Revue Starlight is back to business this week with its bizarrely entertaining duel. In a way, this duel is a long way coming as this is one of the development I expected to happen sooner or later. What I didn’t expect, however, is the overall light-hearted tone with cartoonish paper cut-out design and Mahiru -Karen fight literally stage-crashing other duels at the same time. I guess it’s because Mahiru is a kind-hearted person so we see her point of view in a rose-tinted glass with almost too naive outlook. Overall, while I have some nitpicks over the episode, it’s a delightful one from start to finish. My only beef with this week is that, for an episode that is about jealousy, we get little to no exposition of that theme. We see Mahiru feeling left out by the appearance of Hikari, but it plays out mostly for laugh (good one at that though). Moreover, Revue Starlight frames her conflict more as her own insecure with the rest of the cast, with all the country pumpkin imply and “sparkle” stuffs. Which again, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just that “jealousy” isn’t really much there to begin with.
But what this episode of Revue Starlight does extremely well, it’s how they manage the comedic beat. There are recurring gags about whenever Mahiru doing something “perverted”, Hikari appears with that deadpan expression and walks away. The visual cues sum up very well Mahiru’s situation than many words can tell (it’s show, don’t tell). We have Mahiru’s affection to Karen and we also sense how she feels Hikari invading Karen and her own space. Another notch for great visual gags come later in the duel, where other various auditioning girls get distracted by the duo’s crashing their stage. As for Mahiru, working with all the greatest faces also make she feels unconfident about herself, that she can’t shine like others. It’s her frustration triggers the audition so that she’d have to fight Karen (why not Hikari?) at the revue stage.
The revue duel this week is a total delight with catchy song, humorous, original (even to this show’s standard) and again brimming with many symbolisms that might or might not have a meaning. I mean, I can’t still get my head around the significance of baseball and she hits Karen off. Or even the fact that Revue Starlight animal-codes her as a white kitty cat. As for the duel, well… it’s purposely different from the rest of the duel we’ve encountered so far and I enjoyed every minute of it. With this duel done, however, I hope Mahiru still stay relevant. She’s the odd one out of the 9 members cast and it would be a let down if she remains the least developed character out of this mix. As the final note, two things I can takeaway from this duel: 1) there are simultaneously other auditions happening around at the same time in some extra-dimensional space and 2) I have the most single bizzare image of the week, not from the weird duel, but from our giraffe gets his head down to drink water in the lake with silver coins, while talking no less. Thumbs up for originality!
