Musaigen no Phantom World – 04

Spirited away?

This time we get into Reina’s story….

Usagi Drops

…shame it’s not a nekobussu…

If there is one thing I can state, without any hesitancy, that I love about fiction it is how we can explore worlds that are “outside the norm”. If you set your genre right, and trust that you can meet your audience’s expectations, you can shift metaphor around like nothing else and say quite a bit in the process. One of my favorite places to investigate is the idea of the “created family”. As Ichijo was trying to allude to before he was cut off by a rather insensate Ruru, you don’t get to choose the family you’re born into, much less the rules you have to operate under; but this isn’t so with the family you choose….

So the story goes is that Reina is just right for a phantom to come along and abduct her into a terrible world where her friends have to come rescue her. Now, at the outset much of that it true, but a great deal of it isn’t exactly correct. What really clued me in at first was how blase Koito was to the whole affair. She felt like a canary in a coal mine; “oh, that looks like a phantom they can handle, and besides, does it ever look personal”. After that it was a matter of letting it all play out as it needed to.

I love the little touches they put here an there into Reina’s own personal phantom. It’s so personal it still leaves me scratching my head with just how useful and interesting it was. It had a backdoor out in the form of it’s own indoor plumbing, and it let Ichijo in no problem and even found room for Mai to fit in. That’s a feature she would not have known about, but it seemed to have. It never made her late, it didn’t extract a pound of flesh, it was very pleasant even at the end there, giving her a full range of choices; it didn’t do a thing to stop Ichijo from interfering and didn’t hold Mai hostage. A very useful phantom, and one to keep around in a pinch when you think about it.

Mai is in there somewhere….

But there is quite enough perceptive to go around this episode and I, for one, thing they let their symbolism do some of the storytelling for them. Reina had cast her parents as the hard and harsh rocks in the middle of her little zen garden. They didn’t hold with phantoms, they forced her big sister out, and are looingk to be pretty paranoid from the outside; a camera like they have outside the house is less for security and more for “don’t even think about bothering us”. They are shown as imposing, but how much of that is actually true, and how much of it is coming from Reina’s imaginings of them? She’s a teenage girl after all…

If anything when she is tempted to follow her bunny parents, they seem to regret her leaving, almost as if they don’t want her to face reality quite yet, as if it would make them sad as well. But they still want what is best for her. It’s Ichijo, emerging from the hard and harsh rocks that drags her back to reality. That’s a hefty bit of symbolism going on, and it still makes leaves me with a feeling, much like the one she had when thinking back to her little dream bunny house, that it’s not over yet.

Yeah, there’s been quite a bit of flack about this show, and I wanted to address it as sufficiently as possible before I moved on. Quite a few have dismissed it as fanservice and harem….but have you even watched the show? It has none of those elements to it at all. Sure it may “tease” fanservice, but that is usually more more in service of poking fun at people, and delivering the punchline to a joke. But if you want to stab yourself with genre tags’ sharp ends be my guest. That will be far fewer idiots in on my end of the conversations in the long run…..

So with that out of the way, what did you think? Reina has quite a bit to go still yet, and since Ichijo dropped a bomb about his own family being split up, she might find it in herself to return the favor. I thought they did quite nice on setting up a future arc for the two of them to follow. Along with that, they opened up that she has very complex feelings for Mai, and that Mai is going to become aware of them soon. It could be as simple as projecting her missing sister onto her sempai, or it could be something else. We’ll see as more episodes come out….

About skylion

All around nerd that enjoys just about any anime genre. I love history, politics, public policy, the sciences, literature, arts...pretty much anything can make me geeky...except sports. Follow me @theskylion