Plot: Yuzuki is fed up with Hell Girl, but she has more important things to worry about, such as the results to her high school entrance exams. However, when she tries to check to see if her name is on the list of accepted students, she suddenly finds that no one recognizes her and the results for her exams don’t exist. Even her home has become dilapidated and condemned. Yuzuki struggles to find someone who recognizes her or proof of her existence when she’s approached by Tsugumi, who explains the truth about what’s happening and Yuzuki’s fate as Hell Girl.
Breakdown: I have been saying for many episodes now that Yuzuki’s story better be pretty damn good in order for it be worth putting this soggy paper towel at the forefront, even though I had no faith that they could deliver something THAT good.
And, well, at least so far, they haven’t.
Let’s cut to the chase, pretty much the entire series was just an illusion. Or it wasn’t…? It’s very confusing. The world that Yuzuki has been living in as a student, as a friend, as a daughter, as someone trying to stop Hell Girl…a few times anyway, does not exist. It was an illusion built by Ai to make her understand the true nature of the world and how everyone has hate in them, but Hell Correspondence acts as a beacon of hope to the people who don’t use it because they can rest assured that the most evil people will pay from their crimes in some way.
This just makes everything so confusing. Does this mean that any Hell Girl case that even slightly involved Yuzuki didn’t exist? Were all the hell candles fake? Were the people in hell fake? Even the people that Yuzuki knew in the illusion didn’t recognize her (In the real version of the world) and/or they didn’t exist at all because it really seems like this entire town is empty once Yuzuki learns the truth. Her group of remaining friends also seemingly vanished in the hallway.
Are we really “It was all a dream”ing the ENTIRE SERIES? Were we seeing illusions? Were the scenes that didn’t involve Yuzuki also illusions? Were they not, and that’s why she wasn’t really involved in much of anything over the course of the series?
If you’re thinking that maybe all of this is a big fakeout illusion within an illusion or something – it’s not.
See…
She’s dead.
And has been the entire time.
She is one of apparently several potential Hell Girl replacements that Tsugumi has seen come through over the years (That doesn’t make any sense given the fact that between the second season and now, Ai has supposed to have been gone even to her associates. Although maybe they were coming through without Ai and they brought in Ai to help secure a replacement?) However, the others have hung on and lived between worlds, never being able to pass on and living in torment in the living world, and she was trying to tell Yuzuki that her fate as Hell Girl was preferable to the alternative.
Tsugumi has completely given up on the hope of ever getting rid of Hell Correspondence, which, again, is weird because she should have lived in a Hell Correspondence free world up until the past year or so. Her father lived with a hope and passion for that dream for years, but eventually he grew tired and gave up (it’s continuously implied that he died, but they still never outright say it.) Tsugumi gave up after years and years of her powers in seeing Hell Girl visions. They taught her that Hell Correspondence was necessary and fate is something you can’t fight. She needs to live alongside with Hell Girl and not deny her.
Yuzuki refuses to give up and tells Tsugumi that she doesn’t think she’s given up either or else she wouldn’t have stopped her from passing through that torii during the festival. She doesn’t know what will happen if she passes through it, but Tsugumi knows, and she’s still vehemently trying to get her to not pass through.
Tsugumi agrees and says maybe a small part of her does still believe, which is when she decides to tell Yuzuki the big death secret as long as she agrees to accept the truth and not fight it.
Yuzuki, however, refuses to believe and runs to her house in a panic only to find her skeletal remains on the floor of her room clutching her teddy bear and the Hell Team confronting her.
So….are the remains also an illusion or did no one think to look in this apartment for however many years? There’s just a dead child on the floor. How did no one notice this?
So far, I am less than impressed by this being Yuzuki’s big revelation. At best, it’s uninspired, and at worst you literally just told me to my face that I wasted around 12 hours of my life on stuff that didn’t happen, maybe, I think, possibly? Being an illusion or a dream doesn’t take the full value of an story experience away, the good stories that were told are still good, but it does damage it quite a bit.
At this point, all I can hope for is that Yuzuki’s full backstory will be worth a few more points, because, so far, it’s pretty lame and not worth the price of admission. So Yuzuki’s dead. It just means she somehow managed to be even more lifeless than she has been when I thought she was alive.
I’m also a little bummed that this episode had no case in it. I pretty much knew that would happen because the last few episodes in any season of this show is usually relegated to main plot stuff, but when our main plot stuff is Yuzuki-centric, I’d rather have a case to keep my attention…
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The Anime Madhouse 