei and Fujioka Misaki are twins that were separated at birth, but still remain close friends with each other. The day before they are due to go to an amusement park, Mei’s eyepatch accidentally falls off while Misaki is sleeping, and she sees the colour of death around her.
Impression
Well…I wish I could say I was surprised, but unfortunately I can’t. Seeing as this is Another, it was surprising to see so many normal scenes (for lack of a better word) and it only served to put me on edge, since all I did for pretty much the entire OVA was to keep a lookout for possible death flags and obscure things that people could die from hitting/falling off/encountering. It’s safe to say that the lack of suspense itself proved to be really good in keeping the tension high. Until the bird hit the window and died in a horrible bloody mess, anyway. Birds don’t even do that…
If that wasn’t foreshadowing enough, the tiny screw that fell off when the operator closed the door of the ferris wheel definitely made me think that Misaki was going to die falling off the ferris wheel, and given Another’s past track record it was a troll moment that took the rest of the entire anime to set up. Bastards. Of course, after Mei seeing the colour of death on Misaki, it was a given that she’d die somehow, but as bad as leukaemia is, you could say that it’s better from violently dying from something unexpected. Remember the elevator, the truck, the lightning…I could go on – oh, there was the motorboat as well. And who could forget the umbrella?
Mei never should have had to go through all this. She was completely different in this OVA before she met Kouichi, and most probably changed from Misaki dying and her knowing she was going to die. When you think of Mei, stuff like shopping or a fanservice bath scene just doesn’t come to mind, yet she’s doing all this with Misaki around (who’s much more cheerful by the way). After she dies, Mei ends up being just like the dolls she doesn’t like to be around – hollow, until Kouichi turns up.
In the end it was just something really tragic that I guess I could call inevitable given the show’s premise, though that would make the situation even more cruel than it already was.
