Well, it’s still Miko May, so here’s the pitch for this one: it stars a girl who has been raised at a shrine deep in the mountains. She wants to be normal, but unfortunately for that wish, she may well be the vessel for a god.
Oh, and this is also a school romance.
So, we start out by getting to know our central character, Izumiko Suzuhara. We see that while she’s cared for, she’s also in a position where even cutting her hair is a big deal for the extended shrine family, she doesn’t get a lot of personal interaction with her parents, and a lot of her classmates mock her.
We also see that Izumiko is not machine compatible; she begs others to do parts of assignments that require online searches or the like, and when she tries herself later, something weird happens, initially seeming to satisfy her need for connection by creating a video call with her dad but then, when she starts to get stressed out, backfiring and wrecking the whole school computer lab.
This incident, as well as her desire to stay at a local school rather than going to Tokyo as planned, causes the family to make some arrangements. This introduces her to cool monk with a helicopter Yukimasa Sagara and, shortly thereafter, his son Miyuki.
Miyuki has nothing but venom in his words for Izumiko.
It turns out that he’s going to have his future at a good school snatched away by being forced to transfer in with Izumiko so that he can act as her keeper. When he doesn’t like this, it’s strongly implied that his dad beats him within an inch of his life and uses the threat of crossing that inch to convince him to agree. Izumiko wants none of this since she manages to remember he bullied and traumatized her when they were little (bludgeoning her with a ball to the point where she still can’t participate in ball-based PE because of the trauma), but I guess her wishes are kind of immaterial.
So everyone is awful, and Miyuki seems particularly bad, just with that worrying aura of “he’s the main love interest, isn’t he?”
He is the main love interest in this show. Honestly, while the show quickly starts having him shape up and be only kind of awful to Izumiko rather than relentlessly awful in short order (once he realizes her circumstances are legitimately troubling), it still makes a hard sell.
The first little arc to get them on more of the same page involves a field trip to Tokyo. Izumiko, however, may have more than just the crowds to fear
She only really agreed to go because there was the promise of a rendezvous with her mom, which Izumiko wanted Miyuki to escort her to so they could be split up by the one person his dad might theoretically listen to, for both their sakes. The pursuing shadows, however, scare off Izumiko’s mother and continue to stalk her and Miyuki, triggering Miyuki’s protective instincts until his dad shows up and changes the script, getting them to a warded safehouse.
There, Izumiko is briefly god-possessed, with the deity in her body declaring that she may even be the last vessel. It’s proof positive of her specialness to both Sagara monks, particularly doubting Miyuki who had mostly been going on about how she was too plain and too much a weakling to have a great destiny.
From there, Izumilo… decides she wants to go to the Tokyo school, finishing making nice with Miyuki like no horrid bullying happened. On her way out, she confronts a friend from school only to learn that said friend is both the mountain god and her familiar, cross because she now wants to go away. She pacifies him, and gives a sendoff with an actual dancing ceremony.
So, we then have a time skip to the start of high school for Izumiko. Miyuki has gone ahead of her and ingratiated himself into the school, but she also has a new roommate, Mayura, to make friends with.
Unfortunately, she discovers the hard way that nobody at this school is normal when trying to go without her glasses causes her to see through the illusions to notice that some of her classmates aren’t entirely human. In fact, the scariest of the lot turns out to be a mystic familiar of the jerk top student, Ichijou Takayanagi.
They try to accost Izumiko, but Miyuki deletes the familiar and the roommate and her brother come in to help as well, the latter pair revealing that they are also supernaturals. After getting blasted by a cursed website Ichijou set up, the gang takes a little petty revenge, with Mayura and brother summoning a spirit in the form of their deceased brother (they were triplets, to be clear) who takes out Takayanagi’s Shikigami completely and slaps him a few times for good measure.
We then take a multi-episode vacation dealing with Mayura, her brothers (living and ghost) and their emotional issues.
And this is a key pain point in RDG – at its heart, it’s a shoujo show, but it borrows so many tropes from your typical shounen battle school outing that there’s a palpable feeling of let-down when it doesn’t engage with its setups about a competition between the special students or the fate of the world and instead meanders through this sidequest about feelings.
I call this a pain point and not a flaw (not exactly) because… it’s a pretty alright sidequest. We get a good deal of development for Mayura and her brothers, and even some cool stuff out of Izumiko herself. I’m normally quite open to shoujo shows, and have enjoyed a number of them. Nothing this show is doing is wrong in an objective sense, it just is primed to mess with people who have enough media literacy to expect something else. It’s focused differently and is drastically slower in a lot of ways than what some scenes pretend it’s going to be like.
It’s not going to put every viewer on tilt, but it put me on tilt and it took a while for me to even figure out why. What was wrong? What was messing with my head and telling me that this was off somehow?
The big question is, how much is this an actual problem? Let’s table that for just a moment.
So, we deal with the siblings bit by painful bit, ending with an important spirit realm encounter where Izumiko and Himegami are able to talk face to face, which turns out to be thanks to Izumiko’s mom being on scene.
Then, by one thing or another, we finish summer vacation and end up in the school festival arc, which will serve as our finale arc.
