The Dangers in My Heart – 03 – A New Feeling

Kyou ends up in the nurse’s office with a headache the same time Anna is there with a stomachache (likely due to too many sweets). When she notices he’s staring then realizes it’s Kyou, she doesn’t seem to mind, since she knows him. She also offers him a Tylenol, but the only cup by the sink was the same one she used, which means the risk of an indirect kiss.

As dark and brooding as some of Kyou’s thoughts are, he at least knows better than to blurt out his … less savory thoughts. His male classmates, not so much. They’re a bunch of creeps, and when one of them gives him a note to pass to Anna, he assumes it’s something dirty and swaps it out with a drawing of Anna he made. The drawing absolutely makes Anna’s day.

More of the boys’ talk about how girl takes your hand and what that says about their preferred sex position actually gets to Kyou, when Anna counts her candy, notices one is missing, and takes Kyou’s hand from the top, which according to the dumb article means they like to take control. Turns out the missing candy was in her pocket.

When Kyou is hit by a basketball in P.E., he’s ready to aggressively throw it back … until he sees it’s Anna’s ball. She tosses it back and she smiles and thanks him. But later, while she’s looking at him, she gets hit right in the nose with a pass, and her nose starts bleeding profusely.

Continuing a trend of his actions not matching his thoughts, Kyou’s body moves on its own to the nurse’s office. He wonders what he’s doing there, but after hearing Anna talk on the phone with her mom through stifling tears, saying tomorrow’s photoshoot will have to be postponed, it finally hits him: he doesn’t want to murder this girl … he likes her.

I’m glad after three episodes he’s finally both aware of and seemingly accepting of this fact. Hopefully he can make more progress getting closer to Anna, since the fact she framed his drawing and keeps it in her purse, among other gestures, indicates she likes him too.

But for now, Kyou keeps stealthily doing little things to support her, like when she runs out of tissues from crying so much and he leaves packets of tissues at her spot in the library (as well as at all the other seats, so as not to seem suspicious).

I imagine Anna knows who left the tissues, and since she’s done crying, she instead uses them to wipe potato chip grease from her fingers. This smiling, happily snacking Yamada Anna is what Kyou likes to see most, which is good because he’s proven quite capable of making her smile.

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – Swordsmith Village Arc – 02 – The Boy Who Had No Tact

When a young swordsmith’s apprentice is seemingly being bullied by Tokitou Muichirou, Tanjirou intervenes. Unfortunately, while Tokitou is younger and of much slighter build than Tanjirou, he’s also a damn Hashira, so he’s going to get what he wants to get.

What Tanjirou can’t abide is that Tokitou is so tactless and insulting in his explanation of wanting what the boy won’t relinquish: the key that starts a 300-year-old, six-armed mechanical doll used for combat training called Yoriichi Type Zero.

Tokitou interrupts Tanjirou’s righteous speech by knocking him out, then takes the key and starts training with the doll. When Tanjirou mentions that the doll resembles someone from his dream, Tokitou’s equally annoying crow tells him that’s preposterous, but the apprentice boy tells him it could be an instance of an inherited memory.

The boy can’t bear to watch the mechanical doll break down, since his parents have passed away and he doesn’t possess the skills to fix it. He runs off to sulk in a tree, but Tanjirou uses his nose to find him, and gives him a stirring, motivational speech that lifts the boy, named Kotetsu, out of his funk.

When Tokitou is done with the doll, he’s ripped one of the six arms off since it cracked his own sword. They’re able to start the doll back up, and Kotetsu resolves to train Tanjirou to the point he can give Tokitou a piece of his mind (even if perrential good boy Tanjirou objects to that motivation).

Kotetsu proves a harsh taskmaster, withholding food and even water from Tanjirou unless he’s able to score a strike on the doll. Considering a Hashira considered it a useful training doll, it makes sense that Tanjirou has trouble with it, and Kotetsu keeps the difficulty level uncomfortably high.

This ends up paying off, as Tanjirou discovers that he can smell the moves the doll is about to make before he can sense the Opening Thread (his usual manner of predicting moves). This, combined with Kotetsu letting him drink and eat, thus restoring his stamina, leads to Tanjirou finally being able to defeat the Type Zero.

