Plot: Maki Onda has recently started high school, and since day one she has been tormented by someone. Caterpillars have been put in her pencil box, she’s had her sleeves stapled shut, tacks put in her shoes and even had terrible words written all over nearly everything she brings to school. Maki wants to use Hell Girl’s services to send her tormentor to Hell. The problem? Since she has no idea who it is, or even if it’s just one person, she can’t decide on whose name to put into the site.
Ai and her associates follow Maki around to investigate her case. Is her tormentor lying in the shadows or is it the last person she’d ever suspect?
Breakdown: Picking up right where we left off, Ai is back to her old tricks, and today’s story is one of frustration with a downright depressing ending.
Maki has been accessing the Hell Correspondence website frequently lately, but she has yet to actually enter a name because she has no idea who is tormenting her. Every day she has something else happen to her – terrible words being written on her school books, clothes and shoes, tacks put in her shoes, her sleeve being stapled shut, caterpillars put in her pencil box and other terrible pranks.
Because of this, Maki hasn’t made any friends and the entire class avoids her like the plague. Her existence is miserable day after day with the only person on her side being her teacher Ms. Kamishiro.
However, just as she’s starting to decide to live with it and try to make the best of every day, even making cookies to thank Ms. Kamishiro for her support, the class rep, Hitomi Nakase, shows her that Ms. Kamishiro has a tank filled with caterpillars and a strange mannequin dressed to look like her that was used in another prank.
Shocked that the only person she’s grown to trust has been the one torturing her this whole time, Maki calls Hell Girl, who gives her the trademark doll, only this time Hone Onna is the doll being used today.
Like I mentioned at the tail end of the first season, all of Ai’s assistants are now used as dolls throughout the series instead of just using Wanyuudou. Why she only used Wanyuudou to begin with, I don’t know, but I like the variety. Plus, Hone Onna’s voice saying ‘Your grievance shall be avenged’ is great.
The one mystery left is simply ‘why?’ Why would Ms. Kamishiro be doing this at all, let alone target Maki. The answer? She has no idea. She’s just a crazy person conducting ‘experiments’ and Maki was the randomly chosen target. She even pins her to the ground and burns her with acid, threatening to burn her all over, possibly even kill her, if she doesn’t agree to join her in tormenting someone else.
She knocks the bottle away, burning Ms. Kamishiro’s face in the process and pulls the thread.
The hell torture today is kinda interesting, but the aim is to mix chemicals together to make carbon dioxide while Ms. Kamishiro is trapped in a giant beaker, suffocating her, but they don’t let much of the suffocation happen, so we pretty much take their word on her suffering.
Ai has a new kimono that she got because…It’s season two? I dunno. It’s pretty, though. And thus Ms. Kamishiro is sent to hell.
Sadly, poor Maki has to accept her fate of going to hell when she dies, but again she tries to make the most of it and even makes a new friend in Hitomi.
…But there’s a snag. Maki uses Hitomi’s stapler and realizes that she’s the one who stapled her sleeve shut, meaning…I don’t quite know. Either she took advantage of Maki being constantly tormented in order to pull some pranks herself or she was in cahoots with Kamishiro. Either way, Maki’s down her only friend and she damned her soul to hell to only be rid of half of the problem. There’s no evidence Hitomi did anything worse than the stapler thing, but who knows what else she did?
Poor girl. She doesn’t even seem like she has parents to comfort her throughout all this. It’s terribly depressing. The fact that the culprit literally has a ‘I don’t have a real motive, I’m just a psycho’ backstory is more than enough to want her dead, but the fact that this innocent girl had to go through all this for absolutely no reason and wound up with nothing in the end is just sad.
Also, we get a brief glimpse into Kikuri, the bane of Hell Girl. She only exists to be annoying. Not kidding. She has no real backstory or purpose besides being a different pseudo-vessel for the Master of Hell, and that never matters too much. He could’ve and should’ve just stayed in the damn spider. Why is he taking time and energy out to possess this human irritant?
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The Anime Madhouse 