I think I’ve just given up on making coherent sense of the pacing of these episodes. I could go on about how I don’t think a flashback was a good idea at this time but we got it anyways and there’s nothing I can do but complain. However, I’ll try my best to let go of my gripes with the pacing and just get into this week’s episode.
Instead of delving more into what Trickstar is having to deal with now that they won the S1, we are “treated” to a flashback of what could possibly happen to them since the same apparently happened to the group Nito used to be a part of. At first, I was pretty wary of what his first unit was like. I thought they’d be terrible people or were somehow forced to be part of a group per the student council president. However, it just seems like they had stability problems. Though I’m sure even more problems arose in the part 2 of this flashback.
My first impressions of these guys were initially leaning pretty negatively. I don’t know what it was, but Mika’s speaking voice was grating on me a bit. It sounded like a mixture of happy but emotionless, which was really weird. However, he seems like a nice guy overall with him sew a shirt for Nito’s birthday. It was a very sweet gesture since Nito seemed downright depressed while in this unit. His singing voice was also a lot better than his actual speaking voice. Not sure what happened there, but I’ll give the guy a pass for being a nice guy. But holy crap… the leader of the unit, Itsuki… this guy felt just downright creepy at the start. And while he was apparently one of the 5 essentrics, I have a feeling that he’s one of the two that were dropped from having that title if the silhouettes showing the three of them had anything to say about it.
I really hate the idea of wanting to “keep someone all to themselves and not have to show them to anyone.” That way of thinking is just downright unnerving to me and I was extremely wary of the guy especially with how touchy feely he was with Nito. The poor guy looked pretty uncomfortable with it and the fact he was only being treated like a doll of sorts made it all the more worse. Though even with all those creepy vibes, I did have a feeling that he wasn’t a bad guy at heart, he was just kind of stuck in his ways and wasn’t classified as an eccentric for nothing. We also found out that Kiryu was Itsuki’s childhood friend and that he even clarified that Itsuki did have a good heart but has trouble understanding people. Which we could clearly see from how he’s been treating Nito. I’m sure he’s just a little obsessive, but he could tone it down a bit.
And while I’ve complained about them throwing out character development at random characters we don’t really care about, they did a decent job in developing Nito so that I even care about him now. I felt bad that he was only being shown off for his looks and wasn’t even given a chance to show off his new singing voice when it had changed. Which was probably a hit to his self esteem when Itsuki refused to use his new singing voice and would resort to only using his pre recorded singing voice before the change. Though despite it, Nito seems to have a genuine care for his unit (though mostly Mika) and still was able to have good times with them. Which makes it sad that the student council president somehow ripped him away from the unit. Especially with that last shot of all of them together at the end of the episode. Though I suppose it may have been for the best since he seems a lot happier in Ra*bits.
Now this… this is the kind of content I would have liked to see with the Trickstar members. At this point, I feel more attached to Nito as a character because I actually KNOW HIM now. While with Trickstar, they still feel like complete strangers. I don’t feel for them at all yet and they were able to take a character I didn’t even care for and show me a side of him that made me sympathetic towards him. I didn’t even bother to even remember his name until this episode. We need more episodes like this that allows us to get into the minds of the characters and show us what exactly they’re struggling with. We need more CHARACTER FOCUSED episodes that don’t jump from one point to another at rapid fire speed. Come on anime, you’ve proven to me that you can develop the characters well, so SHOW me why I should care about Trickstar!
We also get to see the state of the school before the student council took control. And while I can see the benefits of creating order amongst the students, especially since a lot of them just used the prestige of the school to get by, they may be restricting them a little too hard. Considering what we’ve seen with what happened at the S2. It’s a difficult situation because on one hand, the student council helped bring the school back to its former glory, but on the other, they killed the passion and love the idols that come out the school have for their career. So it makes me wonder what exactly the revolution will achieve.