When he does, its head crumbles into shards, revealing a 300-year old Nichirin sword—perhaps the very blade that once belonged to the ancestor from his dream. While Tokitou comes off as a big old jerk compared to the affable Mitsuri, his sour introduction is tempered by Tanjirou’s fast friendship with the more pleasant (but still tough) Kotetsu.

Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury – 14 – These Violent Machines Have Violent Ends

Lady Prospera continues giving the isolated Miorine the rundown on why Suletta is at Asticassia. She believes she’s fulfilled her role as a “proper” mother by making Suletta’s dream of going to school and having friends come true. But the school is also the perfect place to “optimize” Aerial and its ability to “rewrite the world”—i.e. control any system—through data storms.

Miorine doesn’t like this project one bit, of course, but it’s also not something she can reject hastily now that it’s in her hands. Meanwhile, at the dust-up in the mobile suit hangar, Nana only suffered a broken arm, but even at Suletta’s urging won’t trouble her further by telling her what’s going on…or what she’s done.

Elan tries for the umpteenth time to elicit a kiss from Suletta, only to be interrupted once more by Sophie and Norea. Sophie is excited to duel against Suletta, kill Nana before she can snitch, and make Suletta her official big sis. Norea passes a smartphone with something on it to Elan in his capacity as Peil representative.

When the “Rumble Ring” begins, it’s an open invitational battle royale meant to showcase to all visitors the abilities of Asticassia pilots. It’s all in good fun. But there’s another plot at play during a battle that includes Lauda and Felsi from Jeturk, Sabina and Renee from Grassley, Suletta and Chuchu from Earth House with Elan pitching in, and some randos.

Things take a turn and the sanctity and relative safety of the dueling environment is changed forever, when Sophie and Norea blast into the battle area and start firing live rounds. Dueling Committee members Secelia and Rouji watch in horror as their elaborate game is suddenly stained with the blood of a real dead pilot.

Secilia immediately cancels the Rumble Ring and orders an evacuation, but the battle continues. Sophie’s green Gundam is joined by six of her own “Gund-Bits”—unmanned Gundams she calls “Gundvolvas”, while it becomes clear that Sabina and Renee are merely pretending to be losing to Sophie and Norea.

Nana is about to call the authorities to confess, but her phone is snatched up by Shaddiq’s buddy Henao. Her fellow Grassley housemates Maisie and Ireesha incapacitate President Sarius’ bodyguards and take him into custody under Shaddiq’s orders. He may not be in a cockpit, but he’s pulling all the strings here, and may have just succeeded in taking over his adoptive father’s company.

While Sophie is a crucial part of his plan, she couldn’t give a hoot about any of Shaddiq’s ambitions. She wants to duel with Suletta and make her her big sis, period. She’s willing to wound and maim and kill and destroy whoever and whatever she needs to to accomplish that and create a better life for herself.

Even as Suletta tells her killing to make those things happen is wrong, she thinks back to when she killed someone to save Miorine. Aerial was built to protect her and help her help others…right? In the midst of this logical conundrum, Aerial emits a data storm that disables Sophie, who was already at her Permet limit.

The battle within the training area is over, as Shaddiq’s objectives were achieved. As this is going on, Bel meets with Prospera and has her worst fears confirmed: there is a second will at work within Aerial—the will of Prospera’s second daughter, Ericht Samaya. The little girl named Eri from Ep 0 and the present-day Suletta aren’t the same—they’re sisters.

While Suletta has always regarded Aerial as her sister, she naturally doesn’t know that she once had a human body, but was turned into a Gundam due to their mother’s ambitions. Like her sister, Suletta is immune to the curse caused by Permet strain, a curse that claims Sophie’s life, and which Norea says will claims hers too in due time.

Prospera insists that Eri, now in Aerial form (I’m just realizing her name is phonetically right there), represents the “future of GUND”, the end result of research to create an end to war, disease and suffering, a pen with which to literally re-write the world as it is. This world may suck in numerous ways, who gave Lady Prospera the authority to unilaterally flip the script? Well…she did. She’s hoping Miorine, like Delling before her, will join her on this journey. But if she doesn’t, that won’t stop her.

As for Suletta, faced with the death of someone while she sits in Aerial’s cockpit (though Norea tells her the Permet killed Sophie, not Suletta), she can only take solace in knowing that she protected the school and her friends … but only for now. The “new world” Prospera is building is already stained with blood, and will be stained by a lot more. The only question is whose.

