Anime roundup 2/20/2020: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun #6 – Nene goes into the Four O’Clock Library meaning to find the book about Hanako, but in typical fashion, she winds up peeking too much at her own book, screwing up her future, and having her own embarassing secrets revealed. Then she finds out some of Hanako’s backstory, from the most unlikely source.

Mr. Tsuchigomori appears to be a tsuchigumo, a type of spider trickster. He’s been teaching at the school since at least 1969, when Hanako was alive but not well and named Yugi Amane. When Tsuchigomori says he knows someone who changed what was written for their future, you like to think about someone escaping a terrible fate, but no, Amane went from a pleasant-sounding future as an educator to being dead.

Standing precariously on the window ledge invokes the symbolism of suicide. (The canonical suicide method for students in anime is jumping from the school roof.) The implication that his injuries were from being bullied supports that. But suicide doesn’t square with Kō’s statement that Hanako having the razor means he must have killed someone with it. I don’t think suicide is supposed to count in this case.

(FunimationAnimeLabWakanimAnimax Asiabilibili)

ID: Invaded #8 – With Hijiriido trapped and Momoki not offering any useful clues, the Well team tries a desperate plan: they will take cognition particles collected from Momoki’s house and send both their remaining detectives into the resulting well, hoping it connects to the one Hijiriido is in. Besides, two detectives are totally going to be better than one, right? Right?

ID: Invaded has been standing out as the serious grown-up show this season, but it sure pulled an excellent prank on its supporting characters here, when they send Sakaido and Anaido in, expecting big revelations and instead getting a big argument about the best use for a limited supply of bodily fluids. Still, it does eventually work out, and Sakaido at least has insurance against being trapped forever with Hijiriido.

Fukuda has an interesting point about putting two detectives in the same narrative. Sure, one possbility is that one of them messes up (perhaps deliberately) so that the other provides the real solution. Another is that one of them is being set up to play a different role, such as the murder victim. Or the murderer.

Meanwhile, Asukai Kiki has assumed importance out of all proportion to what we know about her. Someone with mind-altering technology thought she was worth making disappear right out of a hospital. Momoki or someone who could pretend to be him thought she was worth erasing from computerized records.

Actually, there’s one chance that we do know something of Asukai already. Hondōmachi shares her propensity for suicide and is nearly the same age (23 in the first episode, with Asukai being 24 as of the latest one). And that would mean that Hondōmachi has unknowingly (since Hijiriido would remember nothing of this) entered her own well.

(FunimationAnimeLabWakanimbilibili)

Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story #7 – Felicia wants to know what’s up with this Magius organization, and the White Feathers are willing to dish. They have a plan to get rid of Witches which somehow involves capturing and controlling them, because accumulating a whole stable of paranormal evil creatures could not possibly have a downside, and one of their leaders is Mifuyu, Yachiyo’s supposedly dead friend.

Meanwhile, Iroha runs off and confronts the power behind the Lucky Owl Water. It isn’t explicitly stated, but by releasing her alter ego and taking it down just as the countdown reaches zero, she seems to have beaten the bad luck rebound. Or maybe the alter ego emerging was the bad luck. Either way, having her parents decide she needs to stay at Yachiyo’s boarding house has to be the best of luck.

What remains to be resolved next is what happened to make Mifuyu and Yachiyo part ways. Yachiyo thought Mifuyu was dead, but Mifuyu claims Yachiyo abandoned her. Clearly the sort of breakup that can only be sorted out with a long flashback showing up very soon.

(FunimationAnimeLabWakanimAniplus AsiaAnimate GamerbilibiliCrunchyrollHIDIVE)

Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun #20 – With the dust settled on the Battler Party, the top clubs are honored and Iruma gets a special award for being the right kind of idiot. Then life returns to normal, excepting a little fallout from Sullivan’s detention.

Mr. Azazel comes across as a good guy trying to do what’s right. Faced with a trafficker too powerful to be brought to justice, he still reaches out to the trafficking victim to let him know that he’s there to help. Whoever Baal was working with to arrange for Sullivan to be out of the way, it wasn’t Azazel.

But Azazel is perhaps a bit too focused on how things ought to be to allow for unusual circumstances. He has no idea that Iruma might be happier away from his parents, that Iruma is secretly corrupting Azazel’s daughter with forbidden human texts, or that this will probably turn out okay somehow. I figure he’s in for a few more heart attacks before that happens, though.

(CrunchyrollAnimate GamerMuse Asiabilibili)

In/Spectre #6 – After talking it over some more and interrogating a ghostly witness, Kotoko is satisfied that the Steel Lady mythos can still be modified into something harmless, as long as the apparition doesn’t go and kill anyone. Oh dear, the apparition has gone and killed someone.

It seems that Kotoko and Saki have worked out everything about Nanase Karin’s death, but there’s one question which curiously doesn’t get asked: how did those steel beams start moving in the first place? Regardless of the victim’s failure to dodge, someone was trying to kill her.

But at this point, Kotoko thinks it’s more urgent to prioritize keeping anyone else from getting killed, which means focusing on rewriting the urban legend. It’s clear now why the original title of this story is Kyokō Suiri, meaning approximately “The Fictional Detective Story”, except in the sense of being about fiction. This is why we got the extended prologue with Kotoko and the mountain guardian. The point was that Kotoko’s real talent is inventing stories that are not necessarily true but highly plausible, which is she needs to do as quickly as possible now.

(Crunchyrollbilibili)

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