Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
With its first short, Kayua-sama: Love is War -Ultra Romantic- foreshadows a pattern. Like last week’s premiere, this week’s episode starts with a short focusing on Ishigami and Miko. It’s too early to say for sure if this pattern will continue, but the routine as established here is certainly fruitful ground for comedy, so personally I hope it does. Even just Ishigami and Miko’s self-aggrandizing alone is pretty funny.
It does not take a terribly deep reader to understand that Ishigami and Miko don’t get along terribly well. The student council—as well as Miko’s own friend / “handler” Kobachi Osaragi (Rina Hidaka)—are naturally concerned about this. It hurts the student council’s image if its members are seen bickering, and beyond that there’s a general agreement that life would be easier if these two would just stop being at each others’ throats all the time.
The question, of course, is how to get them to get along. To that, both Osaragi and Our Protagonist Miyuki Shirogane have some ideas, and it’s this particular round of harebrained schemes that drives the first short. The visual style is great here; much of this segment is animated almost as if the characters were still models on popsicle sticks. Elsewhere, when the plan to reconcile the two is explained, we get this particularly cutesy illustration to demonstrate.
The first idea here is for the two to complement each other on their good points. Ishigami can pull that off just fine, though not without effort. Miko, though? Well.
The suggestion to have the two clean each other’s ears (ew) is similarly ill-fated. The position Miko and Ishigami end up in while doing this simply cannot be described in words. Not by me, anyway.
It’s like he’s changing the world’s crankiest lightbulb.
Eventually, it’s Osaragi who figures out the solution (or at least, something resembling one) when she points out that it’s fairly common for teenagers to pretend to dislike someone if they’re actually harboring a crush on them. This causes Miko and Ishigami to be style-shifted into something that, to me, evokes a horror manga page that’s been colored in and then left out in the rain. The two promptly turn into autotuned, canned phrase-repeating robots to complete the transformation.
As with any comedy, relaying this kinda kills it, but it’s really funny to watch, and it’s also a nice reminder of what Love is War! can pull off, stylistically, when it wants to, even in service of something very goofy.
Most people will not be talking about the first segment of the episode, though, I imagine. Because the second and third are combined to make a single longer story, and it is a doozy.
Before we get into why, it’s helpful to briefly discuss Ai Hayasaka, probably Love is War!‘s most important supporting character, frequent recipient of fandom “best girl” awards, and perhaps most prestigiously of all, subject of the Bonus Hayasaka Screencap segment on this column. Hayasaka is an interesting and useful character for many reasons. She’s Kaguya’s right-hand woman and is frequently pulled into her schemes. She’s something of a stand-in for the segment of the audience who got sick of the actual “love is war” gimmick of the manga a long time ago. And, increasingly, she’s a touch bitter about her life situation.
Hayasaka, as we all know, is Kaguya’s maid. Kaguya, being a rich mostly-shut-in from an abusive family, lives a life that was quite unhappy until recently, in-show, but it is still a privileged life, regardless of that. And Hayasaka’s entire situation is a manifestation of that privilege. She has little say in her own day to day activities. In many previous episodes, Kaguya has come up with some ridiculous idea that she thinks will make Miyuki confess his deep-held feelings for her, and Hayasaka has been used as a tool in those ideas. She’s even adapted an entire alternate identity in service of Kaguya’s scheming. Kaguya, it’s important to note, does not heap these responsibilities on Hayasaka out of malice, really. She’s simply ignorant—willfully or not is hard to say—of the nature of the extreme power imbalance in their relationship.
All of this means that in this episode, when one of those schemes is a bridge too far and Hayasaka acts out entirely of her own free will, it’s completely understandable, even if you don’t dislike either her or Kaguya. (And just speaking for myself, I’m very fond of both characters.)
The premise is pretty simple. Miyuki gets invited to a karaoke mixer without entirely understanding what he’s getting into. Kaguya is paranoid that he’ll get whisked away by some bombshell before the two of them ever have a chance to hook up, so she orders Hayasaka to slip into the mixer as well. Incognito as her alternate identity, following up on the fourth episode of last season. She is less than thrilled about this.
Those with sharp memories might recall that the last time Miyuki and Hayasaka met, Hayasaka was on a dare to win him over, if she could. The details of this have become a bit foggy since I last saw the episode, but Hayasaka seems to have taken the fact that she couldn’t do it pretty hard. (That much was evident even at the time, but perhaps how hard wasn’t totally clear.) When they meet again here, Hayasaka awkwardly refers to their past meeting as Miyuki having “dumped her.” In general, she’s pretty cold to him for a minute, here. (It’s hard not to have some real sympathy for Miyuki during all this, in fact.)