As for Nana, she is being arrested for terrorism. She may be the fall girl for Shaddiq’s machinations, but the fact remains: she made her choices. And since all of Earth House is brought in for questioning, she wasn’t even able to keep them away the trouble she was hoping to spare them.

Heavenly Delusion – 03 – Sister’s Keeper

Five years ago in 2034 (a decade after the “calamity”), a girl named Takehaya Kiriko did indeed race electric go-karts in Asakusa as the stoner commune resident recalled. She was on a team led by Inazaki Robin, and lived with her little brother Haruki in a makeshift orphanage with other kids.

Haruki admired Robin, who we first meet rather violently curb-stomping two men threatening him. He also taught him not to look in the eyes of his opponents, but instead focus on their collar and the ground under one’s own feet. In a brief scene, we also see that Kiriko and the mysterious “Doc” seem to have some kind of relationship.

It’s a hard-scrabble existence, but compared to the present-day Kiruko considered that time to be akin to heaven. When Kiriko was cold at night, she was about to climb into Haruki’s bed, but an alarm for a man-eater sounds, and Haruki gets up and follows Robin (against Robin’s wishes). Little did he know that would be their last night together.

As much as Robin (and Kiriko) want to keep him out of danger, Haruki is determined to keep his sister and friends safe and make himself useful to Robin. He fashions his own crossbow, and before Kiriko’s next race he surveys the area from a vantage point.

He finds a man-eater with cloaking ability in the arcade where there are no cameras set up, and when he can’t get anyone’s attention, decides to take care of it himself. Only his pea-shooter isn’t enough against its thick hide, and when he stabs it in the “face” it grabs him and starts to suck him in.

Kiriko takes the lead in the race, and is the first to reach the arcade, where she finds a horrifying scene. She crashes her kart into the man-eater, then tears Haruki free, but his arms and legs are already gone. Kiriko holds Haruki’s body and cries for help as his life fades.

After that, things are fuzzy for Haruki, who is briefly conscious for his sister’s embrace. We get flashes of his life with her before the orphanage when it was just the two of them, and during some of the happier times thereafter. These scenes are full of nostalgia, longing, and melancholy, for they are times that will never be again.

While this is going on, the “Doc”, who one of Haruki’s friends said was doing human experimentation, seems to be doing just that to Haruki, sawing off the top of his head in a gruesome, unsanctioned operation of his own design.

After one last vision of the last time he was with his sister, where the arcade and everything around them is blood red and Kiriko walks away from him, Haruki comes to in a hospital bed…and finds himself in Kiriko’s body. Whether she had a traumatic brain injury that meant certain death, or she volunteered to donate her body to her brother, Kiriko is gone.

The other doctors talk as if it’s still Kiriko in that bed, and that due to some kind of mental break she now believes she’s the little brother she lost to the man-eater. But our omniscient POV of the operation suggests that “Doc” really did put Haruki’s brain in Kiriko’s body.

The length of Haruki’s recovery is such that by the time he can walk around, everything has changed in Asakusa. The Doc skipped town, while Robin is rumored to have either been murdered or disappeared. Haruki decides to believe he’s not dead, and longs to find both him and the Doc for answers.

Haruki assumed the name Kiruko (an apparent merging of his and his sister’s names) and began working on his own as a handyman and bodyguard-for-hire thereafter, which led to him to meeting Maru. Having heard all of this, Maru still can’t deny his attraction to Kiruko, and laments he’d never be able to find a girl with whom he gets along so well.

But now Maru and we know the truth, and what drives Kiruko—who I’ll refer to with they/them pronouns going forward. The thus far peaceful ferry ride back to Tokyo is interrupted by the arrival of another man-eater, this time resembling a fish with many human arm-like appendages. After the credits we get a little scene in “Heaven” where Kona is drawing a baby, and Kuku reports she’s seen a real baby, only “without a face”, which she believes to be normal.

It dawns on me that the drawings Kona is drawing seemingly from out of his imagination (like the fish with arms) are the man-eaters in the outside world. Is this simply a form of ESP, or is he actually conjuring these monsters through the drawings? It’s just one of many answers I’m yearning for as Kiruko and Maru hopefully have better luck finding “Heaven”.