This is the side of the pain point that I’m more confident in calling a flaw: the show’s macro is very oddly paced. Technically, it’s four arcs, not too odd, but those arcs don’t seem to cover the right beats for the main plot. We start with what’s basically the prologue, getting Izumiko to go to the special school for specials with her broody and foul-tempered guardian and potential boyfriend.. Most shows would get this kind of preliminary setup done in… an episode, maybe even less. Instead, we putter around for three just trying to get the plot started. We then have prologue part the second when Izumiko actually gets to school. There are three episodes doing this little initial spar with Takayanagi, so we get the idea that he’s kind of a bad dude and also in the running for some mystical support that it would probably be bad for someone like him to get. This is followed by one (1) magical side-quest for our friendly faction, and then… it’s the big event and promised final showdown with Takayanagi.
Call me crazy, but I don’t think the technical antagonist here was built up very well. We kind of won the first bout with Takayanagi, and he hasn’t had a chance to rebuild his menace. This is a symptom of the fact that the show doesn’t really care about the “main plot” and all it’s trappings, and instead uses it as set dressing for Izumiko’s personal journey.
But if this is set dressing… well, we’ve all heard of actors chewing the scenery. This “set dressing” would be the scenery chewing the characters.
In festival prep, Izumiko ends up getting dressed up fancy to play the “princess” role in a costume parade’s rehearsal. At first, nothing happens, but when she’s confirming that with Miyuki later, the Himegami takes over and, after a day on the town with Miyuki reveals that she’s a sort of time traveling spirit, a deceased human who will cause the extinction of humanity in the future, and thus wishes to prevent her own advent. She also wishes to flirt heavily with Miyuki, who is terrified of this whole business and wants Izumiko back.
Cut to the next episode where Izumiko is back and, while she has some trauma about it, is told to not worry.
Even the first episode of the festival is… a pretty generic sort of school festival episode. There’s some hint of Izumiko connecting to a haunting in a haunted house, and on the character side there’s a nice conversation with Miyuki where it seems like she’s more similar to the Himegami than one would initially guess, but by in large we just sort of drink in the atmosphere, with only a couple weird hints that Takayanagi may be doing something evil.
Finally, he plays his hand in the penultimate episode, mind-controlling Izumiko to his side. He completes his little Charm Person something like halfway through the episode and it’s resolved by the end.
He leaves her to her devices, it isn’t very effective as she keeps trying to shake it and is still herself enough to be horrified by evil plots and plans. She breaks free pretty quickly, but in the process… does a lot more supernatural awesome than we are accustomed to Izumiko doing
Thus our climax is predicated not on Takayanagi, who was basically worthless, but on Izumiko’s internal struggle as she comes to know herself.
Miyuki, with help, tries to track down Izumiko in the spirit plane. He first finds Takayanagi, who has been turned into a dog, and is warned that the ghost brother has fallen for Izumiko and will protect her. Izumiko, meanwhile, realizes that she and the Himegami are one in the same. I guess that means on other timelines she was the one who wiped out humanity in the future?
Izumiko hides away in a higher plane where the ghost brother tries to seduce her. Sort of, he’s not a creeper about it like Takayanagi with his mind control. Miyuki fights through ghost-illusion-things long enough to believe in Izumiko, reach out to her, and be brought to her level. The ghost brother leaves, and we get our happy reunion climax
After some very powerful words about finding a non-specific way to avert her becoming the doom of all mankind, we cut to Takayanagi (dog) having arrived on scene and being forced to spill the beans on all the horrible things he’s been doing with the festival, because curses are his thing. Izumiko does one more dance, dispelling all the bad (apparently including the dog transform) and the festival ends with all the conjured ghosts going home and the adults being pretty sure that Izumiko is the one they want, specialist of all specials.
With that and a “maybe ever after” with Miyuki (they don’t even get a kiss in the show, even though there’s one in the opening), the show ends. Nothing’s really resolved, but I guess it feels good enough for what we had.
RDG was… frustrating. So, here is where I come back to that major pain point and what it means for the overall quality of the show. There is good material in here, even the full material for a good show… but it’s not confident in itself. RDG doesn’t believe it can stand on its home field, and frantically tries to be something it’s not for most of the run.
There’s a metaphor for Izumiko in there somewhere, but in any case it makes the show hard to watch. Every great character moment is pretty much either preceded or followed by a big deal action beat that the show doesn’t support properly or that it doesn’t really know how to make land. This is a show that doesn’t need an antagonist; the fate of the Himegami is enough tension. But instead we have to deal with a random jerk who doesn’t amount to much of anything for half the show and go on about a conflict between the random jerk and a friendly that we know is actually going to be won by Izumiko herself without even trying because all the lame tricks they’re pulling on each other are missing the point.
So, yes, even though it has the building blocks of a really good Shoujo delivery, I think the awkward and unfit battle school shell deals the show a grievous wound. By the end, especially knowing that the Himegami is Izumiko’s own past-future self (time travel tenses are hard), I’m kind of fine with her and her world-endangering shadow. I think the best stuff in the show is Miyuki’s random date with the Himegami and the follow-up scene where Izumiko is jealous of it, establishing that she’s in a love triangle competing against herself, which is kind of funny. If we got more Himegami, either being personable or being scary, instead of goofing around with Takayanagi trying to pretend like he was relevant, that would have been doubling down on stronger material. Instead, the show distracts from it.
I’m going to give RDG a D+. I will admit, some of this was out of spite. I’ve said before that reviewing anime is kind of a great gig, but it became really, really hard for RDG’s running time and while it took me a while to figure out why when so many scenes are perfectly fine on the micro, that is representative of my experience being… less than stellar. It was only twelve episodes, but it felt like such an eternity longer, in the worst ways. Because of that, I have to recommend staying away from this one, and issue it a non-passing grade to go along with that.