Never ask your friends to help you out in finishing your manga before a deadline. Never. Ever.
What They Say:
Mio has enlisted her friends to help her finish her manga. The material proves to be to risqué for Nano, Yukko doesn’t want to screw up, and Mai is bored.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The more we get to know the characters, the more varied and interesting their lives are in general. Take Mio for example, who leads off this episode by having her friends come over and help her work on the manga that she’s using for competition. It definitely fits her personality to be so into manga and the type that she’s doing, but having everyone else get involved is even more comical. Yukko in particular is priceless from the start when she stabs her finger and they make it so epic in her mind that the pain runs through all the planets of the solar system. Mai’s not much help either as she changes the whole thing into a much darker and scarier work with what she adds to the artwork. And poor Nano can’t handle the content at all and offers to be the one to go out and get supplies and things so she doesn’t have to be near works that frighten her.
There’s a lot of very good, specific comedy tied to this arc which runs for a lot of this episode as everyone brings different things to the game. Mai has her own interests that she starts adding to all of it which doesn’t fit the book she’s working on at all while Yukko has spilled the ink and caused a massive problem, leading to her frantically trying to fix it without Mio noticing. Having her trying to recreate the page with her own terrible artwork is hilariously awful. She’s so bad at it that it shouldn’t even be seen. Which is why she has Mai come to help her out in the end who in turn makes it an even more awful piece in a very different way. You have to feel bad for Yukko since she did want to just do the right thing and help, but everything keeps going wrong for her no matter what she does.
Sakamoto has some cute moments in the episode as well, starting with a bit at the beginning when the Professor was trying to scare him with a fun little getup, one that he eventually wears himself but can’t get off. The panic in his face in the opening moments is absolutely priceless. There’s also a really good character segment that has Sakamoto playing hide and seek with Nanao and the Professor in which she really gets scared that nobody will find her. These kinds of moments are usually overplayed in your usual comedies, so terribly forced, but here you’re instantly drawn to the Professor as she listens to the others and the emotions start to swell in her.
In Summary:
My Ordinary Life again proves to have a very fun episode as it covers a lot of material but skips a lot of the short pieces that it usually does. The first half is given over to Mio’s manga and has a return point later in the episode as well that’s a good bit of fun. Watching how Mio reacts to things as she’s pushed and pushed and pushed by Mai and Yukko is just perfect since she has such epic meltdowns over it and goes ballistic. It takes a lot to get her there, but when she does it’s over top as it needs to be. And that’s in stark contrast to Yukko who in just getting stabbed a bit with a pencil treats it as a world shattering event. The relationship of these girls continues to be a whole lot of fun and adding in the others through various connections only makes it more fun. Between this and the material with Sakamoto, this is a very fun episode.
Grade: B+
Simulcast By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
