Plot: The hell team is shocked when someone puts in a request to have Ren sent to hell! Who’s doing this, and why?
Breakdown: Hey, do you guys remember the days when the Hell Team wouldn’t interfere in the lives of humans at all? Yeah, that was a long-ass time ago. Now, they’re getting so involved with the lives of humans that they’re becoming Hell Girl targets……How did we get to this point?
If you’ve just been following along with my review, I should mention that, seemingly because Ai’s been possessing Yuzuki, who, again, does fuck all in this episode besides exist, the entire Hell Team has become full-time employees around her school. Hone Onna is a PE teacher, Ren is a…science teacher I think, Wanyuudou is a grounds keeper and Kikuri and Yamawaro just kinda wander around.
At least they seemingly had the sense to use pseudonyms, like Hone Onna goes by Sone Anna and Wanyuudou goes by Usa. However, Ren just goes by his own name for whatever reason.
This episode raises a question I never even knew had to be asked – what happens when Ai or one of her team is targeted by a client? The answer is….nothing. I didn’t expect anything to happen, but…yeah…nothing. Ai just treats it as an error.
It was kinda funny when Kikuri showed up, pretending to be Ai, and then handed the client an eyeball before walking away.
Ren actually gets an ego about all this, believing the client loved him so much that she hated him so she decided to send him to hell. However, that wasn’t the case.
The client is a girl from Yuzuki’s school named Yuuna. She targets Ren because she believed he and Hone Onna were romantically linked since they spend so much time together. Yuuna is actually in love with Hone Onna. However, she has another rival for her attention – a girl named Kira. They’re both ridiculously obsessed with Hone Onna to the point where they brag about getting band-aids from her (band-aids that have little bones on them, which I thought was a cute detail.)
Kira bullies Yuuna, and Yuuna, at first, seems like a shy sweet girl who wouldn’t hurt a fly, despite the opening scene telling us otherwise, but we soon see that her real personality is not the one she puts on display. She’s actually a very vindictive and conniving person who will do anything to get what she wants.
Yuuna soon takes advantage of Hone Onna’s brief kindness in giving her one of her special band-aids to pretend she’s covering up a hickey left by Hone Onna. Kira is enraged, and Yuuna drinks it up. She continues to pretend like she and Hone Onna are now lovers, and even bullies Kira by dropping her gym sneakers in a bucket of putrid mop water.
The client focus shifts to Kira, and she soon pulls the string.
The hell torture this time around makes a lot of sense but is also pretty weird. Ren is hosting a series of games where the prize is Hone Onna’s love. The other competitors are the rest of the Hell Team. They have a race in water while wearing like…stilts that have snowshoe-like devices on them? Yuuna trips Wanyuudou during the race to win.
Next is a daifuku game where Yuuna pushes Yamawaro and Kikuri down to get ahead.
Finally, it’s a race to the top of a rope against Ai, and she frickin’ kicks Ai off the rope, which would have killed her in any other situation, and Yuuna wins the race.
However, Hone Onna is forced to reveal herself as a skeleton to Yuuna, and Ai, who is actually injured from the kick she received before, ferries her off to hell. We also closeup to her fake hickey during the last shot of the ferry ride for reasons.
Later, we see Kira walking with her friends and….we get stupid. Kira is now completely over her crush on Hone Onna, which pretty much made that whole thing entirely pointless….but now she has a new crush……Wanyuudou!….The man who looks like he’s in his 70s….It was already enough of a stretch for these girls to think they had a chance with a woman in her 30s but, and not shaming older people here, why would a young girl have a thing for an old man?
And that’s it.
It’s a really weird season when I can’t even say something as weird and stupid as this is even in the bottom three episodes so far.
Is it dumb? Yeah. But it’s not THAT dumb. Students do have crushes on their teachers sometimes, and fighting for love/lust is one of the most basic human behaviors. I do find it dumb that Ren’s not using a fake name, and the fact that he was even targeted at all is stupid.
When Hone Onna asked her to check with the mysterious person she had a crush on to see whether she actually was romantically linked with this equally mysterious guy, she said she was scared to do so…but…scared of what? Also, we know her real personality is an evil little bitch, so why would she be scared to ask that question? I would think that she’d target Kira far above Ren because she’s also a romantic rival and she bullies her.
Speaking of the bullying, someone in the comments section was acting like Yuuna didn’t deserve to be sent to hell because she was bullied. I get where they’re coming from. Severe cases of bullying can mess a person up mentally. But first off, the bullying she got wasn’t really that bad. Coming off the heels of the episode where a guy was stripped naked, tied to a tree and had snowballs chucked at him, I think being insulted a little and pushed around once isn’t really enough to make me feel for a girl who tried to send Ren to hell and wouldn’t even verify if he and Hone Onna were an item before doing so.
Second of all, I feel like her shitty personality has little to nothing to do with her being bullied. I think she just plays the role of a timid fawn so she can get sympathy from others and no one expects her malicious behavior.
In the end, they kinda screwed all of this up. The Hell Team are not supposed to impact the events of the human world. They’re only supposed to go where the clients and targets naturally go. It was fine for them to take human form to watch them from afar or even sometimes have a brief conversation with them, but none of this would have happened had the Hell Team not decided to take jobs at the school. There’s no need for them to take jobs at the school. They can keep an eye on Yuzuki from afar and invisibly like they used to. Ren’s whole shtick is doing that – he even does it in this episode.
Besides that, we also learned that, maybe, Yamawaro has some sort of power over plants? He’s asked by Hone Onna to help her have a conversation with him, and he seemingly causes two leaves from a tree to land in Yuuna’s eyes as she’s biking, resulting in her crashing, which allows Hone Onna to converse with her…because…why not cause her to crash her bike instead of just pulling her aside and asking to talk?
All in all, kinda stupid episode, but on the higher-ish end for episodes this season. This is also another fairly failed attempt at mixing comedy with dark drama. There were one or two kinda humorous moments, but otherwise it melded together poorly.
Next episode….
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The Anime Madhouse 