I hope you like flashbacks and still shots thereof.
So, this episode got us more of the backstory of our new orange and yellow friends, the latter of whom turned out to be the candidate for the time being. After an opening flashback in which Orange saves Yellow from a bunch of bullies, we get back to where we left off with Goro going to rescue science girl. When he gets there, he finds that the menace of the hour is masked students. Orange shows up and get the two of them away from trouble, at which point he’s prompted to explain himself.
It seems that this orange guy is in fact the Student Council President, Kouki Ama. After taking care of Yellow (which was itself the culmination of years of self-improvement from when he was bullied himself to now), he made Yellow his vice-president. But, Yellow was chosen as a candidate and began to use his power and the “Little Angel” story to get access to brainwash… well, it’s framed as meaning to be his tormentors, but really it just seems like everyone. He didn’t go after the Kouki, though, since Kouki was Yellow’s idol. This resulted in Kouki being able to snag his phone and hold the brainwashing in check, until that scuffle with Honoka allowed the little angel to get it back, along with his power. Thus, our current predicament where masked and mind-controlled students are on the hunt for Green Science Girl (properly Chika) and Goro.
They go to face Yellow in his lair, the auditorium, but Goro is quickly stopped by the mind controlled minions, including what would appear to be a masked Honoka. Kouki applies his best friendship speech to the problem, which makes our antagonist of the evening start to freak out. Chika comes in, having gotten separated on the way there, and shocks a mass of the goons, allowing Goro to break free enough to invoke the Fool’s Sutra. With it, we see him able to drop Little Angel into a bottomless pit. Kouki grabs his hand at the last minute, but then Little Angel addresses god and says he resigns, which comes with a free course of instant death by bisection.
In the epilogue we don’t check up with Honoka to see if she’s still brainwahsed and crazy (seeing as Little Angel claimed that only his direct action could put his victims back to normal, but who knows how resignation alters that) and are allowed to just assume that things will probably be fine at school. We don’t follow up with Kouki either, who I imagine might have some words for Goro, and are allowed to instead just assume he’s probably going to be our Fourth-equivalent going forward.. Instead, we follow up with Chika and some freshly introduced friends of hers. Surprising no one given the show’s subtle-as-a-trainwreck visual coding, Chika is in fact a candidate, going incognito by keeping her phone off and thus her power sealed, and she seems to be working with others as well, a strange girl in a wheelchair who seems very out of it and their more lucid friend.
So, I’ll be honest, if I didn’t know and trust a lot of the creative minds behind this, and also if I weren’t committed to seeing it through in any case, I’d be running low on patience. The first three episodes were, broadly, a half-decent opening. Goro was clearly going through a lot to learn to be a more determined person and stronger participant, Honoka was actually a good deal of fun, and the stuff with Akitsu including the final (for now) conflict between him and Goro was at least different, with strong emotions and some creative power use until the inevitable deus ex machina pull at the end.
The Little Angel arc, however, felt like two episodes of autopilot. Honoka jobs as a cruddy Rin and we get some quick drive-by psychology for these characters while running blindly from encounter to encounter. I’d blame treating it like the video games Yoko Taro is known for, but Yoko Taro is neither the writer (That would be Jin) nor the director (Hiroyuki Sehsita, who of things I’ve reviewed was assistant director of the first season of Knights of Sidonia only to be promoted for the second and more visually wonderful season to full director credit); he’s credited with series concept, which means that he’s pretty far down the list of folks to blame for this material being delivered like an action RPG would do it.
Dropped, at least for now, is also the idea that Fool’s Sutra has a cost, twisting Karma around. That was pretty integral in the first two episodes and for episode 3, where the staff form first appeared… well, we were more concerned with the fact that Goro had to kill his friend rather than anything he might have had to pay in order to do it. But the idea that his power would cause suffering for himself or at least ripples in reality, an interesting topic, has been rather quickly forgotten. This could turn back around: Yoko Taro likes making his characters suffer so the idea that there’s this mounting debt that will come due could be used, and if it is I’ll forgive the staff form, but for now it feels like outright drama-deleting hax.
Where I’m running low and not out, though, is the fact that the show has kept at least one entertaining character consistently available. It’s not always the same one: Honoka, Akitsu, and Chika have all traded the role around. There’s at least some entertainment to be had in this show, even at the most “just let me pick up the controller” times.
