Oh my… this surely was a unique episode. And I mean that in a good way. I’ve honestly never seen an episode in which so much emphasis was put in just characters talking. 85% of the episode contains just Yuuko and Watanuki, talking about the case of the episode. 10% of the time is spent showing the woman while during the last 5%, Watanuki has to buy a couple of fake glasses. No Doumeki, no Himawari. Heck even no Mokona, Maru and Moro. Is it also me, or did the 85%-part of the episode feature no background music at all?
I really am left utterly silent because of this episode. Clearly, this manga chapter was taken in order to save a little budget, but the results turned out pretty awesome because of it. The woman in this episode has tendency to deliberately do all kinds of things which aren’t in her best interest. Things like pressing fire alarms, deliberately failing her tests, throwing a cup of coffee at Yuuko and even getting hit by a moped.
It’s easy to think that the woman’s got a problem, though Yuuko explains that she actually was busy balancing her life. For every good thing which happened to her, she’d compensate with something which wouldn’t be so good for her. But she’d never do something which would ruin her life, and the aftereffects of her actions all were only bad in short terms. She would easily be able to recover from all of them. After all, pressing fire alarms would get her in detention and she’d get yelled at. If she fails her tests at one school, she can just try another. Yuuko can get pretty angry if someone threw a cup of coffee over her, though it’s just someone she’d never see again, and Yuuko would quite probably forgive her for it. And fractures, indeed, heal.
The interesting thing was that there was also no spirit involved at all. Everything was going on in her mind. The question, however, remains whether she liked her habit or not. After all, everyone of us has some kind of strange habit. Some of them we like, some of them we don’t mind, and some of them we hate. The woman clearly was unconciously in the middle-category, but she did ask Yuuko to cure her. I think that Watanuki made her see that the things she’s doing aren’t very healthy, and that she’d indeed better stop. You can compare this with smokers and drinkers.
Yuuko uses the good old placebo-effect in order to cure her. In case you don’t know what this means: give a sick person a worthless item, tell him it’ll cure him and 10 to 1 that he’ll feel better afterwards. It’s very strange, but interestingly enough, it does work somehow. It also does in this case. Because the woman thinks that the glasses help, she tries to lose her habit. We don’t see how it’ll turn out, though the does manage to surpress the need to get hit by a car.
Yuuko also definately was interesting during this episode. After all, there had to be a reason for her to know that the fake glasses would be useful. The fact that she ordered Watanuki to buy some must mean that she knew or anticipated that someone with a problem which could be cured with the placebo-effect would come to her. Or was there more to it? Was her reason to put this order all the way in a locker near a train station just to tease Watanuki (which worked perfectly, by the way) or was it some method of aquiring things you need before you even know you need them? Or maybe it’s just me, thinking too much.
Overall, now that I think back, this was an awesome episode of xxxHolic. Some may find it boring, though I loved the fact that the episode just consisted of people talking. xxxHolic sure does know how to bring a bit of variety in its episodes.
I’ve got just one problem with xxxHolic. It’s a great series, but why does every victim have to be a woman? Seriously, apart from Watanuki, Domeki, the foxes and the guys who dated the woman back in episode 9, every single one of the appearing characters has been female. Was this also the case in the manga? Or did the creators of this anime decide to leave out every manga arc dealing with a male as victim?
Memorable Moment: Watanuki, finding out about Yuuko’s order.
Yuuko clearly knew about it before hand… My understanding is that Clow and Yuuko made the Mokonas long before TRC, but they were made for that purpose. She must have some form of foresight.
I’m not sure entirely where, chronologically, the part before the episode title fits in. Maybe that’s Yuuko’s vision of the future maybe? If that part didn’t really happen, then Watanuki’s quest for the glasses is also what cause him to meet Nurie, and the follow thru of meeting Yuuko. So, in effect, by sending him out at the right time to the right place to get fake glasses, that triggered the whole chain of events, and pieced together completely in the end.
But that assumes the part before the episode title didn’t actually happen. Are there any hints to this being the case?
Yuuko does have foresight–she apparently gets visions all the time, though she does need help with accuracy. That’s why she has that fortune-teller. Yes, Yuuko also understands the delicately balanced chain of fate. Clow and her knew before hand about the quests for the Mokonas, why they were made, but it seems they can’t know everything. Though they do have a great sense of events, that’s why Yuuko has her shop: an item goes in and another comes out, and so on, and it will continue like that for some time.
Hmm…now that I think about it, there were an awful lot of female customers in the manga, though don’t forget about the three guys from Tsubasa Chronicle.
Every little thing triggers something:
‘There is no such thing as coincidence…there is only hitsuzen!’-Yuuko.