#sissel thinks he's hilarious but it's not like anyone can see his jokes. his talent is being WASTED.

[cairafea]

he makes this joke every time.

[recentanimenews]

Wave, Listen to Me! – 08 – The Culture is Maturing

In a heartwarming cold open, Minare rants about how, like mankind throughout history with nature, she’s “lived her life selfishly without thinking about the suffering of others”, with Mizuho being her latest victim (along with a Coelocanth Nakahara and a Dodo Takarada).

But Mizuho speaks up, refusing to be the victim. She’s been told all her life what a nice, helpful, proper girl she is, but it’s not all she is, and it can blind those who think that’s all she is to her actual weaknesses. To Mizuho, Minare isn’t a burden, but a very necessary inspiration.

The two women complement each other almost perfectly, leading me to wish Minare was less jokey about her romantic designs toward her. While Mizuho’s disinterest in one man shouldn’t be seen as a disinterest in all men, so far I don’t see a life partner better for Minare than Mizuho, and vice versa!

And now, back to the studio. We’re back on the night the show opened with: the bear attack segment. Earlier that night, with no ideas of her own Minare is saddled with a “phone conversation with a family member” segment, something which she’s not particularly motivated to do.

The resulting call, however, is hilarious, with her jokester of a dad coming up with increasingly ridiculous origins of her unusual name “Minare”—first because it jumped out at him on the cover of a dirty mag, and second because he combined the first syllable of the names of the three women he was fooling around with before she was born.

When Takarada unexpectedly shows up at Voyager with Makie’s psycho controlling brother, things look primed to turn very unfunny indeed. But when the brother starts ordering Makie around, she manages to stand up to him, and Nakahara even backs her up…though a bit too forcefully, leading to him getting lifted up by his throat and nearly strangled!

We later learn that the brother has a condition in which he enters a kind of ultraviolent fugue state when he senses his sister is in danger. This certainly makes him more of a sympathetic figure but Nakahara is clearly right that he really should seek professional help for it. It’s a miracle he’s never killed anyone during these “fits”!

The bro’s mind is set at ease (or at least his anxiety de-escalated) after a chat on the phone with Nakahara’s sister Maiko about how much help Makie’s been with the baby. Makie returns home to the Nakaharas and I earnestly hope she’s out of danger and the brother gets help soon, but who knows.

Makie may be more naive than the average person due to her extended isolation, but she still knows what she wants, and it doesn’t involve becoming a housewife or jumping between safe houses. It’s even hinted at that her plans for her life may be more ambitious than her hosts. The fact she’s never been assertive enough with her brother doesn’t preclude the fact that she could be if she tried, and when it counts.

Later that night, Minare performs the Bear Attack show, reading at least in part from a hastily but well-written script from Kureko that made it easier for her to do what she does best in the broadcast booth. After the broadcast she makes sure to thank Kureko, who surprises her by saying it’s a “parting gift”; he’s moving on to other things.

Matou hints that those other things involve something called the “Ranzo Arakawa Prize” before we slip into a sepia-toned flashback of a much younger Matou (note the eyebrows) meeting his comedy idol, Sissel Komei. Only Sissels speaks, in what I’m assuming is the Ainu language.

Matou sits all but entranced as she talks about how the Ainu were great tellers of dirty jokes (owing to all the time they had sheltering from the cold)  and the Monty Python style of comedy that’s more about embarrassing yourself than putting others down. She then tells him the origin of her name: Mina re means “to make laugh”.

Assuming again that this was Sissel (likely a stage name), could it be that Matou’s new talent has the same name as his idol? If that’s the case, I can understand how he’d feel like finding her in that bar was akin to an act of providence and destiny.

We’re also reminded that Minare ended her bear show by promising to murder Mitsuo…who texts her later that night asking if she wants to meet up. All I know about Mitsuo is that Minare claims he stole her money, and that he found another woman after Minare relatively quickly. Suffice it to say I’m eager to learn more about him!

On the whole, this episode not quite as compelling as other recent outings, due in large part to bouncing awkwardly between the A-(Minare) and B-(Makie) plots, not to mention the fast-forwarding of the bear attack, which while practically necessary undermined the episode’s natural pace. Still, it was great to see Makie stand up to her crazy bro, and finally “meeting” Sissel was uniquely captivating. So an “8” it is!

By: sesameacrylic