When I saw the blank blank in the beginning of the episode I thought something bad was going to happen to Gin already! Thankfully, I’ve been spared a little longer.
Again the episode was split into two little stories but both revolving around the same theme. The first half focused on the girls’ coordination. As they barely beat their second opponent, their teacher points out their injuries and how clumsily they fight together. So she proposes a quick little training camp to help them out, making sure they do everything together. Again this shows how public this whole hero thing is. We actually have someone who I guess was instructed to oversee the girls, make sure they do their jobs well, etc. Like I had mentioned last week, I find it interesting that this whole hero business is a public thing. I suppose that the consequences that we know about from the original, the hero thing suddenly became private. But for now, being a hero is honorable. Before they embark on their training camp, the teacher assigns Nogi as the leader of the group. Washio is sure that she was going to be chosen and was surprised when she wasn’t, but she accepts the decision when she assumes that Nogi was chosen because of her family lineage.
In the training camp, the girls are instructed to do everything together which includes doing actual training, studying, and eating. In the training, the girls had to bypass volleyball machines as they tried to escort Gin to a bus, but they had to work together to make sure she got there without a scratch. Again, I found it surprising and different that the girls were able to transform outside of the usual battlegrounds. I thought they could only transform there, so I was caught off guard.
What follows is a series of montages of the girls working together and studying together. We get typical scenes such as the hot springs, and also the girls just being silly and cute and eventually completing their training with success.
The second half addressed Gin’s noticeable tardiness to pretty much everything, which was mentioned in the first half when she was late for the training camp. Washio finds it suspicious that she’s always late to school and so she drags Nogi with her to spy on her in her house. And it was seriously spying because she had a special camera/scope thing she used at Gin’s house.
Turns out Gin is just a busy older sister and an incredibly helpful girl. She goes out of her way to help people when she doesn’t have to, such as helping an old person cross the street, help someone with directions, put a bike back on the bike rack correctly, help little kids stop fighting at the mall, etc. She helps others so much that it takes so much of her time, and she’s always late to wherever she needs to be. I guess the letter in the beginning, with the blanks, was talking about this surprising side of Gin. Cute.
We get another fight and the girls use their training from camp to help them. It was a scary opponent, but with smart decisions and teamwork, they were still able to take down the Vertex. In this fight, Washio panicked and she was able to realize why their teacher had assigned Nogi as leader. It wasn’t because of her family lineage, but because Nogi is able to act on her feet during critical times, creating the stairs for Washio to reach the enemy while she herself was indecisive. Washio thought she needed to be the reliable one and keep them together, when in fact Nogi is pretty capable. Which made her cry in the end as they all lay in the grass, but at least she called them by the names they wanted to be called. It just made them even closer friends. Aww. 🙂
These girls are just so sweet, I love them a lot. So far the show has been chill and cute, with some fights here and there. The whole time I was scared for Gin because of the letter in the beginning, and when she was caught under the drill of the Vertex I was hoping but also expecting she was going to get injured badly. Thank goodness that wasn’t the case. The title for the next episode also sounds normal and that’ll be the halfway point for this prequel, so I expect things to pick up speed really soon.
