English Dub Review: Kageki Shojo!!”The Two Juliets”

Overview

The first-year class learns they’ll be participating in the once-a-decade Kouka Grand Sports Festival. A spark of jealousy and deep-seated resentment tear a rift between Chika and Chiaki…



Our Take

Even while the leads have very little screentime once more, we once again shift the focus towards two other supporting characters, the Sawada Twins Chika & Chiaki. As the Former was accepted into the Kouka School while the latter was emotionally crushed and to some extent, feels left out. These two are in perfect sync and always looking out for each other, but expectations don’t completely work in their favor, leaving the others to see their ugly side and contend with their issues…

What keeps me from giving this episode a higher rating than usual is that the pacing felt too fast so it was hard to get invested. It also didn’t help that they did the usual twins conflict of becoming different people without completely adding anything new. At the very least, it was quite interesting to see the story of the two and I appreciate how a lot of each of the characters outside the leads have episodes dedicated to them which is really nice.

Overall, I think the cliche way twins are often approached or depicted in media on a sometimes stereotypical level, is that they both think/act alike. However, with this show, this was a semi-decent approach to delving into a particular subject of Individuality which is further exemplified when the twins come to the realization that as they get older, their similarities start to wane and that they’ve come to a fork in the road, where both acknowledge that they have to live separate lives as individuals and not twins.