Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun #18 – At long last, Iruma reaches Kirio and demands an explanation. So Kirio tells him all about his terrible childhood, his realization that he was a natural-born griefer, his radicalization and recruitment by Baal, and hey, he’s monologuing here, could Iruma have the decency to pay attention to him and not casually dismantle his infernal device?
Everything Iruma thought he knew about the Magical Apparatus Club turns out to be almost true. Kirio really did join it to erase inequality, just he planned to do it by helping return the netherworld to the good old days of total chaos. There really was once an enthusiastic community of inventors there, just they were developing weapons.
Here Welcome to Demon School returns to riffing on Harry Potter. It was a disappointment that the series never really examined the lasting effects that being surrounded by horrible people for his first 11 years of life should have had on Harry. Instead, once dropped into Hogwarts, he immediately a perfectly normal social life. But Welcome to Demon School has made the adjustment its central theme, letting Iruma reflect on the contrast in his life and articulate how it is shaping his choices.
(Crunchyroll — Animate Gamer — Muse Asia — bilibili)
ID: Invaded #6 – Although the mystery of the Gravedigger is solved, there are still a few details to be ironed out, like actually capturing both members and then finding the victims’ bodies. Hondōmachi gets an official recommendation for pilot duty, Sakaido gets a chance to explore the other half of the Gravedigger’s mind, the police officers killed in the explosion get a nice funeral, and the rest of the team gets a chance to ponder what they know about John Walker.
Having already concluded that he’s not an artifact of the Mizuhanome system, they move quickly to deducing that someone must be creating serial killers with similar technology. In most stories, this would mean there’s an extra copy of it stashed somewhere, but in this case the team works out that it could have been someone making use of their system in its prototype stage. In which case, the perpetrator might still be around, which means that every recurring character is a suspect, but particularly the ones that may have been around for a long time— Matsuoka and the boss.
There’s certainly a lot of room to suspect misuse (or an accident?) with the prototype. It would explain the missing inventor and the heavy veil of official secrecy. It would provide a reasonable explanation for why all the serial killers happen to be in the same town. It would also mean that the spotlight is going to turn on the Mizuhanome itself at some point. Maybe we’ll find out who the real Kaeru is eventually.
(Funimation — AnimeLab — Wakanim — bilibili)
In/Spectre #4 – Nanase Karin broke into the idol biz thanks to her impressive bustline. But she was more than just an accident of topography; she was smart and motivated enough to make her own father feel inadequate. And it was her father’s death, a month before her own, that set off the chain of mysterious happenings around her.
Well, the first thing that will stand out to every mystery fan is the condition of Nanase Karin’s body. So mutilated that the only way to deduce her identity was to look at her belongings (what, no DNA test? The source material for this series is less than 10 years old), it suggests that wasn’t her. So could the apparitions be somehow connected with a living Nanase?
Kotoko, for all her smugness, has a very practical streak, so she realizes fairly quickly that she’s going to have to work with Saki on the case. It helps that Saki can see that the whole thing about being Kurō’s girlfriend is entirely in Kotoko’s head, so that bridge hasn’t been burned as thoroughly as it could have been.
(Crunchyroll — bilibili)
Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun #4 – The spirit of the Misaki Stairs misses the teacher who used to visit her, so she came up with a great idea: find out how the human body works by kidnapping random teenagers and demanding that they build her one, then threatening them with torture and murder when they do it wrong. Somehow this scheme has failed to work, and a forcible demotion is enough to persuade her to give it up completely.
Yako is described as the spirit of an Inari statue. White foxes are depicted in Shintoism as messengers of the gods in general, but they are particularly associated with Inari, deity of rice, agriculture, technology, and civilization. Inari emself is often depicted as a fox. In this case, Yako was one of the standard pair of fox statues guarding Inari’s shrine. Since Misaki often visited the area as a teacher, we can presume the high school was built on the site of the former shrine.
So what does it mean now that there is no official School Wonder #2? Does something else get promoted in place of the stairs, or are there just six wonders with inconsistent numbering going forward?
(Funimation — AnimeLab — Wakanim — Animax Asia — bilibili)
Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magia Side Story #5 – Of course Ui and Mifuyu turn out to be demonic simulacra which try to trap Yachiyo and Iroha in their world. You get the feeling that Yachiyo expected this, though. Soon, Iroha is desperately trying to keep up with Yachiyo and Yui— until she demonstrates that she can fight, but in a way that shocks everyone.
Another piece of how the Madoka Magica world works that past viewers will already be familiar with is demonstrated here: magical girls collect the Grief Seeds from defeated Witches to cleanse their Soul Gems. If a Soul Gem turns completely dark, bad things happen. However, those bad things did not, in the previous series, include being taken over by a witchlike alter ego, dismembering one’s opponent, and then popping right back to a normal magical girl form with a fresh-looking Soul Gem.
So it seems that the mysterious second figure in Iroha’s transformation sequence is this alternate personality, which may be an actual Witch. Again, magical girls’ powers derive from their wishes. So what about curing Ui left Iroha like this?
(Funimation — AnimeLab — Wakanim — Aniplus Asia — Animate Gamer — bilibili — Crunchyroll — HIDIVE)