It’s notable that when Hayasaka’s turn at karaoke comes up, she picks a forlorn love song to sing. A galloping, Eurobeat-y monster of a thing that she sings the utter hell out of. (I don’t know if Hayasaka’s regular voice actress Yumiri Hanamori is doing the vocals or if it’s someone else. Either way, I must say I hope the dub covers the song as well, given that Hayasaka’s dub actress Amanda “AmaLee” Lee is an accomplished singer with a real talent for belting.) The show briefly becomes a pastiche of the kind of heartbroken, theatrical nonsense that the videos for this sort of song specialize in.
Miyuki and Hayasaka also get into a long talk about honesty, in one of the more revealing character moments for the both of them. Miyuki puts forward that Hayasaka always seems like she’s putting on an act (and, indeed, in the context of the two’s interactions, he’s entirely right.) The camera is close to his face, and the background goes solid white as Hayasaka asks if he could really show people his true, honest self. But even more tellingly, a bit before that, the camera “pulls back,” peeking into the karaoke room through a cracked door, and she says this.
Yeesh.
Between this and her thinly-veiled complaining about her “little sister’s” terrible personality (she admits she’s gotten better recently, but it feels like an afterthought on her part), it is pretty obvious that Hayasaka is dealing with some serious headsnakes, and not dealing with them well.
And then, as Miyuki goes to leave this—admittedly, incredibly awkward—situation, pondering perhaps if he should start being more honest with some people in particular, a weird, leery creep starts harassing Hayasaka. Nothing actually happens, thankfully, and Miyuki is able to make up a quick excuse to get her out of the room.
Here though, things take another turn. Hayasaka’s particular mix of feelings; a genuine crush on Miyuki, her resentment over how Kaguya keeps treating her, and perhaps just a general sense of being fed up with how her night is going, convinces the Shuchiin Academy student council president to slip away with her into a different karaoke room. One she just booked. For the two of them. Alone.
She’s not shy about relaying exactly what she’s doing to her boss, either, with the magic of tiny transmitter earrings. (One of many, essentially, spy gadgets, that’s Hayasaka’s been given by Kaguya over the years.) After all, she says, it was Kaguya who first came up with the “try to seduce Miyuki” dare in the first place. What is Hayasaka doing but trying again?
Kaguya then takes a moment to realize that she has created the exact problem she was looking to prevent.
A crueler show would either stop the episode dead here or, even worse, twist this into a major rift between the characters. We don’t get that here, instead, Kaguya has the rather sudden realization that Hayasaka has been very angry this entire time.
Nothing gets past this one.
But, as she often does, Kaguya cooks up a scheme. This one involving her very own secret weapon.
Kaguya’s plan to have Chika barge into the room Hayasaka and Miyuki are in is not exactly sophisticated, but there’s no reason to believe it wouldn’t work. Before Chika even gets there though, Kaguya makes the mistake of trying to eavesdrop. The tension of the prior 10 or so minutes unravels in an instant thanks to a string of frankly hysterical misunderstandings. All you really need to know is that Miyuki was singing, and then rapping (itself a recurring gag.) To Kaguya, it sounds as though Hayasaka is talking about….something else. Things get even worse when Kaguya actually barges into the room (conveniently, while Miyuki is using the restroom and thus isn’t present.)
The misunderstanding cleared up as it possibly could be, Kaguya escorts Hayasaka out. With Miyuki still in absentia, the poor guy.
By the time Chika finally shows up, the mere mention of the president’s legendarily awful vocal abilities—which she knows more about than anyone else, mind—is enough to get her to turn on her heels and immediately leave.
And in case you were wondering what lesson Miyuki took from all this?
As for Kaguya and Hayasaka, the earlier subtext of the episode is brought directly to the front. Hayasaka straight up says she’s jealous of how happy Kaguya’s been lately. The two more-or-less reconcile here, at least for now, but—very, very minor manga spoiler here—this is not the last time this is going to come up, as we’ll eventually see. Love is War! has a way of looping back on itself with regard to things like this.
All told, this is probably the strongest second episode of anything that’s yet gotten one so far this season. If anything it’s actually better than the premiere, which was also quite good but was squarely comedic.
Now, for the moment you’ve all been waiting for. It feels a little odd to put a Bonus Hayasaka Screencap in a writeup for an episode almost entirely about her, given how many other Hayasaka Screencaps I’ve already shared with you today. Still, I do have a pair that I couldn’t otherwise find a place for. Enjoy this from-behind shot where Hayasaka engages what I call her “trolling mode,” as she “explains” what karaoke clubs are like to Kaguya, and the art style shifts to accommodate.
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