What starts off as a particularly standard adventure story with a boring introduction quickly takes a turn for the dark and despicable in the latter half of Episode 1 of Akame ga Kill.
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Love Stage!! introduces the audience to Izumi Sena, a college student who dreams of becoming a manga artist in a family where entertainment is the career path of choice. Despite all of the opportunities and offers for help Izumi has received, he declines them all because his heart lay in pursuit of manga; he even joined the Manga Club at school to better his drawing.
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Set against the backdrop of second year highschool, One Week Friends follows Yuki Hase as he endeavours to befriend and then stay friends with Kaori Fujimiya. Kaori Fujimiya was a loner, withdrawn from her classmates, when Yuki Hase decided to approach her. He quickly learns that Kaori suffers from memory loss problems – her memories reset every Sunday night, making it difficult for her to make friends at all. Despite this obstacle, Yuki Hase remains determined to be Kaori’s friend and the story follows the development of their relationship from there.
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This season of Mushi-shi has been a much darker, colder take on the mushi so far, but episodes 8 through 10 do much to shake the chill off. Winter remains a prominent theme in all three, but in each episode the lessons seem to focus on ‘just because you can doesn’t mean you should’ and the innate balancing act that is nature.
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One Week Friends remains sweet, but I’ve lost interest. The memory problem that defined earlier episodes has degenerated into a circumstantial plot tool and any weight it once held is gone; Yuki Hase reduces the progress he and Kaori Fujimiya have made together to acts that he is solely responsible for, and a grudge-holding boy from the past enters the scene and conveniently resets Fujimiya’s memory from the beginning. The more this series has progressed, the less and less it’s appealed to me, unfortunately.
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The middle run of Mushi-shi’s second season takes both a darker turn and an upswing into more familiar territory. Episode five is the interesting tale of a woman who becomes tied to a mushi and must struggle for her sense of identity, but even this seems light in comparison to episode six.
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In short, episodes five through seven introduce the audience to a new core friend named Saki Yamagishi, to Fujimiya’s mother (and the story behind Fujimiya’s memory problem), and finally to Hase craving some alone time with Fujimiya and freaking out about summer vacation.
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One Week Friends started out with an interesting premise of friendship transcending short term memory loss problems, but as of episode 4, it’s beginning to feel more like a gimmick and less like an actual obstacle. It’s unfortunate because the first episode set something great up, but the subsequent episodes are building on that initial framework while at the same time turning Fujimiya’s disability into a conditional nuisance and convenient story telling device.
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With the release of episode four, Mushi-shi is now a quarter of the way through its second season and while the tone of the stories has changed, the method and pacing remains the same as the first season. The first four episodes cover darker stories, all relating to the death of a person close to the featured characters.
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One Week Friends is a bittersweet shoujo story of friendship and understanding that follows Yuki Hase as he attempts to befriend his classmate, the quiet and withdrawn Kaori Fujimiya. Fujimiya, however, isn’t so keen on entertaining friendships because she suffers from a memory problem that resets her memory every Monday, forcing her to start over each week.
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