It’s been a while since the first time I talked about Yuki Yuna is a Hero. The basic takeaway was that it was very much a Magical Girl show that existed in the shadow of Madoka Magica in terms of its world and story structure, but that carved an admirable niche for itself, in large part with good use of lighter elements and slice of life to counterpoint the magical darkness of existence in the setting.
Apparently, Yuki Yuna did pretty well for herself, because that show ended up being the start of a fairly significant franchise, which returned to anime in the form of a second season split between two half-season long stories: the Washio Sumi Chapter, which tells the tragic tale of the first run that Mimori Togo (then known as Sumi Washio) and Sonoko Nogi had as heroes; and the Hero Chapter, which functions as a direct sequel to Season 1 of Yuki Yuna.
Thus, we begin with Sumi being recruited as a hero, alongside Sonoko and a character we didn’t see in Yuki Yuna, Gin Minowa. This seems to be a lot like you’d expect, having seen season 1, but there are some nagging differences. For one, the struggle against the Vertex is centered not on the forest of the Shinju-sama, but on a great bridge that the Vertex must cross in order to attack the Shinju Sama, with the heroes standing to prevent them from so much as touching the sacred forest (which would allow them, as we see in season 1, to start to damage the real world where it is parallel). For a second case, there are no fairies. Nor, for that matter, does defeating the Vertex seem to charge up the characters’ floral motifs for Mankai (which is also not mentioned at all).
Since this is mostly a matter of absence, it is of course not called out in the show, and a casual viewer would be forgiven for not noticing it, especially not noticing the fact that Mankai (which wasn’t introduced as an idea until a few episodes into Yuki Yuna) and the Fairies (which weren’t more than set dressing for most of the run of the show) are missing.
The early phase sees the trio fight some Vertex, which is difficult as always but which also leads to them bonding as friends. This is especially important for Sumi, who is well-studied this time around as kind of a weird nerd (specifically focused on military history and national defense) and isolated upper class girl who has had some trouble making friends.
The girls work through many of their problems, and share who they are and what’s important to them with both each other and the audience, once again getting us invested in the girls through the slice of life elements so that we’ll want to see them come through their battles alright. Despite only lasting a couple of episodes (because the entire Washio Sumi Chapter is told in a mere six) this really does feel significant and meaty, like we’re really getting to know the trio.
Then, as they’re going about their lives, ready for another good day, the heroes are once again called to deal with a Vertex attack. However, two Vertex unexpectedly prove to be three, taking Sumi and Sonoko both out of the fight, and forcing Gin to stand alone. Being a bold and proud hero, Gin makes her stand, and manages to destroy the invading Vertex in the process. However, she does not manage to survive her wounds, and now the two girls are left with the grim reality of their best friend having given her life in service of the Shinju-sama and the Taisha.
This is where, if you’re familiar with Season 1, you’ll notice the lack of Fairies and Mankai if you hadn’t done so already. Recall, in Yuki Yuna is a Hero, the chosen heroes are not permitted to die. No matter what happens to them, the Fairies will preserve their lives (even stopping Mimori from killing herself in normal form and the normal world), while Mankai allowed them to channel great power, even if at terrible cost, to deal with situations like this. Gin doesn’t have either of those, and thus we get a funeral.
It’s shortly after that when the Taisha rolls out the new and improved Hero System, incorporating new features that aim to prevent a tragedy like Gin’s death from ever happening again. The Shinju-sama has granted its chosen heroes their Fairy partners, and also access to the Mankai power-up to use if things get too dire, though no one thinks to tell the heroes themselves the cost. In my mind, this is probably the biggest mistake made by the Taisha over the series – their heroes are chosen for a reason, and I feel like most them wouldn’t hesitate to give up part of themselves in order to protect the world as much as they’re rightly infuriated when they find out they’ve been lied to.
