This episode was so cool. It starts out as a regular jigoku-shoujo story. A girl with a talent for acting gets surpressed by her famous adoptive mother. We see her acces the website and call Emna Ai. The same ritual, blah blah. But somehow the pacing is a bit too fast, and a few questions are left unanswered. Then, however, we get to see that the girl is actually an enormous SOB, and the mother is the one with the good intentions. When she gets her role taken away from her by an unknown girl, she decides to take revenge upon her, calls a couple of guys and they do something horrible to the girl that took her part. After that, it really gets awesome. I won’t tell what happens, but I was extremely amused by the sudden plot twist. The creators carried it out perfectly.
I also think I’ve figured out the power of Jigoku Shoujo: the element of surprise. The creators build a certain premisse and overall repetiveness up, maintain it, and suddenly break it at just the right time. This has an awesome effect.
