YOROKOBE SHOUJO
Impression
Somehow I’ve only managed to watch this episode just under a day before the next one will be making an appearance – I’ll try to get tomorrow’s post out by tomorrow (i.e. on time) but it’s looking like I won’t be getting off work until quite late into the evening and so I won’t make any promises. Anyway, this was really good! It occurred to me about halfway through the episode that I shouldn’t be taking these weekly doses of free Kadowaki Mai for granted, who knows when she’ll get to voice a loli main character again. She’s not Minase Inori or anything. I also feel like Illya has gotten cuter, perhaps literally.
I said this last week too, but I really do love the new Illya. And I already loved her to bits before. It’s amazing what four years and a couple of gradual tweaks to the character designs can do, huh? Kirei’s design looked slightly under the weather though – maybe due to lack of practice more than anything, if I had to guess. Prisma Illya’s key animators (and Silver Link in general, really) are primarily in the business of drawing key frames of cute girls, not fake priests-turned-ramen chefs.
All things considered, Illya has taken all this pretty well. It’s been surprisingly light-hearted in tone too, due to Tanaka’s antics especially. She has no Ruby, and yet so far she’s survived encounters with both an Ainsworth doll (clearly the counterpart of an Einzbern homunculus) and Gil, who won her allegiance by appealing to her hidden desires to be an onee-chan. Oh, and a stingy ramen chef too.
At least the scene itself was great! I almost expected Church on the Hill to start playing when Kirei just nonchalantly appeared, but that’d be asking a bit too much. Although Illya and Tanaka eating at his restaurant was supposed to serve as a useful way for them to meet up with Gil-kun, the most important thing to take away from their encounter with Kirei is that there are local people in the vicinity who know what’s going on and yet are not affiliated with the Ainsworths. I doubt there are many of them, but they exist. Also, the fact that there are even local people at all (in a city which otherwise appears to be entirely deserted) must be somewhat reassuring for Illya. Kirei clearly knows more than he lets on, but is just unwilling to reveal anything – the crater obviously wasn’t created by a gas explosion for example, certainly not when the Ainsworth estate is exactly right in the middle of it and protected by a bounded field. An intelligent guess as to his role would be something along the lines of the role Caren is fulfilling on behalf of the Church, not least of all because they’re canonically blood-related. They certainly have the same terrible personality. 3,200 yen is daylight robbery. Whether that’s money worth risking being turned into a delicacy over, I don’t know – Illya already is a delicacy anyway, right? …Right? Also his threats could have probably been worse. He could have, say, threatened to hook her up to an extraction machine in the basement of a church somewhere to become a living mana supply for decades.
Gil having a role in 3rei! must be no secret in light of all the promo material he was featured on, but his very presence in the parallel world is in want of some explaining. I’ve got nothing to say on how Illya only ever severed his ‘black’ side and not his current personality (which may be why it feels like his voice has gotten a little higher) but him being coincidentally caught up in the dimensional shift is clearly another retcon. He was already at the scene in the manga when Angelica and Beatrice appeared, and so there was no need to have him say something about wandering the mountain like they did this episode – it was his fight in the first place, of course he was there. I think this should be the end of retcon incidents though, now the most important aspect production-wise is that they find a good place to stop when the season finishes, and that they don’t mess around too much (if at all) with the plot points on the other end.
Every episode from now on, we’ll most likely be getting another piece of the puzzle that is Miyu – at the moment, we’re sort of in Illya’s position in that we know she’s caught up in something absolutely massive but aren’t aware of all the details just yet. Miyu is the Holy Grail of the Ainsworths, which is something we’d all already guessed, but what exactly is her relationship with them? If she’s the parallel world Shirou’s (my favourite iteration of Shirou across all Nasuverses by the way, if you need even more hype than you’ve already got) sister, then did the Ainsworths take her away? Is that why Shirou is being imprisoned, because he also attempted to save Miyu and failed? All will be revealed this season!
Actually, only some of it will be revealed. But at least you get answers. And Angelica vs Gil tomorrow. It’ll be fun, I promise!
