Jigoku Shoujo – 54

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.