Short Synopsis: Porfy meets a masked woman who lives together with a terrible sister.
Highlights: The series’ attempt at mystery turns out pretty nicely.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
The key to having a successful episodic series is knowing that you can play with your own concept. Because the episodes are relatively short, there are many chances for different storylines. If all you’re going to do is a dull pool or beach-episode, then yeah, it’ll get boring. The past string of episodic stories though has shown a great variety of different characters, settings and focuses. This time: mystery.
I don’t really think that this episode deserves a comprehensive summary. What basically happens: Porfy meets a masked woman, who lives near an abandoned gas station. She has a sister who has terminally ill, and Porfy often hears her fighting with said sister. As it turns out, the woman lost her parents in a fire, five years ago. She herself gained a scar on her face from it. Because of this, she became scared to show herself in public, and ended up wearing a mask. She then created an alternative personality called Sandra, to ease herself from her loneliness. This episode had lots of messages against self-loathing.
In the end, everything was between the girl’s head. The villagers didn’t hate her at all; she just scared herself into isolation. In any case, in terms of mystery, this episode did pretty well, even though this isn’t a mystery-series. It was pretty soon obvious that Marissa had a bipolar disorder, so this episode wasn’t much about its surprises, but instead Marissa turned into quite a sympathetic character in the end.
This episode also had a lot of references to Natsume Yuujin-chou. I’m not sure whether that was intentional or not, but Natsume also meets a lot of Youkai who are originally masked, and then at the end show their faces. Porfy no Nagai Tabi showed a more “realistic” side to this story. (Not that Natsume Yuujin-chou isn’t realistic enough already, but more in the way of nothing supernatural).
I’ve been reading your blog for some time now and your taste in anime almost ALWAYS matches up with mine, so I’ve discovered quite a few gems thanks to you! Anyway, Porfy looked interesting to me, and I waited and waiter for subs, but none ever came. So I decided to take my limited Japanese skills and give it a shot. Thankfully I can actually understand a lot of it so far. The first few episodes were easy to follow, but I’m glad you’re still blogging this because I can come here afterward and see if I got everything right and, if not, see what I missed. So thank you very much. I plan to keep watching because the first 3 episodes were really good, and it’s proving to be a good language exercise for me as well.
I really don’t understand why a show of this quality could get COMPLETELY overlooked while you have several groups subbing really (imo) terrible shows with. I mean, do we really need 5+ groups ALL subbing a show like Sekirei…ugh. Fanservice wins out over good storytelling, genuine characters, and beautiful animation. Such a shame.
“I really don’t understand why a show of this quality could get COMPLETELY overlooked while you have several groups subbing really (imo) terrible shows with. I mean, do we really need 5+ groups ALL subbing a show like Sekirei…ugh. Fanservice wins out over good storytelling, genuine characters, and beautiful animation. Such a shame.”
And again Porfy fans feel the need to bash other shows just beacuse nobody cares about this stupid show. This is why I hate them