Plot: Mayama is relentlessly bullied in a group chat. She has no friends and lives a miserable life. A fellow loner named Yukawa befriends her and is seemingly the only other person in her class who doesn’t bully her. She finally has a friend….or so it seems.
Breakdown: What wonderful timing to break back into our final season of Hell Girl. Almost poetic that a show I kept returning to each Halloween season is getting its final anime review set on Halloween. I promise I didn’t plan this – it just worked out very well.
So…..Fourth Twilight….The last Hell Girl anime season. To say I was disappointed by season three is definitely an understatement, but what concerned me most of all was that, despite season three getting some good response for whatever reason, season four was considered awful by many more people. The main issue is something we’ll get to in about five more episodes, but for now let’s try to be nice. Let’s be hopeful.
This might actually be okay.
This might actually be better than most people give it credit for.
This might start off with an endless barrage of people in a group chat calling the protagonist “gasball” and making fun of her farting and getting gassy after eating potatoes……
*sigh* It’s gonna be a long frickin’ 12 episodes. Or seven episodes.
Okay, let me back up.
Mayama is being bullied in a group chat populated by her classmates that she keeps reading all day every day. They harp on practically nothing else but calling her a gasball and saying she smells of farts because she eats a lot of potatoes. The gasball thing is meant to be a double-whammy insult because it’s also calling her fat. They say she’s so filled with gas that she’s swelling up.
A few things – 1: She’s never seen or…uh…heard, farting. Never even like a flashback to a time when she farted and it was a big embarrassing moment or anything.
2: There’s never any indication that she smells even slightly bad.
3: She’s considered chubby? She doesn’t look any different from any other girl in this school.
4: She’s never shown once eating potatoes.
5: Is the title meant to be a play on the term “Silent but deadly”? Because I will burn this whole season to the ground if they made a fart pun out of the title of the first episode. Or any episode. I better just be imagining things, I swear to god.
I know that teenagers are just awful, and I know that making fun of people for things that aren’t true isn’t uncommon either, and I also know that cyberbullying is horrible, especially when you get locked in a habit of being unable to simply not read the messages, but this just seems silly. Constantly harping on her farting when it’s both untrue and juvenile would seem stupid to so many of these teenagers. Mayama both lost her father (it’s unclear if he abandoned the family or died) and is, for some reason, considered overweight – two things that most asshole kids would more likely jump on.
They later showed that this whole group started with things that actually were at least partially true about Mayama – namely that she’s too passive and apologizes too much, making her annoying.
Mayama is befriended by the flippant fellow loner, Yukawa, who spends most of her time on her phone listening to music and ignoring people. Yukawa wants to be her friend since they’re both loners. She even makes a group chat for them, and one other person named Yokota, since they’re all loners, which kinda defeats the meaning of being a loner, but whatever. It’s quite clear that Yukawa will betray Mayama at some point. It’s not even slightly subtle. She’s not likable at all. She’s uncaring and cold and acts as if ignoring each other while sitting in close proximity counts as friendship.
Earlier, Mayama had tried to contact Hell Girl to send someone to hell as revenge for her bullying, but both Ai and Kikuri knew that she didn’t truly know for certain who she wanted to send to hell. There were too many people for her to know. They decided to let her think about her final choice for a while and left her. Once Mayama befriended Yukawa, it seemed like she had an outlet for her feelings, she had a friend, she wasn’t focusing on the cyberbullying anymore, and it seemed like they may have actually lost a client….but of course it’s not that simple.
Mayama had become kinda beloved in the little three-person group chat because she was constantly telling Yukawa and Yokota about how she wants all of her classmates to die and also explained the manners in which she wanted them to die.
One day at school, her classmates all start acting very scared of her. Mayama gets to her desk and sees an open laptop with the three-person group chat up and her awful messages on display. Now everyone is both still cyberbullying her and is scared of her because of what they read in that chat.
Mayama doesn’t believe Yukawa would do such a thing, so she rushes off to another classroom to find Yokota. When she believes she’s found Yokota, she tells her who she is, but all she does is laugh in return. For some reason, this makes Yukawa believe that Yokota isn’t the one who put the laptop up and believes it has to be Yukawa.
