Monday 6 June 2011

The World God Only Knows Season 2 - Episode 9

After some random fun and frolics last week, The World God Only Knows launches straight into its next story arc proper as of episode nine, introducing us to the energetic and idealistic young student teacher Jun Nagase.

Upon finding herself assigned as an assistant teacher in Katsuragi's class, our new charge takes an immediate interest in Keima upon seeing him spending entire lessons playing games instead of learning.  After asking various teachers about the boy and discovering that they've all given up on him, she swears to do no such thing herself and thus makes "saving" problem child Keima from his own insular world her number one priority... a decision which also seems to have left her susceptible to the infiltration of a Loose Soul.


Thus, we have our setup for this story arc, with Keima bemoaning the difficulties of "conquering" a teacher while his endeavours are rapidly turned on their head as Keima seems to find himself being pursued by Nagase rather than pursuing her at his own pace - a baffling experience for him which seems to have given wrestling fanatic Jun the upper hand at this early stage in proceedings.

For all my moans and complaints about The World God Only Knows on occasion, I really enjoyed the opening to this arc, and to my mind it seems to hold a lot of promise where other arcs appeared to be a little weak by design.  For starters, Nagase is just right the blend of fun while still feeling like a genuine character, the links between herself and Keima are clearly there but neither overstated nor overblown, and the twist of having Nagase effectively pursuing Katsuragi is potentially the icing on the cake.  Of course, it could all go terribly wrong from this point forth, but right now I have high hopes for the coming episodes of this series.  Besides, teachers can be awesome, right?

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