Episode 7 – Kageki Shoujo!!

Episode 7, “The Hanamichi and the Silver Bridge,” heralds summer vacation, and also, an intensely Ai and Sarasa-centic episode that feels like a nice break between episode 6’s fairly serious growth arc and whatever episode 8 will bring. And while this initially breaks epiosde 6’s linger tension… I found myself kind of excited. There’s something magical about getting a summer vacation episode in the last gasps of summer: it’s like the stars aligned, in a strange, but kind of fantastic, way. Safe to say I was (and am, as I write this review) pretty stoked for this episode.

Post-OP, one thing is immediately clear: Sarasa’s mind is elsewhere and Ai’s trying to learn how to be a best friend. It’s this neat little tension because it kind of flips their roles, and actually, tugs on that episode 6 tension of Sarasa being told -incredibly bluntly- that she’s not cut out to shine at the top of Kouka. It’s nice to see the girls flipped with Ai being noticeably more energetic and a bit playful to Sarasa’s rather pensive state.

It’s clear that Sarasa is genuinely hurt: she so desperately wants to be a top star, but mimicking others isn’t a skill that plays well with kouka. Now, for kabuki, it’s essential, and the episode flat out tells us that a few minutes in. Given her experience with being steeped in kabuki as a kid, it makes a lot of sense why Sarasa mimics versus acting with her own personality and skills. The only question is will Sarasa grow out of mimicking other kouka actors, or will she ultimately flop? I’d say yes because she’s a main character, but I also think that the series -both manga and anime- will put her through a growth arc versus just giving her top stardom.

However, that’s only a snippet of this episode: what’s more interesting -and downright fascinating- is Ai, who’s really starting to come out of her shell. While I called this an Ai and Sarasa-centric episode, it really is a character study in how Ai’s trying to learn how to be close to someone who’s not her uncle. It’s hard, and understandably so: friendship means vulnerability, and Ai’s never had a safe place to be vulnerable. Her home life wasn’t safe, school wasn’t safe, her mother wasn’t safe, and her mother’s boyfriend certainly wasn’t safe. Sarasa is really the second safe place Ai’s had: third if you could her uncle and JPX, but even the latter became a situation that ultimately became unsafe. Thus, Sarasa is a kind of safe harbor, and Ai’s determined to moor there and that means learning how to be a good friend. Of course, the viewer knows that Ai is well on her way to being a good friend: in many ways, she already is, even though she makes plenty of mistakes because of her innate desire to keep distance between herself and others. It’s just up to Ai to realize that she’s already doing all the right things: friendship just takes time.

I do want to flip back to Sarasa, because we get a lot of backstory into her childhood, which makes it easy to see why Sarasa is the way she is: she’s always been exactly who she is now, down to her cheerful pigtails. She also grew up steeped in Kabuki, and is something of a natural actress. She’s at her best when she leans on her innate talent, but… it also is something that she still needs to have polished. Yet that innate skill has brought her a lot of trouble, and while Sarasa might be sweet and gregarious, she’s not dumb: it’s clear that even as a child, Sarasa understood what it meant to have an adult yelling at her because of her skills and gender. In fact, I’d hedge a bet that that’s an underpinning of why she sought out kouka: it’s easy to give a flippant reason, or even espouse that you’ll be at the top, but it’s hard to admit that you’re doing it because the kind of performance you wanted to do is blocked off to you because of your gender.

Episode 7 isn’t necessarily plot heavy. In fact, it’s really plot light, and is, like I said, a character study. It’s a good bridge to Sarasa finding her own way of acting and performing as a kouka trainee. It’s also a bridge to Ai becoming more comfortable with her friendship with Sarasa, and maybe… to her realizing that she’s doing the right things right now, and that that’s what matters.

I think that’s why this episode stood out to me so much this week. Yes, it breaks the tension (to some degree) of episode 6, but in the end, it’s a really good episode that deep dives into Sarasa and Ai in incredibly pleasant, if not somewhat tearful, ways. Like a good, 100k+ word fanfic, it gives us intimate details about why Sarasa is who she is and does what she does without ever saying she’s immature or too brash for her nature: instead, Kageki Shojo!! demonstrates, once again,l that it understands the girls who make up the cast, and is willing to treat them with care, around all the drama. The same could be said for Ai, and it’s just really, really nice. And that’s what episode 7 is, really: a very nice episode promising a stellar episode 8 when vacation (assumably) ends next week.

Rating:

Kageki Shoujo!! is currently streaming on
Funimation.

Mercedez is a JP-EN localization editor & proofreader/QA, pop culture critic, and a journalist who also writes for Anime Feminist, where she’s a staff editor, and But Why Tho?. She’s also a frequent guest on the AniFem Podcast, Chatty AF. When she’s not writing, you can find her on her Twitter or on her Instagram where she’s always up to something.