Category: Jigoku Shoujo

Short Synopsis: A transfer student from Tokyo arrives at the school.
Highlights: Only this series can come up with those kinds of plot twists.
Overall Enjoyment Value: Objective: 6,5/10 (Lacking) Subjective/Biased: 8/10 (Excellent)
One thing I love about Studio Deen, besides the masterpieces they churn out once in a while, is that in some of their other adaptations, they’re downright crazy. Incidentally, Hiroshi Watanabe’s name is very often tied to these cases, but the fact remains that some of their series just feature plot twists that no other studio would have the sanity for to include.

This episode was just awesome, but SO for the wrong reasons. I have no freakin’ idea why I liked this episode so much: you could see the big twist coming from miles away. Ever since the classmate started to involve himself with the poor transfer student who got abused by his mom, there was no way that he was going to send his mom to hell and let his classmate live. And yet the conclusion felt awesome, seeing the guy turn just as crazy as his mother. Seriously, at this point I’m convinced that for the third season, Hiroshi Watanabe weaselled himself somewhere in the production-team someway and kept throwing in his own suggestions. There’s no other explanation. ^^;;

One other thing I absolutely loved about this episode is how Ai’s dolls were having the time of their live inside the punishment scenes, and they never tried to feel pity for him. It’s logical for Kikuri, but Wanyuudo, Hone Onna and Ichimoku Ren have really changed in the period between the second and third season, and they’ve become less emotionally attached to the different cases, unless it involved them directly, like in the previous episode.

I guess the message in this episode yet again that there are times in which you shouldn’t stick your nose too much into other people’s business. While the case in this episode was definitely an example of a family that actually NEEDED help, but too often I see in anime characters that needlessly involve themselves with those in trouble, without giving them the chance to solve their issues for themselves.

Short Synopsis: Two girls get a crush on Hone Onna.
Highlights: Talk about an elaborate punishment-scene.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10 (Good)
This episode was really typical of the third season of Jigoku Shoujo: two girls are fighting over the love of Hone Onna, one using more subtle tricks, while the other blatantly threatened the other. The second one then ends up sending the first one to hell, and the next day she’s forgotten her crush and fallen in love with someone else.

If there’s one thing I’m worrying about this season, then it’s the lack of variety when compared to the others. It really seems that this third season is set in a high-school, and so it will be about conflicts between students and teachers, while the first and second season also like to show problems between adults at times (the lovable idiot, for example). I also wonder, since Jigoku Shoujo is basically confined to one area this time (since she can’t really move anywhere because she’s bound by Mikage), what are other people doing with their revenges? Does the website simply not work? The first season had this as well, and it’s an annoying plot-hole in an otherwise excellent series.

In any case, the ironic thing about this episode is that it’s basically Hone Onna who set up the two girls against each other. One oft he girls was awfully shy, but Hone Onna gave her a bit of courage, after which she started making the life of her rival miserable, getting sent to hell afterwards. Again, there’s a hidden meaning beneath this: adults meddling in teenaged business isn’t always the right thing to do. From a teenaged perspective, in any case.

This episode aso showed the first hint of an overall storyline: it’s now clear that Mikage is proving to be not the best vessel for her. Let’s see how this evolves throughout the series.

Short Synopsis: A teacher is bugged by an overprotective guardian.
Highlights: You have to love the messages of this series.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10 (Excellent)
Oh, how I love this series, although for a completely different reason when compared to the other seasons. The first season had some really nice stories in its repertoire about people who were pushed to the limits. The second season then started to move to lighter reasons to want to send someone to hell, and here the third season comes and it instead focuses on the darker side of being a teenager. Anime has a real tendency to overglorify teenagers, and I believe that this series has a very strong message against that, with the “Kids these days”-themes.

This episode already started to deviate from the usual formula. What we have here is a teacher, where one of her students has an incredibly overprotective aunt, who makes a fuzz over the slightest thing that happens to her niece, and makes whatever effort she can to make in order to make the teacher’s life miserable. In the end, it turns out that that student had been setting up her aunt against the teacher, just for fun. She figured that her teacher was a grown-up, so she’d just be fine, even though she had to deal with her aunt.

It’s strange. When you look at the themes, it almost seems like this series has been written by a bunch of old guys who downright hate everything about teenagers, and yet they make some very good points. Teenagers these days do cause a lot of unnecessary trouble for others and don’t even seem to understand what they did wrong, and even though the teacher’s method was a bit extreme, it was the perfect one to teach her a lesson she won’t soon forget.

