Plot: Yuzuki has accepted her role as Hell Girl, and one of her first clients is none other than Akie’s father. He wants to send Azusa Mayama to hell for sending Akie to hell – a request Yuzuki is all too happy to fulfill. However, he changes his mind later on and returns the doll to Yuzuki. Enraged with a desire for vengeance for her fallen friend, Yuzuki resolves to send Azusa to hell with or without someone pulling a string. This is obviously a direct violation of the rules of Hell Girl, but Yuzuki doesn’t care. Her blatant disregard for the rules and abuse of her power calls out the Master of Hell to exact retribution.
Breakdown:
Yeah, that pretty much encompasses my feelings on this episode as a whole.
After the disaster that was the last episode, my hopes for the finale were nonexistent. I just couldn’t see any way that they could write themselves out of this stupidity hole and make a satisfying ending. And I was right. They didn’t.
What surprised me is they didn’t even try. Not even slightly. This is depressingly lazy.
The episode starts with Akie’s dad calling Hell Girl to send Azusa to hell after she sent Akie to hell. He knew she did that because he read up on Hajime’s book and noted the curse mark on Azusa’s chest. Also, apparently all the stuff with Yuzuki did happen, but the entirety of her existence beyond her childhood was fabricated and everyone’s memories of her were erased (she asks if Akie’s father would remember her – this is my only indication that this is what happened) which seems insanely unlikely and would be a huge thing to do just coerce Yuzuki, of all people, to become Hell Girl, but whatever. Yuzuki is happy to oblige, and he even wants to face Azusa as he does it to watch her go to hell, but after he sees Azusa through the window of her home, he returns the doll and refuses Hell Girl’s services.
Yuzuki doesn’t understand, but she also doesn’t care. She just proclaims that she’s going to send Azusa to hell anyway as an act of justice for Akie. This is obviously a no-no, and Ai appears to tell her as much. Yeah, remember how Ai disappeared into Yuzuki in the last episode? And how they acted like she was fully gone this time? Well she’s back now somehow for some reason. Yuzuki still doesn’t care and uses her Hell Girl powers to blast Ai away.
Realizing what she’s doing, the Master of Hell emerges from Kikuri to go punish Yuzuki. Bear in mind, Yuzuki still hasn’t actually done anything. She’s just saying she will. When she arrives at Azusa’s house to take her to hell, the Master of Hell arrives with “Akie” (she’s not really Akie – she’s just a construct of her) to punish her for breaking the rules. Yuzuki fights back, but obviously she can’t really match up in power to the Master of Hell.
By the way, if I’m giving off the impression that Yuzuki’s in any way being interesting or cool or badass for these moments when she’s ‘mad with power’ please don’t think that. It’s horrendously boring. She has a fiery curse mark ball she shoots at people while standing still, the Master of Hell wraps her up in web…..the end. She can’t even be entertaining while she’s doing this stuff. The emotion in her voice is minimal.
Ai and the others save Yuzuki….somehow. They’re in some sort of hell dimension when this is going down, so I’d think the Master of Hell would be able to prevent them from leaving, but whatever. After showing Yuzuki her dying self in the past and weeping over her body, Ai confronts Yuzuki and asks her if she knows why Akie’s father decided to give up the contract in the end. She doesn’t. Ai shows her what Akie’s dad saw in the window – Azusa caring for her bed-ridden father (For backstory, see the review on episode 13.) He must have realized that sending Azusa to hell would mean no one would be there to care for her father, so he left her be. He knew she’d go to hell when she naturally died anyway, so he made peace with it.
Seeing this, Yuzuki collapses as well, also not having the heart to exact revenge on Azusa. However, it’s too late. The Master of Hell catches up with them, intent on punishing Yuzuki for breaking the rules, which, again, she didn’t. She said she would, but she didn’t.
Ai steps up and accepts the punishment in Yuzuki’s stead. The Master of Hell accepts this arrangement, but it, for some insane reason, means Ai will be damned to do this job FOREVER.
In the first season, Ai blatantly broke the rules of Hell Girl, using her powers to attack and manipulate Tsugumi into sending Hajime to hell, which cost her more time as Hell Girl. In the second season, she broke the rules again by returning Takuma to the living world when he had been sent to hell, but it was a test to see if she could overcome her own past tragedies and feelings of revenge to finally accept her full punishment and move on. Yuzuki just says she’s going to send someone to hell without a contract, Ai takes her punishment for her after convincing her not to send Azusa to hell……And she has to be Hell Girl forever? How is that in any way fair?
