“Brief” articles are copied directly from my tumblr, with only minor changes, and are shorter and more off-the-cuff than their full length counterparts.
Another strange and unsettling episode from an anime that is consistently very, very good at making those. Although, if you’re reading this here, this is actually the first time I’ve spoken about Shiboyugi on this site. (Damning of me, to be honest!) There’s a lot one could unpack here, but I really want to talk about the episode’s second half and its last few scenes.
The first time we hear a male voice in this entire show is when the game administrator pops up, grainy and hard to make out at first, on that pile of old TVs. This is another way in which I think Shiboyugi is excellent at taking what would be cliche in most other stories’ hands—the animal-headed admin is a tried and true trope of this genre—and turning it into something strange and capable of inducing genuine unease, a charge that this concept has otherwise lost due to simple overuse. He’s not a man wearing a wolf mask, nor even some kind of Live2D or CGI rig as I initially thought. No, he’s a puppet. Clearly filmed in live action, at that. It’s hard to explain precisely why this is so much weirder than any other option they could’ve gone with, but it makes the administrator seem otherworldly and cruelly remote. His voice actor matches that tone, going for a remote diction that nonetheless crackles with a barely-concealed sadistic malice. Malice we are forced to identify with, as fellow spectators of the game.
The final trial in this particular game is a simple vote. The girls are locked in little waiting rooms, told to vote for which one of them was the least useful along their journey, and that girl will be killed by releasing a chemical into her room. There’s a ton of tension that comes from simply how this sequence is framed; we mostly just see the girls in their little shacks, writing on paper as industrial fans spin behind them. There’s not really much sound here either, just the noise from the fans and some flecks of piano, but it’s legitimately stomach-turning despite that.
I think the specific choice of who they kill might strike some people as a bit of a cop-out, but it’s worth keeping Mishiro around now that she and Yuki have this incredible yuri murder rivalry going on.
Speaking of! The last scene of this episode is bizarre in a completely different way than the rest of the show, which is fascinating in its own right. For the first time, we see people who aren’t players of the games themselves—agents of whatever group is setting these up—and they look so…normal? A lot of them have the standard funky anime hair, of course. But other than that they just look like regular people. It’s disarming, to say the least. As is the J-Pop track that plays on Mishiro’s ride back home as she freaks the fuck out in the car, swearing revenge. It’s a very abrupt and drastic tonal shift from what we’ve seen so far, and I’m very interested to know how it’s going to feed back into the games going forward other than the obvious Mishiro v. Yuki rivalry itself. One possible way lies in the shot where we finally see what’s become of Chie. It’s just awful, she’s literally been reduced to nothing but fluff, like a plushie shredded to smithereens, and despite the frame-blending effect—often regarded as cheesy or distracting—seeing the sheer desperation with which her agent tries to put her back together is really effective. Terror like that is pretty universal.
I admit, though, part of me is the slightest bit nervous, because, to float just a small amount of criticism, in something like this that asks a lot of questions, giving too many answers too early often deflates the story’s promise. Still, I think we’re headed in a good direction here and I cannot wait to see whatever the hell will happen next week.
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