The new system gets a workout fairly soon, as a massive Vertex incoming manifests. Sumi loses the use of her legs first thing out, and Sonoko her sight in one eye. They realize this quite a bit quicker than the girls in season 1, perhaps because of their exact situation, but see no choice but to continue to fight, Sumi with her classic floating battle platform and Sonoko with a Mankai rig that manifests as an entire boat. That might sound silly, but it’s pretty cool. Sumi’s second Mankai costs her all of her memory, however, which leaves her disoriented and unable to keep fighting, meaning that Sonoko pushes on alone. She takes on quite a few Vertex, and even gets a glimpse of the flames of the outer world that exist beyond the bridge, where the invading Vertex are being ceaselessly resurrected.
Sonoko also realizes that her heart has stopped, and from that guesses her immortality. Unable to die, she invokes Mankai again and again, striking down the Vertex that are being rebuilt, giving everything she has in order to buy her world and the people she cares about a little more time, which ultimately leaves her in the bedridden, enshrined state we find her in as of Yuki Yuna is a Hero. Sumi, meanwhile, is given a new identity as Mimori Togo and a new home, where the poor amnesiac and wheelchair-bound girl has a fateful meeting with her first new friend, Yuki Yuna.
Then, after Season 1 (or a recap episode, if you prefer), we move on to the Hero Chapter.
Hero Chapter picks up with the members of the Season 1 Hero Club – Yuna, Fu, Itsuki, and Karin – now joined by Sonoko, who also benefited from that whole “return of what was taken” deal that happened at the end of Season 1. This allows her to live as a normal girl again, if one who still has deep insider ties to the Taisha. They go about their business, engaging in the typical Hero Club activities (the slice of life ones, not fighting Vertex), but Yuna and Sonoko in particular can’t help but feeling that something is missing. They’re eventually able to recapture their memories of Mimori (who was back up to some Sumi antics, indicating that she’s something of a synthesis personality with her memories restored), causing them to realize that something as caused the world to somehow forget her.
Sonoko suspects that, if their friend can’t be remembered in the world, she must not be there, and would instead be somewhere beyond the wall. The girls set out, with the brand new Hero System 3.0 unveiled for their trip. Sonoko relates the patch notes – their Mankai gauge now starts full, and drains completely when used or bit by bit to sustain the barrier that saves them from mortal injuries. Mankai won’t cost them part of themselves as an offering, but on the other side, if they use it they’ll be fully mortal again. They’ll also be killable if they soak way too much damage, Mankai or no, which is an improvement over the deal that Gin got but still something to be aware of.
These rules will persist for the rest of Hero Chapter, so best get used to them. Honestly, I kind of appreciate that either the Taisha or the Shinju-sama actually tries to fix the system iteration by iteration, since it makes them feel less stupid and/or malicious and more just like flawed beings trying to do something with a situation that’s going to be terrible according to any logical outcome. To an extent, that seems to be a minor theme of the Yuki Yuna franchise – all the big issues in these stories theoretically put everyone in unwinnable situations, and the best outcomes are typically achieved when someone (mostly Yuna) decides to do the brave thing rather than the “smart” thing.
Speaking of doing the brave but technically foolish thing, the mission to rescue Mimori from the world of flames beyond the wall is one of those. Sonoka uses her boat Mankai to transport everyone, while the others mostly fend off the attacks of lesser Vertex that are swarming all around. As it turns out, Mimori isn’t that hard to find, since there’s a giant black hole sort of vortex of oblivion out there that all the Vertex seem interested in. Realizing that Mimori is in there, Yuna dives in, burning through everything she has to get through the relentless flames and crushing pressure that not even the Vertex can survive. This results in a near-death experience where it’s Yuna’s soul wandering outside her body that mostly makes it to the center, where Mimori is bound.
In that space, Yuna sees how this came to be in Mimori’s memories, that she agreed to be a sacrifice in order to hold the flames at bay, seeing as the degree to which the world was in a bad way was more or less her fault for blowing a hole in the wall. The whole deal where the world forgot her was actually by her request, believing that she would avoid hurting her friends that way. Yuna, of course, does what she would always do with a friend in trouble, and pulls Mimori free of the sacrificial bindings, which does a few things. First, it allows both Yuna and Mimori to be brought home by their friends, which was the idea. Second, there’s now nothing out there serving as a massive redirect of the wrath of the Vertex and the flames that spawned them. The flames seem to have stabilized, but something doesn’t quite feel right about it. Third, Yuna herself becomes marked with a very ominous sort of burning brand.
