Short Synopsis: A fake website for Jigoku Shoujo has appeared on the web. But why?
Good: Gotta love the plot twist.
Bad: This really needs to get subbed. Why isn’t it getting subbed?
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
Why did I ever lose faith in this series!? It’s awesome. That’s what this episode definitely showed. I think that one of the best things of this show is its repetition, even though most people seem to be turned off by it. Because it’s so repetitive, it builds up a certain pattern for each episode. When it starts playing with this pattern, the show turns really interesting. That definitely became clear with this episode.
It already starts out well when it doesn’t really feature a clear main character. We have our antagonist, Baba Shouko. But there’s no real protagonist. We switch a bit around between different characters, we have a student who’s being bullied by her, a teacher who’s seeing her students suffer, a student who gets blamed and expelled for creating the fake Jigoku Shoujo website, Hone Onna and, of course, Jigoku Shoujo. Each one of them gets about an equal amount of development.
But then the real goodness begins when the teacher invites the expelled student to send Baba Shouko to hell with the real Jigoku Website. It seems that the teacher had called upon Jigoku Shoujo herself in the past, when she was still a high school girl, seeing as she hated Baba Shouko herself at that time. Still, she chickened out. Now that she ended up in the same school as her, she actually tries to USE one of her students to send Baba Shouko to hell. Brilliant.
Especially taken into account what happens next. Baba Shouko herself appeared, and reveals that she actually doesn’t have any evil attentions at all. She’s just your usual strict teacher who wants to make her students good members of society. I like that kind of teacher, seeing as kids these days are getting ruder and ruder by the minute. She kindof reminds me of Ro from Saiunkoku Monogatari. But yeah, at the time, the children probably won’t acknowledge this. And some cases will never come to understand it, see the teacher as an example.
The question also remains: did Baba Shouko cause all of this, and more importantly, is she guilty? It’s true that she was the reason that Kuriyama-sensei turned out the way she did, but Kuriyama herself also is to blame, because she never saw the real meaning behind Baba’s behaviour. Still, can you really blame someone for not understanding something quick enough? Still, the fact remains that Kuriyama tried to use one of her students, while Kuriyama actually sent someone to hell. That’s another thing I love about this show. There’s almost no character who behaves ethically correct all the time. The previous episode was an extreme example of this as well.
Also, you have to love the attempts to stay out of the copyrights by turning “Google” into “Deegle”. It’s actually quite a cute name. ^^; I’m also glad that Kirika is improving. I mean, she still is the annoying brat, but she was actually quite funny in this episode, and she actually listened to Ai. I’m really beginning to wonder why she’s in this show in the first place. I mean, she has to have a reason, doesn’t she?]]>
Jigoku Shoujo – 34