I do wish that we focused just a little more. In a sense, this could be growing pains, but it feels like deepening the cast has been ignored in favor of introducing more cast, and to an extent if you want to be really good, you have to find opportunities to weave both. As of this point, it’s been confirmed that KamiErabi will run for a total of 24 episodes across 2 cours (possibly split), and I think that’s a good thing as it gives a chance to iron out this troubling little kink. It does also mean that I can compare it more directly with Mirai Nikki and UBW. So, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
We have just finished episode 5 of KamiErabi. Our main character is Goro. We know he tanked his existential karma resurrecting Honoka, that he’s a big fan of a certain idol who’s almost guaranteed to be a candidate, and that he’s otherwise… I don’t know, really. He’s somewhat conflict averse, but it comes off just as him being not a hardened killer yet rather than a serious character trait. For other characters, what do we know? We know very little about Honoka despite her serving as the best stand-in we have for Rin or Yuno and even less about who Chika really is. They have entertaining bits, but not so much depth. We know more about Kouki, having gotten his backstory told directly to us. He’s the more protagonist-like character in terms of his emotions and motivations, even though here he’s not a player (yet, if the end credits have anything to say), which is at least something. We know the most about Akitsu, having gotten a good and revelatory series of motive rants in episode 3 as well as him having an outward demeanor with personality, but he’s dead right now. Lastly, we know a little about the dead Little Angel and that a couple other characters exist and have real models so they must be important. In terms of emotional connections, we haven’t forged many. There’s some connection to Goro, but it’s pretty tenuous since we didn’t really see what if anything sacrificing his karma to bring Honoka back to life meant to him. Does he regret it? Would he have done it for anyone, or was she special? These are big important questions for understanding his inner workings.
Where would we be in five episodes of UBW? Not counting the hour-long prologue (because that would be cheating) we’d know a LOT of characters exist – Shirou, Saber, Rin, and Archer are fairly important and we’d have at least seen something out of Illya, Berserker, Sakura, Shinji, Lancer, Kotomine, Gilgamesh, Kuzuki, Caster, Rider, Taiga, and Shirou’s one student friend. How deeply do we understand them and how emotionally connected to them are we? Well, for most, we know they exist, like Chika’s buddies or the idol. Shirou, however, has had the time and focus to find his conviction and express to the audience what makes him Shirou Emiya and not just “a nice guy”. Rin is already clearly deep in the Tsundere, but while her character is loud it’s also reasonably complex, and we have reason to like or dislike her and see more of who and what she is. Some of the other characters, like Saber, Lancer, or Illya are at least as well off as Chika, having both a “bit” to go off and hints of more nuance beneath. It’s honestly night and day, and that with time for plenty of drag-out supernatural battles besides.
What about Mirai Nikki? The structure there is more similar: Episode 1, Yuki gets his powers and has to have his first taste of life or death battle, facing down Third alongside Yuno. Then we meet Ninth and Fourth, getting another good battle and establishing a new normal going forward. Then, using that, we get the two-episode arc centered around Sixth, the cult-leading diary holder being dealt with at exactly the same point as Little Angel, the brainwashing candidate. In that time, we understand that Yuki, like Goro, is normal and terrified and not really playing for the win even if fate is going to force him to. We’ve gotten a good initial study of Yuno, seeing her ruthless cool head under pressure, dangerous obsession, and even the literal skeletons in her closet. We know broadly who Fourth is, and maybe even start to like him. Ninth has already begun her long, long arc with her escape from Yuki and capture by Twelfth, and while Twelfth is an also-ran he had a big eccentric character to command screen presence. Finally, Sixth had a well-executed tragic backstory so that we would feel something when she ultimately had to be killed by the lead, a lot like what happened with Little Angel here, just better.
Those shows are high bars, but they are also very natural bars and they knew how to get you invested in the characters and their plight. They gave us intriguing people that we wanted to know more about, and while they needed to and did get out their fair share of fighting, they also got their leads moving forward, perhaps because they seemed to know who they were focusing on in a way that KamiErabi doesn’t seem to. And, in both those cases, the scenario was better explored as well. In UBW we knew the stakes, what they meant to our leads, and had a clear theme of these mythical figures of old coming out to have their legendary fights. In Mirai Nikki we knew less about the endgame, it being this nebulous “become god” sort of thing, but we had a strong understanding of what it meant to be a diary holder and what their powers could be like, since they all existed within a tight theme. Here, we neither understand how and why our characters are connected to this game nor what the sequence of play is going to be like.
And this is already a mile long for one of my seasonal episode summaries, so I’ll try to wrap it up by saying this: while I just went into Kamierabi’s faults, I don’t think it’s dead in the water just yet. A bad opening can kill a show even when paired with a fine finish (just look at Revisions) but this opening isn’t that bad, it’s just a little below the inspiration it so obviously wears on its sleeve. Had I done Yuki Yuna is a Hero as a seasonal watch, I might have been just as hard on it at this point, and that ultimately turned into something that I have a strange yet definite fondness for, and that as a twelve-episode outing. We’ll see what Kamierabi does with the remaining time that is given to it.