Back stories time! This week of Mayoiga dedicated itself for backstories of many characters. Too many characters indeed. This is for me the turning point of Mayoiga, where many facts are revealed and we seem to head to the new phase. The show now becomes much clearer and have a sense of direction. This week, Lovepon, Mikage, Nyanta, Jigoku all have their own stories to tell. Most of them ridiculous as they are (like the silicon part, or the monk, or the 12//20 mix-up, or the bullying girls, basically all of them), but they all serve their purposes. Lovepon, for example, has been a source of complaint for the last few weeks as being one-note and anime-like, but with this week’s reveals, she was also a victim of injustice, violence and her own hatred. The use of heavy symbolisms in these flashback scenes could rivals Kunihiko Ikuhara’s shows anytime, and I mean it in a good way. The devil, the silicon, the bees and the laughing train are representative of their characters’ deepest fears, their CG designs make us feel both uneasiness and alien, and that exactly what the show aims for. Those flashbacks give us a reason to care for those characters and I for once root for them when they running away from that thing. The most effective story is for me, Nyanta. Being bullied is more common than you would think and people tend to do more extreme and painful things to cope with it. In her case, this is to shoot those bullying girls with a BB gun. There is a sadness behind all that and Mayoiga (briefly) nailed that raw emotion.
So it appears that the Lost Village is a place where people have to face their darkest sides, they have to face the negative feeling (like hatred, shame) that they had buried inside themselves, which for me is very fitting. Remember all of them want to go to the Lost Village because they want to run away from their problems to make a new life there. Well they can physically escape from it but they have to face their own issues in order to really get over it. As I suspected, Masaki is the main source to all the mysteries, but I don’t think she’s a ghost yet. From what the paper says she was just disappeared, so I think she was stuck in this lost village ever since. There are two things that baffles me this week: first, how the hell that those 4 people were chasing by god-know-what but they somehow all escape from it, I originally thought they would be killed or at least be vanished. What’s else going to happen after this? Second, I find that Koharun’s habit of stop talking and then singing in the middle of conversations is a bit chilling, it’s like she’s a ghost. Hell! Mayoiga! You might be the only one show that can pull it off.
Mayoiga this week delivered all the ambitious intentions it promised since its premiere. Just for this time, I feel glad that I haven’t given up on this. Whether it going to stay this inspiring or stumble for the rest of the series is everyone guess. At least we’ll always have this episode. We’ll always have Paris.
~SuperMario~
A silicon tit monster. Just when you think you have seen everything, life still surprises you.
For me the “symbolism” of the monsters was less Ikuhara and more of an attempt to emulate artists like Ito Junji. They were overblown images of their biggest failures or fears, going less for a symbolic element and more for bizarre exaggeration.
I have trouble liking this episode, since the fast pace in which their stories were done away with made it hard for me to actually feel anything for them beyond a passing emotion of pity. There was no real arc for them.
On another note, I’m starting to wonder whether this is actually going for a “they are all dead” scenario. What drove me towards that is, that I find it hard to believe that a young girl like Nyanta would actually survive having a nest of Japanese hornets dropped on her.
Around thirty people here die every year from being stung be these bastards.