As Yuna grapples with what to do about the mark, she starts to see dark visions of it afflicting her friends, and her friends begin to suffer misfortunes – minor, at least at first, but still bizarre enough to note. The misfortune seems to ramp up as her desire to open up does, with Fu even being hit by a car and hospitalized when Yuna tries to go to her for help, and thus Yuna decides that now is not the time for Hero Club Tenet #4 (If you’re troubled, talk to someone), and proceeds to keep her suffering to herself
Eventually, though, Yuna’s friends catch on to the fact that all is not well with her, and do some snooping when she won’t tell them a thing. They discover, from her journal and a book of records of the heroes, that Yuna is suffering from a curse sent down by the high god/gods that are responsible for the flames, that the curse will spread to those that learn of it from her, and that between the curse and the body that the Shinju-sama provided her with after she messed herself up touching the Vertex core at the end of season 1, she probably only has a couple of months left to live.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Taisha let Yuna in on a bit of a problem they’re facing: the Shinju-sama is withering, and will soon die. Without their protector deity against the heavenly god of the flames, humanity will be wiped out pretty much instantly if that happens, so the Taisha have hatched a plan to avert this fate. By performing a marriage/sacrifice ritual between a human and the Shinju-sama, not only will the Shinju-sama be regenerated, but humanity itself will become part of the family of the gods, living a new sort of existence that won’t need the physical world or be under constant threat of divine extermination. Of course, it’s unclear what they’ll be if this step is taken, but every other reasonable answer seems to have been exhausted at this point. They ask Yuna to be the sacrifice/bride and she figures she might as well, what with the whole “cursed and going to die extremely soon anyway” deal she’s suffering from.
This extra burden drives Yuna farther from her friends, though, and they aren’t particularly happy when the Taisha approach them with what is expected to be their final mission: protect the ritual against an all-consuming final attack by the God of the Flames until humankind ascends.
The hero team splits up, with Mimori and Fu going to see Yuna at the heart of the forest world while the others hold the line against the biggest, baddest boss monster that a literal deity can throw at them. The ritual progresses with (as Mimori reaches the center to discover) Yuna’s spirit being slowly dissolved to become part of the higher realm. This has rippling effects on the real world, and many of the Taisha priests begin to shed their physical bodies, becoming glowing golden stalks of wheat as matter crumbles to dust and spirit altered.
Mimori, however, manages to break through to Yuna (verbally) and get to admit that she doesn’t want to die, that she wants to be saved, and that’s pretty much what it takes for Mimori to go all out trying to pull her free. The fairies resist, but the spirits of all the fallen heroes past (including Gin at the forefront) put their weight behind Mimori and her show of devotion, saving Yuna.
After that display, the Shinju-sama decides to believe in the humans who believe in it, and spends everything powering up Yuna. She takes on a new super-Mankai form and, in a properly impressive display, literally punches out the Heavenly God and destroys the Flames for good. The Shinju-sama perishes after this, seeing its last heroes off (seemingly happily) through the fairies, but the entire world outside its protection has been regenerated with the flames gone, thus providing a bright potential future for humanity.
The epilogue is very short, but we know enough to know that Yuna is fully healed, the Taisha are presumably in shambles what with many of their members being dust (their most friendly member, a teacher who repeatedly sided with the heroes, is still around but down an eye from partially being converted by the ritual), and there’s now a whole world outside to explore and expand into.
Part of why I wanted to address the Washio Sumi and Hero Chapters together as Season 2, rather than separately as their individual stories, is that I don’t think either one is balanced alone. Washio Sumi has great character building and slice of life, but the dark side of things appears very abruptly right at the end. The Hero Chapter is a surprisingly good continuation of Season 1 (a story I wouldn’t have called being a good one to continue), but it leans heavily on either Season 1 or Washio Sumi to provide some of the counterbalance for the constant train of bad to worse that is missing Mimori, Flames, Curses, and the possible extinction of Humanity. Taken together, the two half-seasons have the same sort of structure and flow as Season 1, which is strong. You do still need to watch season 1 first, because not a lot of time is spent on re-establishing who the Hero Club members (other than Mimori, who got to star as Sumi) are; you’re expected to more or less know them and like them by the time we start telling their story, but I feel like the whole thing works best when it’s put together.
