Goro may be only mostly dead, but that still means it’s Honoka’s turn to steal the show. So, what’s Yuno minus the -dere up to today?
Mostly, we get out her backstory, which clearly involves psychotic controlling parents. After the initial flashback, she visits the hospital and threatens to kill Goro off before Lall bluffs her into backing down. Her emotional instability comes to the front, she runs off, and Lall and Kouki make like friends, having discussed Goro’s price and situation.
Honoka finds out that it’s a bit after hours and most of the hospital doors are locked. Since she can’t face Goro and Kouki after her previous display, she insists on finding a different way out. This continues even as she runs into Chika, who is busily cryptic at her and attempts to dissuade her from opening a particular door that, when opened, sucks her into another flashback… or rather a parallel world of her past.
Here, Honoka meets her younger self, at a time when her little brother was shut up in a heavily locked room as punishment for breaking an undisclosed number of the household’s many asinine yet absolute rules. After some discussion with her young self, Honoka summons her cleaver and tries to free her brother. That’s when her parents in that reality come home and she goes ahead and butchers them a second time. That, evidently, allows her to exit for a confrontation with Chika on the roof.
There, after brief discussion of the whole parallel world thing, which seems to be tied to the wheelchair-bound candidate, Chika takes her combat form and has a round two with Honoka that does not go Honoka’s way. While burning to death, however, and guided by the encounter with her past, she realizes she can use her own flesh. This allows her to regenerate into a younger form with much more lopsided power. She bullies Chika into surrendering and demands fealty (restored to the outside world and her usual character model), but as Chika prepares to accept, she gets a trident through the back for her trouble.
We see that Chika’s assailant was the other ally we saw for her earlier, now identified as the brother of the sleeping candidate in the wheelchair. He brushes off killing Chika and starts to threaten Honoka when sister comes to. This, evidently, means withdrawing for the time being, and he takes her through a portal to leave Honoka on the hospital roof.
So, this is an episode where Kamierabi’s Mirai Nikki side really shows, given how familiar Honoka’s backstory is to the backstory of Yuno Gasai, who also went completely psycho due to a strict abusive home and murdered her parents. However, it’s not as though Yuno has the monopoly on abusive households, and if Honoka was not also the knife nutter in a death game, I’d probably write off any hint of similarity. Overall, I actually still rather enjoy her as the deuterotagonist, and seeing some of what drives her to have a better outcome and want to be god is good. The fact that there’s a little brother bond in it is also, while hardly the most inventive thing, a nice note.
Chika’s death is kind of underwhelming though. True, we kind of knew that Goro’s circle was getting too big, and I actually enjoyed how Honoka was questioned on why she was sparing Chika, making it clear that whether naturally or supernaturally Goro is kind of rubbing off on her. Still, she was such a personality and was fun enough to watch that I was kind of hoping we’d have her around for a while.
Meanwhile, we’ve also introduced a parallel world power, which is something that feels like it might actually synergize and/or compete with Goro’s manipulation of Karma and fate. I will give the show some credit in that most of the powers given to the candidates feel like they could be meaningful fragments of divine potency. Mimic seems a little short, but there’s clearly more to Honoka’s command of flesh than she was initially able to capitalize on, and while Chika is dead now and thus someone we probably have to worry about less, it became clear in the fight with Honoka that she’s not just throwing fire as much as she is manipulating the chemical elements on their most basic levels, with fire just being the practical application she’s most capable of. That gives us known powers of flesh, matter, karma, time, dimensions, and minds – heavy hitters.
So far, the outlook for Kamierabi is still hovering in the “Fair if you can get over the animation” bracket. It’s not exactly a great place to be but even discounting Ex-Arm I’ve watched worse for these seasonal reviews and it’s certainly not one to avoid. Not, at least, as it stands now.