I want to like this show. But they're not making it easy.
After last week's cliffhanger, I was expecting the majority of the episode to focus on Insane Black Rock Shooter, but instead this was Yuu's and Saya's episode. I found this backstory flashback to be one of the better-done parts of the show so far. Saya really wanted to save Yuu from the situation that she was in, but ultimately there wasn't much that she could do but just be there for her. In the end, that trust was broken when Yuu correctly guesses that Saya thinks Yuu set her own house on fire. Given all of the problems that Yuu was dealing with at home and at school with no immediate discernible solution to deal with both, it makes sense that she would want to project her feelings onto another person, in another place. Compare this to Yomi's situation, which has been revealed to be partially caused by her own hang ups about wanting to be needed, and then completely loses her mind. Yuu's circumstances were not her own creation, which makes her much more sympathetic. Last week I thought that Yuu and STRength were the same person, but apparently it's more complicated than that; it's heavily implied that Yuu (the one that Saya knew) somehow managed to trade places with her alternate universe self. I liked his presentation a lot more than how this show has handled the other world so far. There's an element of misplaced escapism to it, rather than focusing on characters who can't handle conflicting emotions on a basic level and who need professional help. After establishing all of this, the fight with STRength was great, and I'm sure that fans of the character who were disappointed that she didn't get much screentime in the OVA are pleased that she's taken a big role in this version.
I'm assuming that we're going to get the second half of that backstory sometime in the next two episodes, since we still need to hear why in the world the counselor (Saya) thinks that traumatizing the kids in her care will bring back her friend. I'm also not sure why she wants to bring her back anyway, since STRength (in Yuu's form) seems to be stuck in time; Yuu is still a middle school student while Saya has obviously grown up since then. What would Yuu have to come back to? It feels like this is just a sudden effort to make Saya/Black Gold Saw more likeable, since she's been playing the villain for the majority of the show. In fact, the entire backstory segment was obviously supposed to make me feel sorry for Saya, but--like with Yomi's mental breakdown--the sentiment feels forced. If I was supposed to like her by the end of this episode, they could've done a much better job of presenting her as someone who's doing what she feels is right, instead of going out of their way to point out how evil she was acting until this point. The hypocrisy was pretty blatant in this episode as well, with Saya breaking down and saying that she didn't want to kill Yomi, yet she had no problems with attempting to strangle her in the last episode. Randomly throwing in "but she was doing it for her friend!" doesn't make her sympathetic to me. Overall, the episode was enjoyable but the writing and presentation still have some very serious flaws. I'm still waiting on an explanation for how the alternate world is supposed to work.
Images from Nico Nico Douga.
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