Plot: Yuriko and her father have been doing nothing but relentlessly campaigning to overthrow the current administration, whom they blame for all of the country’s hardships. They spend all day and night campaigning for the upcoming election for Prime Minister, neglecting school, work and everything around the house, leaving everything up to Yuriko’s mother, Harumi.
Their lives are falling apart, and the blame always rests with the current Prime Minister. If he was gone, their lives would get much better. Or would they?
Breakdown: I hate politics. Let’s just leave that there.
Instead of trying to make a political message here like many other shows would try to do, this one really doesn’t. It’s moreso exploring how it’s not healthy to allow yourself to be consumed with hatred for the government to the point where you start destroying your own family for ‘the cause.’
It’s great to be involved in politics, it’s awesome to actively try to make a change for the better, but when it gets to the point where you’re skipping school, not even trying to make a living for your family and dumping the finances on one person in your family who is literally making themselves ill trying to keep up, it’s time to take a step back.
Yes, the government can and commonly is the cause of many problems, but a lot of the time the best thing to do is band together and work hard as a team to help everyone through it. Send out your political support however you can, but never forget that the people around you are the most important things and they have the real power to make things better.
It’s also not right to have the mindset of ‘the government is to blame for literally everything.’ I can’t tell you how tired I am of seeing something happen that is completely unrelated to the government, whether it’s a good or bad thing, only to see someone turn it into something political.
Yuriko’s father is a whole new level, though. He doesn’t just blame the government for everything bad that befalls him – he blames his family when he can’t find a reason to blame the government. His wife ends up being hospitalized because she’s overworked herself trying to keep themselves from drowning in debt, and not only does he not care, he claims he wishes she had died instead.
But we’re not even done. Yuriko’s father starts a fight at an important speech for their candidate, which means they need to do damage control. The campaign manager cooks up a scheme with him to have Yuriko attacked in a dark street in order to make a statement about the fact that they requested more lighting on that street, but were denied. He hopes this will make people forget about the fight at the rally and make them look better.
As if that’s not bad enough, not only does he agree to do this to his daughter, because he blames her for the campaign incident happening in the first place as she was with Harumi in the hospital, he specifically asks for them to do their worst in order to teach her a lesson about the real world. That lesson, by the way, is rape.
Luckily, Wanyuudou interferes before they can actually do anything, but still. Later, her father chews out the attackers for failing in their mission, so yay.
A few interesting aspects of Hell Link pop up today. We get error messages upon entry, for some reason. The site has never really been all too picky about the target, as long as it’s someone you have a deep grudge against, it’s usually fine. Today, however, despite Yuriko’s deep hatred for the current prime minister, entering his name doesn’t work. She gets an error message pop up whenever she tries.
Later, when she tries to input her father’s name, she also gets an error because someone already has a contract out on him. I checked through some previous episodes and didn’t find another example of this, but I could’ve sworn it was possible for two people to have contracts out on the same person but whoever pulls the string first….is ‘wins’ the right word there?
It was a pretty decent twist that the father was the target. I got to about the commercial break thinking it would be the campaign manager or the prime minister, but the instant I realized Hone Onna hadn’t shown up all episode and Harumi was hiding something in her drawer, the internal ‘dun dun dunnnn’ went off.
I’m also glad this one had a relatively happy ending. No Hell Girl ending is truly happy because usually someone innocent is also damned to hell (and this is no exception) but, still.
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The Anime Madhouse 