Despite that, I wouldn’t actually recommend putting it together with Season 1, to watch the stories in chronological order: a big part of the tension in the Washio Sumi chapter is that the audience knows how bad things really are from Yuki Yuna, and that there are some foregone conclusions (That Sumi will go Mankai twice, losing the use of her legs and her memories and that Sonoko will go Mankai over twenty times, rendering her an immortal invalid. That Gin will die isn’t guaranteed from her absence in Yuki Yuna, but there is a heavy lean in that direction) that serve to draw you on because even though you know what’s going to happen, you don’t know how or when it will happen, so the Sword of Damocles hangs over the fun times with Sumi and her friends. Similarly, season 1 of Yuki Yuna is hurt pretty badly if you go into it with the Washio Sumi chapter, since that starts you off knowing all about Mankai, and also having the perspective that it’s an attempt at mercy and not a monstrous truth. So I’d go with production order if you want to watch or especially introduce someone new to the Yuki Yuna franchise.
On the whole, a great deal of what I said about the first season of Yuki Yuna, in terms of things that really determine its grade, still holds true for the second season. There are, however, a couple of notable exceptions. For one, the second season really crawls out from under the shadow of Madoka Magica to be its own thing, owing largely to a shift in perspective that highlights a great difference in themes. In Madoka Magica, one of the big themes is really betrayal. The largest comes from Kyuubey, but there’s a persistent sense that people are basically rotten, and that it takes something really exceptional to be good. In the first season of Yuki Yuna on its own, the atmosphere is not as oppressive but there is still that very strong note of “these girls are misled and sent to torment.” Sure, Kyuubey tries to justify its actions, and the Taisha can be explained by gesturing vaguely in the direction of the world of flames, but there’s still a core of abuse.
In expanding the material and showing the evolution of the Hero System, though, Yuki Yuna seems to go with the idea that everyone involved is basically good, and forced to consider what to compromise and what to sacrifice when they’re presented with a situation where there doesn’t seem to be a good choice on the table. The Taisha handle people in a shady way, but it’s hard to doubt their devotion to the cause of humanity as a whole, or that their choices, while perhaps not the right ones, were made in honest pursuit of the best outcome. What’s unique in this setting is not being a decent person, but being willing and able, for whatever reason, to throw out limits both real and imagined in order to make a miracle. Even if Madoka’s ending kind of went there, the way in which it permeates the show feels more like Gurren Lagann than it does Madoka.
The Season 2 chapters also seem better balanced in terms of their character focus. When talking about Season 1, I mentioned that Fu kind of stole the show, and that Yuna was a bit of a flatter character, being always and relentlessly positive. In this season, we’re focused on Sumi/Mimori and Yuna, and both of them get the kind of development you want to see. We get to see Yuna reach and even pass her breaking point, and be the one who has to be saved as well as the one doing the saving, which was not something we ever really saw in Season 1. Similarly, we learn a lot about Mimori, what makes her who she is, and see her really develop a strength of character, where as in Season 1 she was pretty much the sad girl who was easily brought low by things until she finally got sad enough to decide that the world might as well die. There’s a degree to which it’s sad that we lose out on a lot of scenes I’d like to have with Fu, Itsuki, and Karin… but we also get Sonoko and Gin, who get really great work done with them over the course of the show but who don’t steal the scene in a problematic way.
For all these reasons, I’m going to go ahead and bump up the grade for Season 2 of Yuki Yuna is a Hero from the B of Season 1 to a B+. They took what they had, improved on it, expanded on it, and built something that while still flawed is overall a little bit stronger, and which serves to strengthen the franchise as a whole. You can’t really ask for more than that out of a sequel season, so if you had any fondness for the first season of Yuki Yuna, I would very much recommend going on to the second.