Another point this series is trying to make is about the ease at which people are willing to send others to hell. It’s not just a sign of that people are losing faith in these “fictional” places as heaven or hell, but also at how they fail to look at the distant future (a very recent topic, with the economy, and huge amounts of people who failed to pay their mortgage). It’s a conservative series, and yet it’s also the series that’s got the most actual topics. It’s the first anime I’ve seen that included the Vista-cursor, it’s got IPods, as compared to most other series, which are still stuck in Windows 98.

Short Synopsis: A guy who gets bullied joins a Kendo-club.
Highlights: These cases are getting more and more extreme…
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10 (Excellent, although that may not be exactly the right word…)
Okay, new theory: either one of the following two must have happened somewhere between the production of the second and third season:
– The important creators were introduced and got addicted to some strange sort of crack.
– Hiroshi Watanabe (the one who originally proposed the concept for this series) sent the production-staff a long list of his own suggestions for stories.

I mean, it has to be ONE of these two; otherwise this episode just can’t be explained. It was just that weird. Basically, we have a bunch of bullies who are into bsdm, and they strip their victim butt-naked and throw stones at him. The victim then gets saved by a strong upperclassman. The latter then pushes the bullied guy into joining the kendo-club, the two of them develop a crush for each other and then the bullied one sends the upperclassman to hell because he couldn’t save a victim of a bus-jacking because he was too scared. I mean… what the heck?!

Still, I absolutely can’t deny that this episode wasn’t entertaining. Heck, it was awesome to watch, although in a strange way, especially after those two guys started to develop feelings for each other. What I especially loved about this episode (probably due to my inner-sadist, which is probably the most excited about this third series), is that the guy just quits the kendo-club and goes back to being bullied. No moral message, no lesson to be learned, just an angsty teen who can’t seem to forgive others.

I’m really baffled. I shouldn’t be liking this series, and yet at the same time it’s such an awesome third season. If this is only the fourth episode, then what the heck are the creators planning for those other 22 episodes? And here I thought that Shigofumi was the extreme one, but Mitsuganae proved me more than wrong within just four episodes.

Short Synopsis: A famous idol has a past she’d like to not think back to.
Highlights: The theme of growing up versus staying the same.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7/10 (Good)
Okay, so in my next attempt to make the episode-rating a bit less confusing and more expressive, I’m trying to associate a word-rating with each number. It’s obviously incredibly inaccurate, but I hope it helps both the reader and me a little. Basically, the rule of thumb is that if the episode rating is six or higher, it means that I liked it.

In any case, in this episode a famous idol becomes the victim of Jigoku Shoujo. When she was a middle schooler, she was pretty much your typical teenager, and she grew up together with her best friend, as they both aspired to become idols. At one point, she ditched her best friend and went on to become a famous idol. Over the years, she grew up and realized what an idiot she’s been, though her best friend still can’t forgive her, and she also longs to be a famous idol as well, even though she can’t sing to save her life. Since she never grew up, she acts like the teenager she is and sends her former friend to hell.

In the meantime, it seems like the new boy on Ai’s party comes from Kikuri’s side, and is something like a servant to her (calling her “Hime”). One thing that felt a bit off in this episode was how Mikage just keeps running into potential Jigoku Shoujo-victims. I mean, I can understand how the Ai inside of her is directing her towards these cases or something, but I’d like to have that actually confirmed WITHIN the show.

In essence, the general formula of this episode was pretty much the same as in the previous two episodes, but that’s of course something to be expected, since the first and second season did this too. Right now, this series is busy creating a solid base, and of course the real fun is only going to begin when the stories start diverging from this base, and it’s always going to be a mystery as to when that’s going to happen. The base for this season seems to be a bit different from the previous seasons. Even though there were quite a few exceptions, the general formula was basically Ai and her minions handing out a strange sort of justice. In the third season though, Ai has only been carrying out the wishes of whiny and spoiled teenagers, with the great thing being that the creators seem to be having lots of fun to make all sorts of teenagers suffer as much as possible. I sense a strange sort of sadism in this season, which gives off a pretty nice effect.

I’m also glad to finally see another series that shows that recycled scenes aren’t necessarily a bad thing: you just have to know how to use them. Obviously, if they’re used as an impulsive way to save a bit of budget, it’s a bad thing, and at the same time the technique has been made infamous by various mahou shoujo. However, when they’re used for creating a sort of ritualistic feeling, they can actually contribute to the series they’re in. It doesn’t happen often, I only noticed this effect in Jigoku Shoujo and Revolutionary Girl Utena so far, but repetitive shows like these are excellent at creating a ritual that appears in every other episode. The fun then comes from everything that plays around it.

Oh, and one final comment: three episodes in, and I obviously can’t say yet whether this is going to be the best season of Jigoku Shoujo, but I can say one thing: it’s definitely going to be the season with the best visuals. It’s incredible: the graphics for this series already looked great, and the creators managed to succeed in making things look even better.

