An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Seasonal Selection – Endo and Kobayashi Live! The Latest on Tsundere Villainess Lieselotte Episode 9

Festivals all around, as the school culture festival is in swing over in Japan and the festival set to be attacked by the Witch of Yore is soon to arrive in the fantasy world.

As such, we get an episode that’s more dedicated to Endo and Kobayashi – there are honestly few preparations left for the Witch, and though we get some time with Lise and Seig and some good sweet scenes between them (Seig comes on too strong, Lise intends to attend ball in a uniform so she’ll be free to fight, and Lise’s littlest sister now intends to wed the little boy of the bachelors come hell or high water), for once the majority of the focus and movement is on our normal world not-quite-a-couple.

Kobayashi, avid as she is, starts out wanting to do Seig’s confession from the previous episode as the club’s dramatic reading (with Endo playing Seig, to which he agrees if she’ll play Lise). Mercifully for everyone except perhaps Kobayashi herself, this gets nixed by the rest of the club on the grounds of “don’t use us for your PDA, you two.” They challenge Endo about this, and he admits that he and Kobayashi aren’t actually a thing despite the fact that he might like it. The other club members help him out and hand off a usable script (a murder mystery) that he’s able to present to Kobayashi for doctoring, resulting in the Broadcast Club putting on a decent little play.

After the performance, Kobayashi’s older sister comes around. Seems like she’s part of Team Shipper, more or less, and also embarrassing to her little sister. She also has some connection, however tangental, to Mr. Model, helping bring him back into the picture.

She manages to get a conversation with Endo alone, against Kobayashi’s wishes, and is starting to actually give up some good material when the girl in question interrupts. From a long shot, we see that Mr. Model is also at school. Looking at Kobayashi, he once again calls her “Eve” and says that she’ll be his.

At this point I’m more worried about the Witch of Yore attacking Kobayashi than Lise. Given the tone of the show everything’s going to work out if she does, but clearly something is going to go down as the plots end in parallel festivals. There’s three episodes to do it, and I’d give good odds that we get one for the climax in fantasy land, one for the climax in Japan, and one for cleanup. If that’s the case this show has been… chill. A calmer and more quiet affair that it might have been. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with that, but we’ll see how it all shakes out.