English Dub Review: Insomniacs After School “The Elder Sister Star -Spica of Virgo-“

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Ganta stays at Isaki’s place to get ready to take some night pictures and meets her older sister Haya.

OUR TAKE

We continue to slowly orbit closer towards the season finale, and while we’re not exactly getting a quicker pace or much in the way of a more compelling plot, we are getting a little bit more in terms of Ganta and Isaki’s slowly flowering relationship. And nothing says developing a relationship like meeting the family! Or just the sister, I guess. Haya is not exactly the most complex character but she works well enough to show what Isaki’s home life is like. We’ve seen Ganta’s home life with his dad and we also get some explanation about his mom’s absence…mainly that she just up and left in the middle of the night when he was a kid, which is gonna fuck ANY kid up, plain and simple. No clue if this has something to do with his insomnia but it wouldn’t surprise me if it had an impact. And yeah, this is not exactly the most interesting or compelling set up but this show has continued to just not be up my alley. It’s easy and breezy which is nice every once in awhile but I need some variance in tempo. Or maybe those aren’t actually the problem and I’m attaching undue resentment because it’s kind of hard to come up with four hundred words to say about it every week, even when it’s two episodes worth of plot.

Luckily we just have a few more weeks of that to go, but in the meantime, the really important bit of the episode is Ganta’s brief chat with Haya, which reveals as much about her as it does about him. For Ganta, it shows that he isn’t jumping the gun regarding whether or not Isaki LIKES him likes him, instead doing the same thing I and many other awkward shy nerd boys have done when any girl tries to be flirty or deliberately affectionate: assume they’re just being nice and think nothing else of it. Honestly, that’s probably a good policy to go by as opposed to the opposite, which is assuming everyone even remotely nice to you is flirting. But in this case, it’s clear that there’s definitely something between them that just hasn’t fully taken off yet. As for Haya, we see that even though she fights with and bugs the hell out of her sister a whole lot, she ultimately does care and wants what’s best for her, so that’s nice. Anyway, just three left!