Sachiko is not amused

Doremi, you guys are walking way too fucking fast, while I lag a bit behind. But I still beat lolikit to a proper entry.

The school festival has arrived and everyone is having a grand ol’ time. Yumi and Yoshino man the gates of some shrine restaurant. Yoshino goes at it with particular enthusiasm since it’s her first school festival since she almost died, while Yumi would rather be in the throes of pleasure, writhing in bed with Sachiko tending to a vending booth.

Outside, Sei and Youko catch a girl trying not so inconspicuously, about 5 meters from the main entrance, to hop the gates into the festival. After some interrogation they get that the girl, Yuuko, claims to be a relative of one of the students, but does not have a ticket as she ought to, and isn’t on the guest list either…hmm…rather fishy, or maybe that’s just the usual scent of pheromones that wafts about Lillian.

Back inside, Yumi takes a quick break from her post to greet Kanako, who perpetuates her loner status by standing around wistfully holding the tickets that were supposed to be passed on to her family members. They chat for a while until Touko comes along, causing Kanako to bolt away. Yumi exchanges pleasantries and meal tickets for free weiners with Touko, but is suddenly dragged back to Yoshino and the photography club, who are taking pictures of the roses at work for the next edition of the newspaper. Yumi returns to find Touko has excused herself, but ended up accepting Yumi’s offer of gratuitous sausage, leaving her thanks.

After finishing up at the restaurant gate, Yumi heads inside the school where she meets up with Sei and Youko, who suddenly realizes that Yumi and Yuuko are strikingly similar both in appearance and mannerism. The three make their way to Sachiko’s classroom to see her, but she happens to have been called to the nurse’s office, so they opt to fool around in her class’s candy grab games to kill the time until she returns. In the midst of their crusade for chocolate, however, they’re interrupted by Kanako, who comes running in begging Yumi to hide her, having met someone she’d rather avoid.

Sachiko returns soon after, gives Kanako a stare that would make me shit myself if I were ever hit with it, and orders her and Yumi to come with her to the nurse’s office. She explains that she’d been called to the nurse’s office because her father was there, but found that odd since her father left for New York the night before, she went to check it out anyway and instead found Kanako’s father there. Kanako is reluctant to see him at first, but Sachiko coerces her to do so with relative ease.

What follows is a touching reunion where Kanako confronts her father about being a lying adulterer and blames him for breaking up their family and coming between her and her best friend, who he slept with. But her friend, who unsurprisingly turns out to be Yuuko, follows soon after and explains that Kanako’s father did not ruin her life, and that she genuinely loves them. They laugh, they cry, they hug, and Kanako finds out she has a little sister!

Teen pregnancy, bringing families together again. D’aww.

The festival winds down with the bonfire folk dance, where Yumi and Sachiko traditionally find each other idling around by their lonesome. Sachiko takes Yumi for a walk to the statue of Maria-sama and delivers a touching speech about how the two have been sisters for a year now and how despite her best efforts, Sachiko couldn’t come up with a way to celebrate it because having Yumi as her soeur seems so natural that this day feels like any other. Yumi is brought to tears by Sachiko’s spiel, but her bliss soon turns into shock as Sachiko then tells Yumi to choose a soeur of her own.

Thoughts

FWOO FWOO

Ah the dramatic wind, an anime staple that tells meteorologists to shove it, because high pressure system be damned, a dramatic revelation needs to be followed by a strong gust of wind.

Maybe it’s because I’ve long since forgotten Marimite’s time line and any events that preceded the fourth season, but this came out of nowhere to me. Was this hinted at at all before now? I was always under the impression that Sachiko was rather protective of Yumi and didn’t really want to share her with anyone else. In retrospect, that may just be a result of the “Crazy Sachiko” persona that all Sachiko fans seem to push onto her.

I’m going to assume that Sachiko’s reasoning is that after experiencing the joy that having une petite soeur has brought her, she wants Yumi to follow suit. But I could have sworn she was really possessive of Yumi before. Even the look she gave Touko and Yumi as they ran off together reeked of “If anything happens to my little sis I’ll tear that girl’s head off, dip her twindrills in the resulting fountain of blood and paint my kitchen with it”.

…am I just imagining things D:?

A wild Touko appears.
FIGHT          BAG
PKMN         >RUN

As for the race for Yumi’s rosary itself, things seem pretty one sided. Kanako can’t stand the competition, and doesn’t seem to really like Yumi anyway, still unable to completely detach herself from the ideal of Yumi that she had built up in her mind. That, and she’s only using her as a means to get over Yuuko. While it looks like Kanako will resolve a lot of the issues she has with Yumi and humanity in general and becoming less of a nihilistic bitch as the series progresses, I’ve still got my money on Touko. Largely thanks to the in your face symmetrical docking shot of the two in the ED. *bitter*

Yup, still a dyke.

~ Shirukii ~

A wild MissingNo. appears

First of all, FUCK YEAH I’m blogging again! Feels good to be back and slightly less lazy, just slightly. Second of all, many thanks to lolikit, whose post informed me that the .avi raw of this episode was made of artifacts and fail. Incidentally, I’ll be blogging this series in tandem with him, so look forward to that if you’re at all remotely interested in either of our ramblings.

We start off by getting a reintroduction of the Roses and whatnot. Just in case you forgot who Sachiko is. But you didn’t. No one forgets who Sachiko is. It’s Sachiko.

The Rose mansion is aflutter with talks of the play which they will be showing at the upcoming school festival, for no apparent reason but to illicit one of her petite soeur’s funny facial expressions, Sachiko decides on one whose main characters fit Yumi and her little brother perfectly.

