neko's thinkbox

Phew. After numerous delays due to procrastination and fatigue, I finally finished the translation for episode 08. Finally, an episode about Alice and Athena!

!! Spoiler Alert !! This review is obviously spoiler heavy. Don’t read further if you don’t want to be spoilt. Don’t say afterwards that I didn’t warn you! ^^

Episode Summary

I has bread!

In a nutshell, Alice invited Athena to a picnic and hit all kinds of preparations for that event. However, as she and President Maa went to take a bath, Athena came home and immediately went to bed, so Alice couldn’t tell Athena about her plans. In the morning, Athena went to work in the next morning as usual, which was a huge disappointment for Alice who was looking forward to it. At noon, Athena returns and proposes to still go to the picnic, but Alice becomes tsun and rejects Athena. And as Athena wants to go after Alice, she slips on a banana peel and crashes on the ground. As she wakes up… she cannot remember Alice anymore. She lost her memory!

Worried, Alice calls Akari and Alicia. Athena can’t seem to remember any of both anymore, but she does remember President Aria. And soon she recognizes Alicia as well. Then, throughout the day, Alice tries to help Athena recover her memory, but her efforts are not properly rewarded: Athena gradually remembers President Maa, then Akari, but not Alice herself. In the end, as Alice is on the verge of despair, Athena admits that her loss of memory was only a pretense to know Alice’s true feelings about her. Medetashi medetashi.

Neko’s Thinkbox (It’s been a while… missed it?)

Hohe? – Ara ara!

It was a pretty enjoyable and funny episode insofar as it so seldom to see Athena and Alice together. There were plenty of episodes in the past about Akari and Alicia, or about Aika and Akira – but, to my remembrance, there was only one episode where at least Alice was shown alone with Athena. Are those two characters that boring?

This episode showed how childish Alice actually is despite her usual arrogant behavior. She herself says in the beginning that Athena was busy during spring, and that it seemed that Athena had a day off. However, she prepared everything by herself. Sure, she was expecting Athena to come home early to ask her about it, but she missed her as she was taking a bath. And in the morning, Athena left early for work. Alice totally took it for granted that Athena would read her letter – what did she expect, Athena would suddenly cancel her job to go on a unplanned picnic? Of course Athena didn’t.

Alice’s reaction to Athena’s early homecoming felt pretty familiar, however. It reminds me of a parent-child relationship, where in this case the daughter expects her mother to always be there for her. The child, disappointed, gets angry and lets the steam out on her mother, who hurried home soon after her hard work. Sometimes, the daughter realizes that her mother is not to blame at all – it’s her own selfishness that took all the things for granted. Sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it? Perhaps not everyone, but at least I can relate to that pretty well, since I had a few arguments like that with my parents as well in my childhood.

DEKKAI angry mode!

Basically, it’s just the lack of communication that causes these kind of misunderstandings. And in this case, Athena tricks Alice in turn, which honestly speaking I would never have expected of Athena. I guess she’s not just as spaced out and clumsy as she is always shown to be. Sadly, I would still want to see more of Athena-chan, like, her habits, or her childhood, or her apprenticeship… Why! She’s one of the Three Water Fairies too! Instead, she’s always been inferior to Akira and Alicia, and treated as a minor character. MEH! Hope she can kick the other’s ass someday.
Hey, she actually found the best way to make Alice cry!!! That’s awesome isn’t it?! The only person I’d want to see cry now is Alicia xD

The preview to the next episode sure is intriguing me. “Congratulations on your graduation!”, Akari says. Graduation? Who? The image shows Alice. And Alice says she will go to have a picnic before. So… there are now two possibilities. The first would be, Alice finally graduated at school. I have always been wondering why, out of the three juniors, Alice was the only one to still go to school… Anyway, she would graduate and finish school. Second possibility, she will be promoted to Single…. I would like the former option, to preserve the status quo. But since the series is about to end (I can’t stop thinking about it, DAMN IT), I would believe it to be the latter. Also, an image showing the windmills of the Hill of Hope (where Akari also got promoted to a Single), backs up this theory… ARGH NO, I DO NOT WANT AN END! *denial mode on*

Even Alice is sad…