English Dub Review: Chio’s School Road “Chio in the Middle of the Night/ Apocri!”

Friends don’t let friends smell each other’s armpits.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

This week follows Chio’s late night adventures, playing video games and getting up to her midnight shenanigans. The episode begins with Chio kicking ass at a western online shooter heist game, betraying her crew to keep the money all for herself before her mom comes in to interrupt her good time. Chio manages to pretend that she was sleeping, but her mom is left suspicious. She then finishes up her game and heads to bed for real but finds that she can’t get to sleep. Chio gets caught up in her head, plagued with insomnia, almost falling asleep but waking up again at 4 AM. This places her in quite the dilemma; should she go to sleep and risk sleeping through her alarm, or should she try to stay up all night? Chio isn’t one to be defeated, so she comes up with a clever plan to sleep on the street with a bag over her head and have Manana wake her up on the way to school. The plan, as insane as it is, somewhat works, though Chio is left with a splitting headache for the day.

In the second story, Manana becomes self-conscious about her smell after seeing an invasive commercial for beauty products. This prompts her to have Chio take a look at her pits and see if she smells bad. Chio assures she smells fine, but Manana, emboldened, decides to take a whiff of Chio as well. Chio protests, but Manana puts her in a body lock and takes a good sniff. Much to her horror, she finds that Chio smells terrible. Manana then goes through her whole friendship with Chio. At first, she pities Chio for her curse, but soon she believes that her proximity to Chio as ruined her chances with boys and being popular. Eventually, after letting out some anger, Manana declares that she cares for Chio, no matter what, despite her smell. Of course, Chio is oblivious to all of this and thinks Manana is going nuts. She gives Yuki a call to help calm Manana down; Yuki arrives, and takes a whiff of Chio, announcing that Chio doesn’t smell bad at all. Turns out, its just one of Chio’s armpits that smells bad from letting her dog lick it. Oops.

Our Take:

We get an excellent showing from Chio’s School Road this week, which uses its great characters to its advantage in two stories featuring great banter, setups, and punchlines, which craft two epic struggles for both Chio and Manana.

The first story of the episode is a solo act by Chio, and shows off how well she can bring the funny when she’s all by herself. Having Chio trying to hide her late-night tendencies from her mother is exactly the kind of adolescent scheming that makes her so relatable as a character. I myself can confess to having done the exact kind of “staging” required to make it look like I’m asleep when I’m actually goofing off, so seeing that scene in an anime put a big smile on my face. Chio’s struggle with going to sleep thereafter is the odyssey that keeps the episode moving, one that no doubt we’ve all experienced. Her cute turns-of-phrase and witticisms give the story a happy little pace, but it’s her zany excuses and the eventual solution to the problem that brings it all together. Chio, being Chio, takes things way too far, and having her sleep on the street with a bag over the head was unexpected, but surprisingly brilliant, in an absurd way.

While story numero uno is all about Chio, Manana steps up to take the reins with her own brand of insanity in the second half of the episode. Her silliness is distinct from Chio’s in that its based in her own internal imagination rather than Chio’s external focus and problem-solving, but its still hilarious to watch. Manana gets stuck in her head as some people get lost in the middle of the ocean. She undergoes an epic struggle of pity, hatred, and finally acceptance of Chio’s stink, all for her internal angst to amount to nothing. This too is one of those relatable properties of Chio’s School Road’s characters that makes them so endearing. Of course, seeing Chio’s hapless reaction to the whole thing is what cinches the joke, since Chio acts as a stand-in for the audience, bearing witness to the narrative Manana constructs in her brain.

From start to finish, its chuckles all the way through on this week’s Chio’s School Road. Through smells and insomnia, both Chio and Manana are brought low to the pits of despair, with hilarious results. It’s not the best episode we’ve seen so far, but a solid time that is sure to delight and amuse.