Sara Talks Anime

Before I begin talking about the episode itself, I like the recent change made to the scheduler for the AM/PM selection. While I still mourn the loss of the color, at least it’s easier to tell whether you currently have AM or PM selected! I know none of you care about that and probably just want me to talk about the episode, but since I brought up my grievances before, I might as well point out that I like the change. Now to stay quiet about changes and instead focus on the episode.

And, uh…wow, between the fight between Urusugawa and her rival, as well as Kukuru and the sword guy (with the former being shirtless), this episode was a bit of a difficult watch for me. I’m sorry, I felt like both of these cases of cutting clothes was unnecessary. While you could argue that Urusugawa and her rival ended up in a place where it’d be necessary to undress, the fact that their clothes were tattered before they even got into the water makes the time that they actually got into it seem way less like they just tumbled into it while fighting and more like “I need a justifiable reason to have the female characters get naked”. At least you could argue that sword guy cutting off Kukuru’s clothes was just him showing off his powers.

Anyway, we get more character development in this episode! Yay…

In order from what I can remember:

• Urusugawa was getting bullied in school and found solace in a specific band’s music. Awakened her cyberkinesis after she wished that a girl would die.
• Urusugawa’s rival changes as much about herself as she can, and even creates sockpuppet accounts, to gain the attention of the boys that she has feelings for, though loses interest when they reciprocate. Her cyberkinesis also allows her to use the skills the guys she’s won over have, though at a bit of a higher level.
• The ragebaiter with red fire thinks “love” and “hate” are the same thing, and even somewhat enjoys seeing people get mad at him (thus fueling my belief that the intentions behind your actions play a part in how your cyberkinesis manifests).

Again, while I’m enjoying getting this character development via backstories, it feels more like these sections of character development are being used to pad for time instead of naturally developing. For example, we only know that Urusugawa’s rival does what she does because Urusugawa said so. I really wish that some of this character development was shown during the earlier episodes instead of told now. Unless it was and I somehow missed it.

Oh yeah, and mister “Bananas make me think of yellow, yellow makes me think of bananas”? We learn what his cyberkinesis is! It’s hypnosis! Though it seems he isn’t terrible skilled, because his own cyberkinesis could get used against him via deflection or something, though it was successfully used once just to let the audience know what his cyberkinesis is.

While something connected to something I kind of brought up previously occurred in this episode, I’ll wait until next week to talk more about it because I don’t think there’s enough information at the moment to be able to explain it in a way you guys would like.

While this series was one that I was looking forward to, I think that the story is so focused on the big battles for the A-B battle that they’re forgetting to develop Class 1-A properly. Maybe there were more arcs where Class 1-A got developed that the anime cut for time just to speed up getting to the A-B battle, but this feels like a story that will have a strong start to the cour but a weak end of the same cour. I hope that I’m wrong and that Dead Account finds a way to have a strong ending despite the path we’re on now, but I have my doubts.

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