Himitsu ~The Revelation~ – 14

On a completely unrelated side-note: consider Soul Eater dropped at this point. I’ll still continue to watch it, but I just don’t feel like blogging it anymore.

Short Synopsis: A woman with red high heels commits this week’s murder. The question: who do they belong to?
Highlights: Interesting twist to the love-triangle.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
Interesting how this episode didn’t feature Aoki or Maki as the main character, but instead it showed how Okabe stood in the centre of attention. We’re back to regular stories, and the victim this episode turns out to be a rich businessman who was fooling around with a few too many women. The twist, though is that two of these women used to be each other’s lovers as well. Really, women can be scary when they’re serious…

In other news, this post by Usagijen got me thinking. And now that my initial fanboyism over the premise seems over and I look back at the past episodes of the series, then I do agree that it hasn’t been perfect. I agree with Usagijen at how this series lacks subtlety in its messages. The messages are definitely there, but they feel much more like a list of taboos than that they’ve really provoked any real thoughts. I once mentioned how Himitsu was the smartest series of the spring-season, and with this I take that back. That honour falls much more to series as Amatsuki and Real Drive.

Another big minus for this series is also that it’s not that good at characterization. To compare it with Jigoku Shoujo (now that I think about it, a rather similar series), that series knew perfectly to first establish its characters and then to start toying with them, and it did so for fifty episodes with excellent results. It feels that the characters in Himitsu lack a bit in personality.

And then there are the abundances of male fanservice. As the same with a female’s clothes getting ripped apart á la Sekirei: it’s annoying, and this episode has a good example of it when Okabe and Aoki have to pretend to be a gay couple (pelvic thrusts included) in order to find out information. (is it me, or are people quicker to whine about fanservice for fangirls than the fanservice for fanboys?).

So, why do I still love this series? Well, for one thing it does have a great sense of storytelling: it knows when to reveal what and how much, and how to keep the viewer interested, but that isn’t the most important thing. It’s the way it plays around with irony, and that’s something that it does perfectly. I first noticed this with the infamous episode eight. The murder itself already was disturbing, but what made that episode so incredibly awesome was that it took an innocent girl who even could spark some romance, and at the end of the episode showed that she was the entire opposite of that. After that, this series has continued to play these games, for example in episode 11, where the real culprit got revealed, or episode 13, where Maki basically could have saved the lives of 30 people. This episode has it too: it continously refers to women with high heels being murderes, and at the end of the episode we see Okabe, having a date with his wife who wears red high heels. That’s what makes this series so great.