Short Synopsis: A boy who has a crush on a female store owner calls Jigoku Shoujo.
Highlights: Nice ending.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
Am I glad to see this series back or what? In any case, as for the series I’m not going to blog this season:
– Akane-iro ni Somaru Saka… err… no.
– Every single new character of Kuroshitsuji’s second episode was dull and uninspired, the servants I liked so much in the first episode are turning into one character and the two main characters are also getting pretty dull. That shouldn’t be happening after just two episodes!
– I like Clannad, but I’m a fan of the climaxes. I don’t feel like writing about the lesser comedy-bits.
– I already had trouble following Noramimi during a light season, let alone a heavy season as this one.
– The drama in Yozakura Quartet’s second episode felt shallow and uninspired.
– Tentai Senshi Sunred already turned from hilarious to dull within two episodes. I knew that this was going to happen, but not THIS fast.

In any case, I’m getting really excited about this third season. I would already have been happy if this season would be more of the same, but the creators are really showing that they’re evolving this show. It now makes perfect sense that the second season was less extreme than the first season: it was basically one big season, meant to flesh out Ai’s three dolls, and flesh out the show’s premise by showing how people are getting more and more easily able to send someone to hell.

Now in this season, people are suddenly beginning to see themselves that sending someone to hell might not have been the best thing after all. The previous episode showed a high-school girl who banished her teacher (really, that’s something I can imagine that would happen a LOT if Jigoku Shoujo would exist for real), and this episode features an abused woman who doesn’t want to be rescued. It’s about a boy who tries to help her from her incredibly abusive boyfriend. It’s interesting how the first two seasons started with straightforward cases, but here in the third season, the creators have already started with a thought-provoking case, which goes beyond the usual good and bad.

The strange thing about this third season is… there doesn’t seem to be a director for the thing. According to ANN at least. Apart from that, there’s absolutely no change in staff, which really makes me wonder: was the missing director just a simple mistake, or did he really leave the project, so that the ones who are left opted to do the series with a more chaotic style of “direction”? I really expected when I first saw this episode that huge staff changes were made, but instead it’s the same animation directors who went with the new visual style, and both punishments in this and the previous episode were much more extreme than what we’ve seen in the previous seasons.

I also wonder what the exact role of the girl is going to be, but it’s still going to take 20 more episodes before we get to find that out. It makes sense to start her off with such an extreme case, so that we now get to see her initial stance on revenge (as in, she hates it). I think that she’s going to become the new Tsugumi: because Ai uses her to get back to her original job (the question of course is: why?), she can see exactly what’s going on. I think that she’s going to go against Ai, to try and stop the revenges.

Short Synopsis: The end of Emna Ai as Jigoku Shoujo. Good: Beautiful episode, an actually good ending. Bad: Questions left unanswered. Overall Enjoyment Value: 8.5/10 It finally becomes clear where this episode was working towards: forcing Ai to let go of one of her victims. Because of this, the spider immediately abandoned her from her position, and made her body mortal again. This returning her to the real world, in a body that’s 400 years old! The climax itself was beautiful. I loved how she tried to calm down Takuma, who had also finally become tired of his own morals, and decided to burn the house of the ones who made his life miserable. You know, as I’ve been writing this, I’ve been hoping more and more for an actual third season. The ending did suggest that we’ve yet to reach the ending of this show. Still, the fact does remain that Ai’s dead, and she won’t come back. But then again, this show is called “Jigoku Shoujo”, not “Enma Ai”. The Spider remained unharmed through all of this, and the final moment of the episode suggested that he’s just recruited another girl for his plans. It’s also a pity that Hell Boy didn’t come back. And Kikuri. What the hell was her role in this series anyway? I kept thinking that she had some kind of strange contract with Hell boy, but in the end, it looks like she’s connected to the spider, of all possible characters. I still haven’t figured out her exact role, but if I had to guess, then she was employed by the spider, in order to keep an eye out on Ai. I think that at one point, she started caring about Ai, and tried to find a way to relieve her from her tasks. Because of that, she probably stirred with Takuma, in order to bring Ai even closer to the boy. I think that by episode 24, she knew that Takuma would end up in hell in some kind of way. This would be painful for Ai, though in the end, she could rest peacefully. That’s probably why she was so gentle to the cherry near the end of the episode. And regarding her brattiness. That’s just who she is. It’s just her character, nothing more. And we still don’t know much about Ai’s grandmother. Overall, I feared for the first couple of episodes, but overall, Jigoku Shoujo Futakomori has been a real treat. Definitely one of the highlights of the rather mediocre fall-season. I’m really hoping for a third season right now, which will answer all the questions left behind. But for now, I’ll consider this show as finished.]]>