Servant x Service Episode 8 | TFP Review
GingaDaiuchuu: The character arc you never thought you’d see Hasebe receive!
After hitting on her so much and getting so many unprecedented and fantastic reactions, he’s really in love for the first time. And that means he can’t do everything perfect without trying; matter of fact, he’s screwing up quite a bit, and gets rather nervous when finally cashing in his Lucy Points for date, although he’s still very skilled at manipulating Chihaya to get her out of the way and even get Lucy in a cute costume out of the deal.
bctaris: Loved that. You’re right, it’s all setting up an arc for Hasebe you wouldn’t have expected, and in fact most of this episode was, in its way, fairly dramatic as it lead to Hasebe–and Lucy–to being a little more up front about things. But that neutralizing move on Chihaya was perfect, made all the better by her thinking about it, realizing what may have happened, and still wanting to go through with it.
Hitsugi Amachi: That was what made the planning both so skillful and so funny: Chihaya being completely aware of her being used, and yet being 100% okay with it because it accomplishes something that she knows she wouldn’t be able to achieve on her own.
What continues to be kind of weird is Lucy’s claiming that she’s a plain girl. Granted, animation makes it extremely difficult to judge the “real” attractiveness of characters, since real people have a lot more detail and structure to their appearance than the oversimplified and abstracted form of an animated character, so we have to either take it on faith that Lucy, in reality, would be a Plain Jane, or (more likely) Lucy’s just too damaged by her name trauma with the result that she has consistently misinterpreted interest on the part of boys since high school, and also cannot understand how Hasabe would be genuinely smitten with her.
