Telepathy Shoujo Ran – 22

Short Synopsis: Ran&co go skiing during their holidays.
Highlights: Most natural storytelling of the entire series.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,0/10 (Excellent)
It’s episodes like this that really make me ask the following question:

Why the heck didn’t the creators just ditch the original novels and went with their own direction? Seriously.

And don’t get me wrong, the novels are by no means not enjoyable, and admittedly they remain flawed. There’s simply no continuity or character development whatsoever; the novels were animated in a random order, and you wouldn’t suspect the difference unless you knew. The creators of the anime have a vision, though. They somehow made the lacking novel stories fun to watch until the end, and they seized every chance at filler to include some development so that at least Midori comes out as a complex character. On top of that, the fact remains that the banter between the characters is consistently at its best during the filler episodes. These guys know how to make an anime dammit!

This is why I don’t mind it at all when an anime simply ditches the story of its original source material and goes into a different direction. It only becomes a bad thing when the anime creators clearly aren’t up to the task (I’m looking at you, Romeo and Juliet), but that would have been the same if they decided to follow the original source material (I’m looking at you, Hatenkou Yuugi). What matters is whether or not the creators have a vision. Himitsu ~ The Revelation’s original stories were very capable ones for example, and the anime creators had enough inspiration for the manga’s unique premise, so they just decided to go with their own look at the story, resulting in two different views at the same subject in anime- and manga-form.

In any case, with this episode, the filler episodes for this series have unfortunately come to an end, since there are two novels left to be animated. What I hope is that the anime creators chose the order of the stories so, that the best ones would be saved for last, so that the series at least isn’t going to end with a bad taste.

About this episode, I really liked that this has been the episode that felt the most natural of all of the cases so far. Ran and the others don’t conveniently happen to run into a case. There was just one coincidence that felt a bit weird, but apart from that everything made sense: Ran and Midori actually went to the resort, searching for a local legend about a snow woman. The legend turns out to be wrong, it was the ghost of a fox that took the form of a little girl. The fox was attached to one particular person when it was still alive, and when it called out to it, Ran picked up the same waves, involving her with the story. They then use their powers to reunite the two, and act as a sort of medium between the two. As a result, the climax was rather quiet, but very sweet.