By now, a staple presence in any school event, the guys from Hanadera head over to Lillian to help out with the play. As everyone seems to be settling in and the play looks to be taking form, Sachiko (again, for on apparent reason) tells everyone to forget all their roles and arbitrarily dictates new ones at her discretion. Instead of being irked at the wasted time spent memorizing roles and preparing costumes, everyone seems to take the suggestion in good humor.

After rehearsal, Yumi, Yoshino and Shimako are heading home when Yumi stops in front of Maria-sama’s statue and begins to nostalgia bomb about when she became Sachiko’s petite soeur, she outright denies her reminiscence to the other two, but her lie is written on her face.

As rehearsals continue, Yumi begins to notice that Kanako isn’t exactly in high spirits about the play. When she confronts her about it later at the rose mansion, Kanako reminds her of her disdain for all being with a penis and how displeased she is by the fact that she has to portray one in the play. However, she does not break the promise to be in the play that she made to Yumi, despite voicing her desire to.

Later that day, during cleaning duty, Noriko stops Yumi in the halls to tell her about Touko, who has been skipping drama club activities for some reason. While it’s reasonable to assume that the school festival play is taking away some of the time Touko has for the drama club, she shouldn’t be completely absent from their meetings. But nevertheless, after some discussion in the Rose mansion, everyone agrees that Touko should be dismissed from her duties in the school festival play to free up time for the drama club, sending Yumi to give her the news. Instead…

Confrontation.

Confusion.

Accusation and first lie.

Presentation of evidence refuting first lie.

Defensive bantering and second lie.

Pointing out of flaw in second lie and demand for truth.

Admission of lies and concession of truth.

Make up sex.

So from what I understood, Touko first tells Yumi that she just doesn’t have the time for the drama club, or that it’s on hiatus or something. However, Yumi’s done her research and presents a copy of the drama club schedule. Touko then explains that she’s just gotten bored of acting, a pretty stupid lie since she’s skipping the drama club to practice for the school festival play. Yumi finally drags it out of her that one of her upper classmen got pissy that Touko got the lead in the drama club’s upcoming play, so Touko shoved the role back in her face and quit. Yumi’s puppy dog face manages to convince Touko to go back and give the drama club another chance.

Preparations for the school festival continue and everything seems to be ready with time to spare on the eve of the festival.

Thoughts

You’re a wizard Harry Yumi

I-I’m a what?

Wow, an actual OP, that kinda caught me off guard. Whatever happened to walking slowly?

Marimite season 4 looks to be more of the same, Sachiko’s still insane in the membrane, Yumi still wears her heart on her face, Rei’s still a dyke, Sei…we haven’t seen, but she’s probably still a dyke too. Which is all well and good, Marimite has kept the same feel with few deviations from day one, and it’s worked! I’m a little disappointed that the characters come off as static, showing no sizable growth in personality, except perhaps Yumi, Sachiko and Touko. However, the character dynamics are laid back and fun to watch, so meh.

Rape is imminent.

Oh Sachiko, you so crazy. I look forward to many more of your dere moments with Yumi. The relationship between these two has become rather predictable, anytime there’s any conflict between them, it will undoubtedly be caused by come stupid misunderstanding that could have been cleared up in seconds if either of them had just voiced their concerns instead of playing mind games on themselves. You think they would have figured that out by now, but alas. Still great fun to watch Yumi’s facial expressions though.

This, however, was a dick move. I could have done without being blatantly told the result of the Touko-Yumi-Kanako soeur triangle. The mystery is gone D:

But on the bright side, victory to the loli! Sieg heil.

Isn’t it sad Kanako ;_;

~ Shirukii ~

Aside: As usual, any summary flaws as a result of watching this raw should be noted in comments and will be promptly correctly. Also, keep an eye on notdotq, where lolikit promises to do a real post when he actually watches the episode.

Gokigenyou.

Yet another call to arms, this time by my better half with an XY chromosome (sorry lolikit, title reserved, 3 x 0.5 =/= 1) lolikit. Having blogged my fair share of absolutely nothing for the past few months and winter break not too far away, I figure it’s time to jump back on the episodic bandwagon. Unfortunately the damn thing rode so far into the distance that I have no clue what’s going on anymore. But I do know that Maria-sama ga Miteru is primed to return for its fourth installment, the third season being thinly veiled as OVAs despite really being a full length 12 episode series divided into fewer, but chunkier releases.

Maria-sama ga Miteru follows the lives of the students of Lillian School For Girls, a prestigious, and therefore pretentious all girls school. Delving further into pretentiousness, the abundant and unquestioned proliferation of lesbian undertones in this school serves a gigantic middle finger raised to the opposing gender, whose appearances are so few and far between (save a few key characters) that they may as well not exist. Within this school exists the hierarchical “rose” system wherein three seniors and their personally chosen apprentices rule the school with an iron fist, using its resources at their whim for personal glorification and amusement. Yet they are so unpretentiously pretentious about it that the student body not only tolerates them, but reveres them as gods of sorts, their mere presence sending a trickle of warm female excretion down the side of the legs of their respective fan camps.

So in not so many words: It’s pretty awesome.

The plan is to blog this raw, but something tells me that I’ll fail in this regard, all in the spirit of the show of course, walking slowly is preferred and etc.

EDIT: I’m an idiot, and it’s not 2009!

EDIT2: Oookay…so apparently it is 2009!

~ Shirukii ~