It is once again time for the weekly dose of very cute girls doing things. And with each passing episode Shamiko gets more and more relatable. Unfortunately, I have not been called upon by my demon ancestors to take down a magical girl, but the way Shamiko approaches the task just makes me realize that I would probably react in the same way. If someone came to me in a dream to try to communicate with me I would also 1) aim to go back to sleep, despite already being asleep and 2) be more fascinated by the manifestation of a food court booth rather than having someone tell me how useless I am.
There were two points of focus in the first half of this episode: The ancestor critiquing Shamiko’s uselessness and laundry. The entire interaction between the ancestor and Shamiko was a blast. Shamiko’s consistent lack of focus paired with everything the ancestor was trying to say was just fun. There were many times in their interactions that I found myself actually laughing out loud. However, the real winner of this whole interaction was probably Shamiko because each of her lines were just delivered so well. And overall, her observation of the obvious things around her, such as hair color and the ancestor being half-naked was honestly a good time. When Shamiko’s mother called to wake her up over pancakes and the ancestor started to become static I was pleasantly amused. Having figures come to a character in a dream is nothing new for anime or even just media in general, but using it as a “weak signal” joke was absolutely fantastic. As far as the laundry went in this episode, I was consistently confused about why it was showing up so often. But I assume it’s just to reiterate just how hopeless Shamiko is (but if I’m totally misunderstanding the joke please tell me!).
The second half of the episode focused more on Momo helping Shamiko out with a new method of taking down a magical girl: projectiles. Of course, Momo being the good soul that she is, takes away the rubber band weapon that was made and swaps it out for her magic wand. From here we get a hilarious moment of Shamiko trying, and mostly failing at trying to come up with her activation phrase. And with the interactions in this scene I am becoming more and more invested in figuring out just exactly who Momo is. What is her magical girl story? Is she a solo magical girl? Why does her special phrase highlight peaches? Ahh! I just want to know, but it might be a bit before any of that information is given to us. But in the meantime we can still enjoy watching her help out the demon girl who is focused on destroying her.
In my post about episode 2, I spent a great deal of time talking about how I wanted more magical girl/demon girl elements in this anime, and this episode certainly delivered on that. For me, I think this episode definitely hit a sweet spot between providing more exposition while still providing quality comedic moments. I hope that moving forward there will be a nice balance between these elements as well as keeping up with the slice of life parts because even though I don’t really remember their names, Shamiko’s friends always manage to make me smile and give a good laugh.