Mayama calls on Hell Girl again, this time knowing for sure she wants to send Yukawa to hell. This time, Ai agrees and gives her the straw doll. She later meets with Yukawa in the park to get the full truth. Yukawa admits that she started the cyberbullying chat. One day, Yukawa bumped into Mayama, causing Mayama to drop her cell phone. She apologized, which pissed Yukawa off. She felt it was annoying and weak for a person to be bumped into, drop their own phone and then apologize to the person who bumped into them. She was so annoyed by this one interaction that she started a group chat to talk about how annoying Mayama is. She even started the “gasball” thing and the stuff about her farting after eating potatoes.
She admits all of that, but says that she felt bad about how far it went. She didn’t realize that people wouldn’t let up. She felt so bad about it that she befriended Mayama. However, she denies that she was the one who put the laptop on her desk. Mayama doesn’t believe her because she’s the only person who could have done it. Fed up with her lies, she pulls the string, sending Yukawa to hell.
While silly, the one highlight of this episode is the hell torture. Because, for a change, it’s actual torture. Sure, her having a giant cell phone for a head is silly, but the fact that they turned her organs into data and deleted them, literally, was horrifying.
However, as per usual following up season three, things aren’t as clear cut as they seem. Once Yukawa has been sent to hell, Mayama basically turns into a clone of her. She just constantly listens to music on her phone and ignores everyone. She also doesn’t apologize to anyone when she bumps into them. But then, plot twist, she gets a message on the three-person group chat from Yokota, whom she believed was Yukawa pretending to be someone else on a spoof account. Turns out there were two Yokotas in the other classroom, and Mayama met the wrong one. Yokota was the one who put the laptop on Mayama’s desk, but why he did that is still a mystery.
This story isn’t that bad, to be honest. Some of the aspects about it are really stupid, and bullying being a motivation is something we’ve seen many times before, but it’s never not relevant in life so it’s fine. The plot twist at the end really did get me. I knew 100% that Yukawa would turn out to be a bad person, but I didn’t see the Yokota twist coming. That was a pretty good twist.
However, it’s not one of those twists where I’m like “Ooh nooo, she sent the wrong person to hell!” because Yukawa did start the bullying, and it was for a monumentally stupid reason. Just because it got out of hand and she decided to be her friend to make up for it doesn’t matter a whole lot, especially since she wasn’t even really a good friend. She ignored her most of the time in real life, was rude to Mayama’s mother and they basically just had a “Who else you want to die?” “This person!” “Oh who else you want to die!?” go around in the three-person group chat.
I don’t even know if I can say Yokota was more in the wrong because making fun of someone for farting is one thing – having a long stream of messages about how you want all of your classmates to die and explaining the manners in which you want them to die? That’s some psycho-ass behavior. Yokota wasn’t right for putting those messages up for display, and I still don’t understand why he did it, but Mayama also wasn’t right at all for saying those things.
You may be wondering what our main storyline of the entire series is going to be. That is also introduced a bit in this episode. A girl clad in green, and I mean entirely, like her eyes and hair are even green, whom we’ll later learn is named Michiru, appears to Ai and keeps telling her what she’s doing is wrong. Maybe the world doesn’t need a Hell Girl anymore.
And that’s pretty much it for now.
Ai also has a spiffy new kimono, which is very pretty.
Also, Kikuri’s not a wind-up doll anymore….somehow….for some reason…..yay?
The art and animation for this season are definitely a little different. I can’t really determine if I like it. What stands out most is the fact that the colors are a bit more saturated than they have been in the past, and the lineart is kinda off and on with looking crisp and looking very janky. I really hated the design of Mayama’s eyes. They’re shaped terribly and look too big.
The OP and ED are pretty good. They haven’t clicked with me as much as previous seasons, but maybe they’ll grow on me more.
I’m really hoping that the season will be okay in spite of what happens from episode seven onward. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt, Fourth Twilight. Please deliver in some way.
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The Anime Madhouse 