As Yuzuki is released from her role, she starts to vanish in a field of blue flowers. Before she heads off to the afterlife, Ai holds her and kisses her once more to show her her own backstory. Because apparently she can’t just show her that with her own powers like everything else. When they break apart, they smile at each other, and Ai tells her that Yuzuki is her…….Uh…..no. I’m not even going to go into a tangent about why that’s inaccurate. Just no. You barely have anything in common. No.
The last thing Yuzuki says before she vanishes is pointing out that Ai had a boyfriend (Sentarou) and that she’s kinda jealous of that……*lip smack* Kay. Wait, is she jealous that Ai had a boyfriend and she didn’t or is she jealous because she was romantically interested in Ai? Because the latter is kinda creepy given that Ai is like 12 and Yuzuki is either 16-ish or a five-year-old in a teenager’s body.
Ai’s left alone in the field of flowers and the credits roll. During the credits, we see Ai back in her normal attire getting ready for more clients. We also see Azusa’s father’s memorial marker (I had to look this up on the Hell Girl Fandom page, because there’s no name on it and I didn’t recognize the apartment building.) We cut to an airport where some dude I didn’t recognize is getting off a plane when Azusa comes out of nowhere and stabs him in the gut. The guy was apparently the drunk guy that assaulted her father and left him in such a feeble state. Since her dad died…..I….guess he felt like he could come back to Japan? Azusa’s wearing all black like she just left a memorial, and what I assume were her father’s ashes were still in the box on her table. Did he get the news of her father’s death and immediately caught the first plane back to Japan? What a psycho.
I would think it’d be even more risky to come back considering her father most likely died from complications regarding his injuries, meaning he could be up for manslaughter or at least a hefty lawsuit from Azusa. I’m not really familiar with the Japanese legal system, but I’d assume there’s something she could do.
If this was her plan….why didn’t she just hire someone to care for her father for a few days, fly out to wherever this dude ran off to, and murder him whenever? Why shift her focus to the police chief and then his daughter? You could argue that she couldn’t risk being sent to prison for the murder because she had to care for her father, but it’s pretty obvious she doesn’t care about possibly being sent to prison because in her debut episode she tried to have Akie raped and then called the chief of police, ya know, Akie’s father, to taunt him about it as it was happening.
Actually, what the hell happened with that anyway? Did Azusa get off of any charges because Akie suddenly vanished?
Anyway….Azusa suddenly vanishes.
As she disappears and the other guy falls down from his gut wound, we see….Akie’s maid. She uh….pulled the string on a straw doll….sending Azusa to hell………..Akie’s maid….Just…what? Akie’s maid cared about her enough to not only stalk Azusa after somehow finding out she was responsible for Akie’s disappearance, but also damn her own soul to hell to get vengeance for her?….And why did she wait until Azusa murdered a man? I mean, he deserved it, but this seems really weird. Also, again, I didn’t recognize Akie’s maid at all. I had to look that up in the episode synopsis too. I don’t remember Akie and her having any meaningful interactions – I barely remember her at all.
And that’s it. Ai’s Hell Girl again “forever” even though she’ll relinquish the title somehow in the next season. Yuzuki’s passed on to wherever. And I couldn’t feel more like I wasted so much time on this crap.
I honestly, truly don’t understand how this season has relatively high ratings. I mean, the stories besides Yuzuki’s are fine, for the most part – they have their ups and downs like every season, but we’ll address that in the full series review – it’s Yuzuki’s story that’s lazy, boring, poorly written garbage. But somehow I seem to be in the minority…. Yuzuki’s story and her as a character get quite a lot of praise on MAL that I really question if we all watched the same show. A few people are on the same page as me, but many people are giving this series high recommendations, with some people saying the main good point of the show was Yuzuki’s story.
Even THEM Anime Reviews liked Yuzuki with their only real complaint against her being that she was a bit of a doormat. They even state that they like her much more as a protagonist than Takuma (even though they keep misnaming him “Tamura”) which I don’t understand at all. I mean, Takuma’s story wasn’t all that great either, but I sympathized with him much more than Yuzuki, and his story had way more impact on me than Yuzuki’s. Plus, the conclusion to his story was much more satisfying for both him and Ai than whatever this is.
