Monday 19 November 2012

My Little Monster - Episode 8

Although its school culture festival time, it seems that the main players in My Little Monster's drama are finding it hard to concentrate on their haunted house attraction thanks to, well, other attractions.

For Shizuku's part, our protagonist still can't really get her head around either her feelings or her actions, as one minute she lets Haru get closer to her before pushing him away - then again, Haru himself does a fantastic job of portraying all of the reasons that she might want nothing to do with him during the course of this episode between accidentally punching Shizuku in the midst of a jealous retaliation, threatening to "force" Shizuku to be with him and making a hostage of Oshima.


Revolving around all of this is Yamaguchi and Yuzan, who not only know one another but also have their own responsibilities for pushing Haru towards the aforementioned actions that he takes, while on the other side of the fence Natsume finds her heart practically punctured by a particularly cold shoulder from Shizuku after giving her some advice.  It's ultimately Shizuku who we return to in this episode, as she finally begins to realise where she's gone wrong on her part - an opportunity that she uses to confront Haru with her true feelings as they currently stand.

Just as watching Shizuku stumble through and learn from her experiences has become a weekly joy within My Little Monster, so watching Haru flush any good will towards him down the toilet is equally frustrating - no matter how many excuses you craft for him, his behaviour throughout much of this episode is downright abhorrent, with multiple counts of violence to varying degrees against girls and yet another effective threat of rape.  Although Shizuku clearly needs a foil to bounce off against in an "opposites attract" kind of way to help lead the show's emotion and drama, did they really need to set this intelligent girl off against quite such an unlikeable (to put it mildly) male lead?  I would wager they didn't, but so goes the world of shoujo anime I suppose....

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