Rent-a-Girlfriend – 27 – Operation 203

Take it from someone who made a student short film: making one can feel like an endless checklist. But one thing Kazuya and Chizuru are able to check off relatively quickly this week is the script: they found a good one. Kazuya also managed to get their college’s film club to film it. Progress!

When Kazuya and Chizuru meet up for a meeting with the club president, she levels a joke at Kazuya about charging him for their “date” that gets him hook, line and sinker. It’s a little thing, but it says so much about how far they’ve come that she can mess with him.

At the end of the meeting it’s raining, and Kazuya runs off to buy an umbrella. The club prez tells Chizuru he had to meet the actor with whom Kazuya was so smitten he prostrated himself before the entire film club to get them to film his movie. Kazuya putting all this effort in motivates Chizuru to work just as hard in her role.

But while production logistics are taking shape, the crowdfunding page has stalled, with no new backers in the last 24 hours. While dropping in to ask her shisho about his progress with Chizuru, Mini catches a gander at the page, and offers her expertise and experience in crowdfunding and marketing.

Despite being a “zoomer” who pauses every two minutes to take a selfie, Mini proves she’s serious and diligent in her offer of assistance. This isn’t just apparent to him, but Chizuru and Ruka, when the two of them are summoned for a strategy meeting. Ruka identifies Mini as another threat, but she’ll do anything to help Kazuya, even if it means making a movie starring Chizuru.

While not doing producer work, Kazuya is pressed into service handing out fliers with Ruka, but when she can’t be around, he isn’t able to pass any out. Who should happen to cross paths with him than Sumi, making her first appearance this season.

While Kazuya puts on a brave face, Sumi is determined to help him out, because she’s an abominably good girl. She even delays dinner with her dad and overcomes her fear of speaking out loud to help him hand out fliers, and because she’s so goshdarn cute she has no trouble doing so. It’s not nearly enough Sumi Time, honestly, but I’ll take what I can get!

Finally, Mini visits Chizuru’s “main heroine” apartment for the first time, and is rightfully impressed. Chizuru made a good start in gathering some personal items she can offer as tiered rewards for backers, but Mini insists they have to take things further. Chizuru may see no value in a 100-yen scrunchie, but Mini says the fact it touched her skin makes it priceless to a potential backer.

Even though Mini knows she shouldn’t go through Chizuru’s unmentionables, instinct compels her to try anyway, resulting in a brief tussle with a Chizuru who has to draw the line somewhere. But the end result of the evening is an impressive haul of Ichinose Chizuru effects to use on the site.

Mini uses her time with Chizuru to try to get more of a sense of how she feels about Kazuya, starting with asking if she has a boyfriend, then asking if she’d ever considered him for the role. She acknowledges his good qualities—honest, kind, straightforward (most of the time)—but insists that his interest in her is “just as an actress”, and he wouldn’t be stupid enough to fall for a rental GF.

Mini makes clear to Chizuru right then and there that neither of those things Chizuru is so certain of are true at all. Kazuya does have romantic feelings for her, whatever he may have said in the past. Not only that, Mini is certain most if not all of Chizuru’s clients dreamt at one time or another that she’d become their real GF. The line in the sand between rental and real is just that: all too easy to cross, or wipe away entirely.

This information from Mini, a new but not altogether untrustworthy source, may well be the catalyst needed to move the needle on the Chizuru-Kazuya impasse. It’s more than a pact, and has been for some time. That doesn’t bode well for Ruka or Fumi, but hey, there can only be one. I was skeptical of Mini at first, but I’m really enjoying competence in marketing strategy, as well as in her self-appointed role as matchmaker.

Reign of the Seven Spellblades – 03 – A New Way to Live

Ophelie and Cyrus could probably achieve terrible things together if they joined forces, but each finds the other’s methods (her promiscuity, his necromancy) repugnant, so they fight each other with huge summoned monsters. Ophelie actually gives birth to hers; judging from her ahegao she seems to get a kick out of doing so.

When Cyrus blocks the underclassmen with his wall of bones, Nanao arrives to give them cover to escape. She also makes it sounds like she’s been looking for a place to die, and has found one. Oliver is ready to follow her into battle when Ophelie and Cyrus’ duel is cut short by the student body president, Alvin Godfrey.

Backed up by school prefect Carlos Whitlow, Alvin orders the two villains-in-training back to the depths of the Labyrinth, and escorts our first-years to safety.

