With Nao’s help, Arika lands a job on the castle construction site. She unwittingly touches Mashiro’s rawest nerve but saves her from another Nagi trap. With Mikoto, they enter the secret passage that Shizuru had stopped Rado from exploring and find an organ that shatters Arika’s coral gem, Mashiro’s ring, Natsuki’s wine glass etc etc., sends a big beam up into the sky to be seen by Miyu (I bet her little bird is called Alyssa) and then reveals a Mikoto-shaped spirit. Black Letter Man No.2 attacks them with his Slave but Nina uses two gems from her pendant to power up the Blue Sky Sapphire Robe FTW. By cooperating and forming a contract to survive the ordeal, Arika and Mashiro establish a warm rapport. See also: Kurogane, Random Curiosity, the usagi incidents.
Left: Big Bad Ass Weapon. Right: "Mommy, I want to go home now!"
Loved the fight scene! Arika is nowhere as graceful as Shizuru or Nao but her style suits her brash and perky personality. Though some scenes reminded me of how Cardcaptor Sakura took subtle digs at magical girl costumes and poses - Tomoyo’s loving tailoring raised the question of "Where do the costumes come from?" (in this case, handled by the nanomachines) and Tomoyo’s bugging Sakura to have a new wand routine posed the question of "Are those sentai poses really just spontaneous?"
Just as how Ep 6 got me to like both Arika and Nina, this episode confirmed my view (from Ep 3) that Mashiro is not a total brat and actually has always cared somewhat for Arika. Very nice to see how they’ve developed a much warmer relationship. I also love the way Arika casually addresses the Queen of Windbloom as "Mashiro-chan". Bit like calling the Queen of England, "Lizzie".
Warning: Being a Mashiro Minion can make you fat. See Mikoto and Sakomizu (above, after prolonged exposure). However it seems that females aren’t affected. Must be cuz of them nanomachines, no Y-chromosome or whatever that last anime science protease thing was.
Ladies of the lily role-call. Shizuru! Natsuki! (Loving glances!) Check!
Erstin! (Without Nina!) Check! Chie! (With spectacles!) Check!
Even if I didn’t read your entry, I could tell that you thought Arika was sooo kakkoi too (thanks to the 20+ screencaps of her)! Haha Yea her style wasn’t as graceful as Shizuru or Nao, but thats only because of inexperience. Nao is ranked fourth in the pearl class(I want a recount), and Shizuru is already a meister-otome. One day, Arika may even be number one when she becomes a pearl, because I can sense a fierce rivalry between her and Nina.
I’m actually a bit worried that I’m starting to find so many of the characters likeable as it’s a SUNRSE Standard Operating Procedure to get you to like the character before they are butchered or other horrible things are done to them.
Based on Mai HiME, I seriously doubt that we’ll get to the stage where the Corals move up to Pearl. In the predecessor series, events lead to the whole HiME festival system being broken. Between Nagi’s scheming and the potential revival of old super technologies, there’s a good chance that the whole Otome system might go out of the window as well.
LOL yea true! However I never started hating Natsuki when she became all vulnerable, or when Shizuru became psychotic. Natsuki was the cool and loner type, which made me dub her as my favorite character and Shizuru was the calm, problem solver type. Yes I did get weirded out when she lost control of her emotions, but she did manage to redeem herself near the end. Actually I probably liked them even more, because it shows they are human with human characteristics. Sunrise made them appear as though they were flawless individuals, but in the end they were REAL. Well maybe not Shizuru, but definitely Natsuki.
Haha well I could always hope they go up to 52+ episodes.
Be careful what you wish for, Problematic! ^_^ Afterall, by popular demand, SUNRISE gave us GSD. (-_-);; - painful memories of endlessly recycled footage and wasted new characters -