There’s one thing you can count on original shows, you can never know for sure what the plot is going next. Sometimes, it surprises you with its sheer originality and sometimes, it could go to weird places. HisoMaso falls into the latter this week, literally where it’s taking us to an uninhabited island for the survival test. It’s this week that the show goes for more serious tone, and I’m not quite sure if this seriousness works for the show’s benefit. First, I don’t buy any talk from Administrative Vice-Minister Iiboshi at all. He seems to be the one who knows the most about the connection between OTFs and their pilots, but all his “white maiden” metaphors scream all pretentious with no real substance for me. I mean, the show’s pretty obvious with their visual motifs in support for this white-maiden tale: the traditional festive in the beginning, the torii gate and the rice cakes but now all seem vague and contrived to me.
Second, the way Iiboshi (and the show) frames that the main reason the dragons choose the pilots is because of the girls’ self-loathed. Now THAT I have issues with. Hisone puts it better than anyone: Without Masotan, she’ll be just a social awkward girl who talks to herself too much and is unfit for society. The girls themselves admit later on that they regard their dragons as a way to close themselves off to the people around them. Now thinking back, this has always been Hisone’s perspective towards Masotan since they first met. She said to her dragon the same thing before that she was flattered by the dragon’s choice because she feels special; and her speech to Masotan to “take his responsibility” for choosing her. It’s a flawed way of regarding your partner (and definitely not better than Eri who regards the dragon as the tool) but things might change for the better once the girls have more confident in themselves.
The gist of this episode is, however, to show us how dysfunctional those girls are. It feels to me that these girls are the protagonists of their own story, and then awkwardly assemble them altogether. As such they belong to their own story and have absolutely no chemistry put together. It’s a compliment actually since this episode works its way up to improve the girls’ dynamic together (and also, their relationship with the dragons). In terms of set-up, this is as classy as possible: throw the girls into a deserted island with their (somehow useless) dragons, and force them to interact for the same goals. Matters got worse when Hitomi’s dragon eats all the food supply. Everyone has their own way to deal with it, mostly sleeping and wander aimlessly, and working together remains their last option. Disappointed Hisone soon finds out that despite their team work is close to non-existent, each of the girl can still offers something useful, and together they can manage to survive… for few more days.
Their objective for now is to let the dragons have fun until they get hungry, they’ll fly again. But isn’t it better to figure out why the dragons can’t fly there? That brings us to Eri. While the point of this mission might be improving the team work, it also works as a way to improve yourself and understand your dragons better and Eri needs that now. She’s determined to abandon the dragon to accomplish the mission, but as HisoMaso hints us she opened her heart to the dragon once, so now is the good time to revisit the very moment her dragon picks her in the first place. HisoMaso so far gets away with a lot of its stupid ideas because of its incredible ability to not take itself seriously, so I hope when they finally get serious they have to find a way to hold everything up together, because eye-candy visual alone can only go so far.
Side note: I’m not a fan at all of this overlong, LN-inspired title. Remind me in a bad way of the episode titles in Kiznaiv… wait, that anime was written by Mari Okada too? Never mind then.