Once there, Oliver gets in Nanao’s face and asks her what all the suicidal talk is about. Chela pulls him away, but is just as curious to know what’s up with Nanao, so she asks her to please tell them all if she can. That’s when Nanao looks back to the last and worst battle she ever experienced.

Even with a seemingly hopeless deficit in numbers, Nanao is able to easily carve her way to the enemy general, and dispatches his son, who was purportedly one of the finest warriors in the land, before she even knew it was him.

When the general orders his armies to kill her without learning her name, their spears are suddenly stopped dead…by a western mage on a broom. He invites Nanao to Kimberly, and here she is. But ever since being plucked from that battle—and from her certain death—Nanao has felt like she’s strayed into a dream.

When Nanao fought Oliver in class, she experienced shiawase, a moment of clarity and shared admiration and respect when locked in mortal combat with an opponent. But the battle was cut short, and Oliver pushed her away. Attempting to join the battle with the upperclassmen was her way of ending that dream on her own terms, before it ended on its own, worse terms.

Oliver thinks Katie is speaking out of turn when she says that, basically, Nanao is saying she’s heartbroken after Oliver rejected her entreaty of love and happiness (i.e. shiawase). But Nanao admits that yes, whether she fell for Oliver the person or his sword, to a warrior like her, there’s little difference.

This is when Chela asks Nanao, as a friend, to consider living her life in a new and different way than she did before. One need not cover themselves in blood or glory to thrive at Kimberly. Chela wants to spend more time with Nanao, and all of the others feel the same way. Indeed, it was clear Oliver was only upset with Nanao because he thought she was being too reckless with her life.

When everyone else chimes in agreeing with Chela, Nanao bows her head in apology and vows not to put her life in danger again. She also admits she’s happy she has friends at this school, since she hasn’t been able to learn much of anything in the classes so far. They all agree to help and support one another. If any dangers cross their paths, they’ll face them together.

It’s the Oliver-and-Nanao making up scene I’d hoped for at the end of last week, but I won’t knock the show for interrupting it to demonstrate how dangerous the school can be when our first-years are fractured. The next morning, Nanao clings to Oliver, who is both embarrassed and flattered. I love the varied reactions from the others to what is basically a newly formed couple.

Back in Garland’s Sword Arts class, Richard Andrews isn’t done with Oliver, and wants to fight him one-on-one. Oliver agrees, but before they get started Nanao grabs his arm, sensing he intends to lose on purpose. When Richard hears this he gets even more angry. Thus Oliver needs to give it his all to satisfy Nanao, and not humiliate Richard into desperation.

Chela takes Oliver aside to tell him she and Richard were childhood friends, always compared to each other by their elders, hence Richard’s inferiority complex. She’s not entirely sure how Oliver should proceed, only that some kind of fight is inevitable.

This dilemma is interrupted by news that Katie has rushed to the defense of the troll who went on a rampage at the parade. It’s about to be executed by faculty member Darius Grenville, but she stands fast in his path. Unamused by her insolence, when he learns she’s a “civil rights activist” he mocks her parents.

When she refuses to step aside, he uses an extreme pain spell on her, cementing his status as a real sonofabitch. Her friends come to her rescue, and thankfully don’t have to fight Grenville, as he’s told to stand down by fourth-year Vera Milligan, backed up by Professor Garland.

They inform Grenville that not only is there an ongoing investigation that demands the troll stay alive for now, and that it wouldn’t do to anger the growing pro-demi civil rights political faction, but the use of pain spells by faculty were banned five years ago.

Vera formally introduces herself to Katie as a fellow pro-demi advocate, and tells her she’ll be happy to help her in her efforts going forward as they share the same cause. Even though she’s still feeling the effects of the pain spell, Katie leaves the confrontation with a big smile on her face, having found a strong, cool upperclassman ally.

While the good vibes are somewhat marred by an inevitable duel challenge from Richard to Oliver, I still enjoyed this episode immensely from start to finish. Oliver and Nanao made up and may be an item, and we learned that Kimberly isn’t just a school full of perverts and assholes outside of the friend circle. In Alvin, Carlos, and Vera, there are good seeds looking after them too.

It’s a testament to the character writing that Garland’s explanation of the titular Spellblades (there are apparently only six of them at the moment) is the least interesting part of the episode. I’m sure they’ll come into play soon and a seventh will emerge, but for now I care more about these lovable kids.