Recap: Suigintou agrees to keep Jun’s night time activities secret from Shinku, while the other Jun ponders his predicament. Shinku is then recruited as a last-minute prop in Saitou’s play.

Zigg’s Thoughts: I accidentally watched episode 8 before episode 7 and didn’t realise until I’d finished it, which is pretty much all you need to know about these two episodes. Increasingly I’m becoming bored and irritated by the lethargic pace Rozen Maiden is taking, saying lots without actually communicating anything. While I appreciate a show that takes its time to develop, here we’re just sort of going around in circles.

Episode 7 is a pretty prime example of this. A significant chunk of time is spent recapping Jun’s middle school breakdown, which is something we went into in great detail just a few episodes back. They even recycle some of the same footage! I understand it’s a key aspect of where his character is now, but please give your audience some credit. Throughout its run, and especially in the awful first episode, Rozen Maiden has seemed extremely uncomfortable with parceling out exposition, often resorting to huge, inorganic monologues where the characters tell us their motivation directly. That’s horrible storytelling and it happens again at the end of episode 7, where young Jun essentially recaps the series of events that led him to be where he is. It’s yet another example of how clumsy this ‘manga sequel’ setup is. We’ve got to devote large amounts of screentime explaining just why the characters are where they are and even after that it’s still messy and unclear.

Episode 8 is better, but there’s still too much flab on too little story. The Jun/Saitou dance is just becoming a little bit wearying now. They’re clearly attracted to each other and while I can believe that a socially-awkward shut-in might not have the balls to ask a girl out, there’s little to be gained from stringing this along too much further. Jerk manager threatening Jun is just a routine that’s happened almost every episode at this point and purely an excuse to give Saitou another chance to be greatful towards him. There’s still some residual cute to be had here but I do wish they’d just hurry up already.

One of my main issues remains the alarming stupidity of our protagonist. Jun has been told that Kirakishou is a soul in search of a vessel, Shinku warned him that building the doll was dangerous, and the ‘other Jun’ is clearly super suspicious and not the same person, yet he still persists with his efforts. Why? There’s no reasonable motivation at this point – his social anxiety is receding, he has two bratty dolls to talk to and is sort-of-dating a cute girl. He seems, if not mentally stable, at least not drowning in despair. It’s odd.

Really, the problem with both of these episodes is that NOTHING HAPPENS. There’s attempts to develop the characters (Jun’s present to Shinku is a nice, if slightly inexplicable, scene) but really the plot goes nowhere. I mean, episode 8 even uses a bad musical montage, surely the ultimate sign of filling space. Now we’re closer to the end than the beginning, I expect things to happen fast, or else this will soon become unbearable.

Random Observations

• Wonderful to see Kanaria again. Bad that it’s for like two lines. Also  if a character has a verbal tic it makes sense to translate it the same way every time, maybe?
• Not so wonderful to see the return of the weird icky pseudo-romance between Shinku and Jun.
• Lovely to hear Nori again, even if it was just over the phone.
• I do rather like the weird chalkboard outlines used in the flashbacks, but otherwise these were some dull looking episodes.
• Laplace’s Demon continues to be an enigmatic wild card. There’s a danger he could be used as a deus ex machina but it’s worth noting the original series avoided this.