Sunday 10 November 2013

Monogatari Second Season - Episode 19

Shinobu's long tale about her past, and her previous encounter with the mysterious "darkness", may be over, but it seems that we're still no closer to finding a solution to the crisis currently facing Araragi and company.

However, perhaps three heads are better than two, as rather than going off to return to work as she'd previously suggested it seems that Ononoki has been handing around to eavesdrop on this whole tale, and thus she returns just in time for Hachikuji to also regain consciousness, although I suspect she wishes that she hadn't given that all it gains her is another molestation at the hands of Koyomi.


Although Ononoki doesn't get on at all with Shinobu, the three girls ends up teaming up against Araragi to tease him mercilessly to the point of almost losing sight of the real heart of the matter at hand, although a reminder of this predicament soon makes itself very brazenly known to jolt the quartet back to reality.  Thus, it's time to effect an escape once again, although this time around it seems that not everybody has gotten off quite so likely, as recovering from their quite literal leap to safety it soon becomes clear that Shinobu is nowhere to be found...

Following that entire episode of story-telling last week, this particular Monogatari story arc continues to be quite the slow burner, spending a lot of its time goofing around before returning to the crux of its story.  Thankfully, this series is nothing if not masterful at letting its characters joke around and bounce off of one another, even if it sometimes entirely too reliant on Koyomi being an irredeemable pervert at the heart of its humour.  Uncomfortable though this occasionally makes things, I can't deny that it's a whole lot of fun, and the fact that I really have no idea what's going to happen next in this series in terms of the wider plot of this arc is no bad thing either - maybe this wasn't an example of pure-spun gold Monogatari, but it remains pretty great more often than not.

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