Another week, another episode and another stack to my disappointment. I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but again it’s real hard to really care about what’s happening when we barely know the characters. I guess I did feel bad for Chikage, and the fact that they tried to erase her existence as a Hero was really shitty. I also wanted to feel more for Wakaba but I barely know her and she doesn’t feel more than just your standard serious hero being the leader.
It sucks I feel that way because I understand that she’s going through so much, and she’s completely bottling up her emotions to remain strong to her friends and to the public. She watched her friends die and feels guilt for what happened to Chikage, and there’s so much pressure on her shoulders as a leader and as a hero, as the beacon of hope for humanity. It’s a lot to take in, and you have to remember that these girls are in junior high. They’re just kids! I always forget the girls are this young and it’s just crazy that they have to go through so much suffering. So it was nice to see that for once she was able to just break down and cry on Hinata’s shoulder, and for once just be weak and let her emotions out. It’s a traumatic situation to be in and there’s only so much you can handle on your own.
If we had gotten to know Wakaba more and spent as much time with her like we did with Chikage, I’d really feel for her. Like, I believe her sadness and fear in all of this, and at the same time I don’t. It’s not that the writing is necessarily bad, but the pacing and all of the things we’ve skipped doesn’t help in this case. That flashback scene with the diploma was really sweet and all, but that does absolutely nothing emotion wise. It does help us see that even with her loathing of her hero role, Chikage still cared about her friends by keeping that diploma. But even though it was a bonding scene, it still does nothing. Half of these girls are dead now, two of them we barely know who they even are. So again, what does it actually do for us at this point? Only a small part of me cares, but it’s mostly just indifference? Which is such a huge disappointment, because I’m always anything but indifferent towards these characters. The Yuyuyu series does a good job making us care about the girls and gives us fun interactions, but because of the insane pacing we just get…whatever this is. And it makes me sad.
I will say, however, the episode did make me feel a little peeved with how shitty the Taisha continue to be. Them trying to hide the truth and not put Chikage’s name on the memorial is awful. Seeing how neglectful her parents seemed, I can imagine they didn’t even care that their own daughter was killed. I mean, the father just left the home without the financial support from Taisha so that’s all we needed to know, and man that is awful. Poor Chikage deserved better. And I will also say that I loved that Wakaba went off script at the press conference and finally said her true feelings, and went against Taisha when it came to mentioning Chikage. I can probably expect some sort of punishment, but that might not matter when the Vertex invasion happens. Because we all know this is not going to end well, with the world ending and all. Still, at least there were a couple scenes here and there that actually made me feel something.
Next episode will probably be the last of this arc, we’ll see what happens.
And as horrific these power ups are with it slowly killing its user, Chikage’s ability and design was really cool. Something I wish they would have gone into more detail about…sigh.
