Seitokai no Ichizon - Episode 9

Reading seems to be the order of the day for the student council's ninth instalment, as demanded by Sakurano for some vague reason or another. So, reading is exactly what the council members do, for the first half of the episode at least.

Needless to say, the variety of preferences in literature on show tie in closely to the interests of the council's various characters, from Mafuyu reading Boys Love stories through to Minatsu's preference for action-oriented manga (although she does also manage to pull off a mildly amusing but otherwise utterly predictable reference to Death Note).


With that particular sketch (for want of a better description) out of the way, the second half of this episode throws us into one of those more sentimental moments that Seitokai no Ichizon so loves to deliver for no particular reason whatsoever - In this case, the tale in question involves a letter left behind in the council room by Chizuru from a former school friend turned bully, apologising for the hardships she put Chizuru through and asking forgiveness. I'm not entirely sure what the point of all this was, but it felt rather like a cheesy sub-story from a below par visual novel or something.

After serving up what was a genuinely rather good instalment last week, I was hoping that perhaps Seitokai no Ichizon had turned a corner, but of course those hopes proved to be short lived - If anything, this ninth episode was one of the dullest and least amusing yet, with the inability to shift any of the show's humour away from playing to character severely limiting what can be done in any given scenario when only those major characters are featured. This makes for a very weak offering with no redeeming features to speak of at all, a situation made worse by the show's forays into the emotional which tend to be of even less interest than the more traditional comedy-oriented side of things.