This week, Shigofumi is about a rather extreme case of bullying. The bullies are ruthless in every single way, but this episode is told from a rather interesting viewpoint: from a guy who happens to be in the same class as the bullies, but in the beginning has nothing to do with them. He never takes any action, and finds the bullied guy rather pathetic (which in a way is true. The guy has really gone crazy under the pressure). Then, when the bullied guy asks for his help, he declines, and instead betrays the guy to the bullies (did anyone else think of Kaiji when that beam appeared?). After that, the bullied commits suicide, and the bullies find themselves a new victim in the main character, who now understand how hard it is to be bullied.
Well, I think that it’s clear now that Shigofumi lacks any form of subtlety. It knows how to build up, but it’s interesting how it never tries to go too deep, and instead presents its story quite straightforward. It’s interesting how basically the entire episode says “thou shalt not bully”, and how the symbolism with the puppies was quite straightforward. It kind-of matches Fumika’s approach when she delivers the Shigofumi as well: all that matters is to deliver the Shigofumi, and everything that’s in the way doesn’t matter. I usually like series with a bit more subtlety, but a series with a subtlety like this one also is nice once in a while.
There’s one thing I couldn’t understand about this episode, though. At the end of this episode, we see how the main character stabs one of the bullies with a screwdriver (quite an interesting method to get rid of them), which he posts on a local bbs, it seems. We then switch to a completely unrelated girl, who reads the bbs as well, and seems to get bullied too. She then makes a phone-call to an unknown person and the episode ends. What was that about? Did we meet that girl before? Or was that just an introduction to the next episode? I’m going to assume that it’s the latter.
What site do you download from? I was getting Shigofumi from anime suki but they took it down, saying it was licensed.
I get my files raw from the program called share. If you want the subs of the show, either buy the dvds when they come out, or go to tokyotosho.com
Some say the beam walking was an intended refererence to kaiji,aparantly because one the guys says “hey lets play a game i saw in a manga” or something like that.
I think that the girl at the end just called for help after she read the forum,could be wrong though.
My biggest problem with this episode is that the shigofumi itself did not bring anything to the story. Basically they wasted an episode.
I must say that on the whole I’m disappointed with the series so far, they are wasting an excellent premise because of lack of imagination and depth.
This was an interesting episode, to me. Not particularly great, but pretty cool.
Skeptical note of the week; I love how they have no idea what would happen to them if they got caught killing someone in a stupid prank. They’ve already seen a janitor or guard on the roof once.