Yuzuki’s big finale isn’t even unique, because, as I pointed out, it’s basically just a watered down version of when Ai went mad with vengeance. However, while Ai’s breakdown was badass and frightening, Yuzuki’s was boring and stupid. It wasn’t even emotionally understandable. Ai’s backstory is so tragic and heartbreaking, and even though you can agree that she deserves the punishment that has been assigned to her, to some degree, you still feel really bad for her that she even wound up in the position she’s in. She was hated her entire life by nearly everyone. She had to leave her family and everyone she loved, besides Sentarou, to live in hiding only to be found out, murdered alongside her parents and betrayed by the one person she had left.
Yuzuki’s story is sad, but only if you also don’t find it ridiculously stupid – which I do. She didn’t deserve to be selected to be a new Hell Girl because she didn’t do anything vengeance-wise when she was alive. Being Hell Girl is meant to be a punishment, not a gift. And then they made the stupid decision to juice her up on “Look at how many people wronged you in life and how much people suck, look at all the Hell Girl victims, also Akie was a wrongful victim of Hell Girl.” before putting her kimono on and sending her on her way.
It was very obvious that she’d lose her mind to vengeance immediately, and her motivation for doing so was crap. She wasn’t even trying to get vengeance for how she and her mother were treated in life or how they died because literally no one gave an iota of caring to them. She was trying to get vengeance for a person who technically never met her…I think.
Akie’s situation is awful, and I agree she never should have been sent to hell, just as I very much agree that Azusa should have been sent to hell, but I never felt any strong emotional connection between these two. They were friends, sure, but I’d just as quickly forget she existed once she was removed from the story if they didn’t bring her back later. They should have had them be best friends as children or something instead of just her giving Yuzuki a candy in passing once. I actually felt more of a connection between Akie and Azusa during her brief stint on the show than I ever did with Akie and Yuzuki.
I stand by my statement that the show probably would have been a little more interesting if Akie was the protagonist and the next in line to be Hell Girl. The series did wind up basically centering on Akie in the end anyway, and Akie had a better personality. Maybe she could have moved away shortly before the bus accident and Yuzuki and her mother died, and she became filled with rage and vengeance when she moved back and realized her best friend and her parents had died in such a horrible manner. Then she could meet and befriend Azusa, whom she wouldn’t realize was only befriending her to get closer to her father so she could send him to hell, then she’d have Akie attacked, send her father to hell and then Akie would be consumed with vengeance that would make her break emotionally and she’d, I dunno, kill Azusa and maybe some other people.
Oh and you may be wondering what happened to Tsugumi during all of this.
She just leaves during the beginning of the episode.
Yup, just straight up leaves and doesn’t come back.
She apparently came to this town to help Yuzuki, but decided to leave when Yuzuki became the new Hell Girl because she viewed that as the end. There was no more helping her. Thanks, Tsugumi, you sure were…..pretty damn useless. I am really struggling to see how Tsugumi affected much of anything over the course of this series besides to convey exposition.
She stopped Yuzuki from going through the torii gate….for some reason. Now that we know Yuzuki’s a ghost, and Tsugumi knew this….why did she stop her from going through the torii gate? She wanted to save her from becoming a new Hell Girl. Passing on through the torii gate would be the best and fastest way to do that, would it not? Although, if I recall, that may have just been a one-way ticket to hell and she didn’t want that either.
Tsugumi had one interesting episode centered on her, but other than that she pretty much just sat around and watched stuff happen. She was almost as passive as Yuzuki. And I hate to say that because Tsugumi has so much potential to be a strong and interesting character, and I still believe she would have been the best protagonist for the third season, but she’s become so defeated over the years. What’s worse is that we never learn why she’s so defeated. Hajime gave up and died, I guess, but we never learn when or how. She’s still getting Hell Girl visions, I guess, but, again, we don’t know why or how. She felt the need to move to this town to help a ghost to prevent her from becoming Hell Girl but she barely puts in any effort, so why did she even bother showing up?
This season finale as a whole was just so boring and a complete waste of time. The first two season finales had so much more tension, drama and intrigue than this. They couldn’t even provide any decent mindless action or cool visuals.
I’m probably just going to plow through season four quickly just to get it out of the way. If this season was given fairly good reviews but four was considered awful, I can only imagine the levels of terribad I’m in for in that season, but hey at least it will supposedly close out Ai’s story for good.
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The Anime Madhouse 