Mayoiga – 11-12 [END]

Observe, the usefulness of the Mayoiga cast in its natural habitat.

I kind of fell off track in last two episodes, but it was fun being able to blog a show weekly again!

This is one of those shows where the majority of the cast really did not serve a purpose. They could have cut it in half (like, take out sick boy and 2/3 of the Yuunos or something) and it wouldn’t have made too much of a difference. They still could have had the mob mentality scenes be effective, and maybe they could have gone into the character’s issues more instead of magically having everyone go “oh hey, our problems are suddenly solved without issue!” and show up on the bus at the end. They took an entire episode dedicated to trying to make us feel bad about Lovepon and the other’s pasts, but then couldn’t be bothered to give any kind of resolution on how they got over those problems. Sure, it could have been tedious to go over “I accept that my past sucked” 30 times (or even 15 times if they cut the cast in half), but if they’re going to dedicate that much time to Lovepon, the least they could do was show how she became a somewhat functional human being again.

Koharun being Kamiyama’s daughter made a lot of things make more sense. That’s probably why the email thing sounded like a lie since she probably just knew from talking to her father (and also why she’s apparently popular around the university or wherever, if her father was a researcher). It’s also the most likely reason why she knew everything about the song, and also why she chose to not talk about the things she knew, since apparently knowing that the monster is just your trauma personified with separation issues makes it SUPER easy to return whenever you want. Sure, trying to create the ultimate Nanaki to try to solve her father’s issues was a really dumb plan, but this entire show was dumb. Seeing how she somehow trusted Hyoketsu with trying to carry out her plan (and gave them bows and arrows for some reason…?), she doesn’t seem to have thought many things through.

One thing I did find kind of clever though was the relationship with that window shown in the first episode, and having it end up being Kamiyama’s house. In the first episode when they showed that, I thought it was just another level of stupidity where the so-called “secret entrance” was so close to someone’s house (to add on to the ridiculousness of how it was already on a well-maintained, paved road). Having it actually be Kamiyama’s residence where he tries (and fails I guess, from Masaki’s flashback) to stop people from trying to find the village makes the location of the house make sense. …Plus if Koharun lives there, it also makes her dramatic entrance with the fog in the first episode make sense as well. She couldn’t join the tour group because she was busy drugging people. It happens.

As for unexplained mysteries, why the hell did Masaki lie about everything? There was no good reason why she did. There’s also the whole “Masaki is a ghost!” issue, which caused a lot of drama, but sure as hell wasn’t resolved. So did she work under her real name despite being a missing person, or not? If not, what did she do for all of that time? It doesn’t seem like it was too long ago, if Kamiyama was there to try and stop her and he was already aged, but it was at least long enough for her to qualify as a missing person. In the end, she was just a really confusing character. Maybe there’s some sort of psychological reason tied to her delusions of Reiji that can be explained (like some sort of mental disease or something), but that isn’t really immediate to the non-informed viewer, and it feels like they just kind of threw that in there to delay explanations once again. Or if there is some sort of mental illness that lines up with her behaviour, it was probably just an accident seeing how well planned the rest of the show was. …And let’s just forget about how quirky (like with the talking to herself) she was in the first episode, since that disappeared with the end of that episode. Though of course, Mitsumune’s vision in the first episode really didn’t play any part either.

There’s also the whole issue of why/how Nanakimura and it’s supernatural ties exist in the first place, but I figured it would be asking too much to have that explained in the last episode when they had so many other immediate problems to address. Sure, it would be nice to figure out why everything was rather well maintained, what the eye Mitsumune saw was, or why there were animal claw marks and such, but even the show itself forgot that these were once plot points.

Don’t ask how he captured Mitsumune’s Nanaki. He just did. 

The Nanaki itself was an interesting concept, and made sense in order to get every character scared when the characters were so different and probably would have had really different views on what scary things were. …Because let’s be honest. They argued about everything else, so they would probably argue over what was frightening or not. It’s just too bad that the Nanaki itself made such little sense. Why wouldn’t it attack in the village? Why did Kamiyama grow old again? Is everyone else really going to be okay? I guess they explained that everyone’s Nanaki is different, so it kind of makes sense that Mitsumune and Kamiyama wouldn’t have the same reaction to dealing with their Nanaki. …On the other hand, having everyone on the bus seem to be fine after dealing with their Nanaki is REALLY pushing it. Maybe the majority aren’t okay. However, we’ll never know, since the show didn’t even seem to care about the details of how they solved their problems.

“Quick, let’s add something cute so the viewers so they forget what they’re watching” – Mayoiga staff probably

At least Mitsumune got some kind of closure (along with Masaki I guess), even if him gaining a new Nanaki in the last minute was pretty dumb. I don’t care how adorable the little dog-thing was, it just seemed so sudden for him to gain that much emotional pain over Masaki. But I guess it got him into the village again with little to no effort, so whatever.

Surprisingly, the bus driver might have had the best character arc (or whatever you want to call it) of them all. I’m just going to ignore the development that Nanaki can talk and whatever, but the character nobody seemed to care about actually seemed the most developed. In the first episode, we saw him obviously suffering and taking his pain out on others, his encounter with his Nanaki shook him, and by the end, he managed to overcome his past and move forward (in a non-stupid way too, amazingly). This is more than I can say about the majority of the cast, and maybe character development like the bus driver’s is what the show should have focused on more than what it did. Sure it was pretty shallow character development, but at least it was something. Yottsun maybe wasn’t so bad either, since he seemed kind of rehabilitated into society now that he’s decided to get over his Nanaki (and his Nanaki had a backstory to how he got rid of it). …Or at the very least, Kamiyama has an interesting partner now.

All that being said, I was thoroughly entertained the entire run of the anime. There was… a lot wrong with this anime, but I can’t say that I was ever bored. It was fun to try to come up with theories about what was happening, even if some of the clues they gave were just… kind of… ignored, and the characters were pretty awful, but some of them were entertaining on some level with how out-there they were. I’m not really disappointed that no one died (even if some of them really deserved it), since this was labelled as “mystery” as opposed to “horror”. I was already kind of skeptical of a massacre midway through with Yottsun and Hyoketsu being the only characters who disappeared and neither of them had bodies to show for it.

I am disappointed though that they seem to have thrown together such a large cast that most of them didn’t really matter. A smaller cast could have been far more well developed, and could have offered more closure than what the anime provided. It almost seems like they had so many characters just to beat the cliche that having a large cast in a mystery anime means that most are going to die (such as something like Danganronpa). They had Yottsun and Hyouketsu disappear early on to maybe try and lure the viewer to keep watching and ignore all of the things that were wrong with the show into thinking this would be one of those anime where the majority dies, but obviously that never happened. Hell, they even added to the character count towards the end with Kamiyama.

It also seems like there were rewrites or something along the way. A lot of the plot points weren’t addressed, and they spent far too long on dumb things like the arguments (which don’t seem to have had any pay off in the series overall), or whether or not Masaki was a monster controlling ghost. Even the whole part of Koharun’s song that led them to believe that Masaki was involved (the one about the girl leading in monsters or something) was forgotten about. Maybe Koharun just made that part up to stop people from adding her into the witch hunt though. Who even knows at this point.

But tldr, I kind of liked how awful this series was, and if some of the characters being stupid and staying behind in Nanakimura means a second season, then I’m not complaining. Of course, if they leave the series as is, and decide to never explain what happens to Koharun and the others, then I’m not exactly going to be broken hearted over it either.

About Karakuri

University student and the one at Metanorn who's known for wearing glasses. Likes blood, insanity and plot twists, but also plays otome games and adores cute romance anime. It balances out... somehow.