English Dub Review: Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun “Severance”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

With Aoi’s sacrifice, the near and far shores have been fully separated, with every spirit vanishing instantly, including Hanako. Time passes, and Nene tries to move on, but Kou, Akane, and Teru have an idea for how to make everything how it was.

OUR TAKE

Okay, egg on my face, it turns out I completely misread the ending of last week’s episode. My guess was that Aoi being left in the land of the dead was kind of a fake out and that Hanako would do something to try and get her back and restore the status quo. But I guess her sacrifice was all that was needed to completely cut off all spirits from interacting with living humans, including all of the Wonders like Hanako. So, Nene has to be told her friend she went to save was dead the moment she was taken and NOW see her other friend/love interest disintegrate before her very eyes. Yeah, I can see why she’s pretty dang depressed after all of that calms down. And while this would be a pretty crushing way to end the season and possibly the series…we are only three quarters of the way through this season. Still six episodes to go in this, and unless they want to use that time to not involve the title character, things are gonna need to be done to…well, undo this and restore the status quo. Whether or not that will include getting Aoi back is unclear, but at the very least Hanako will be back for the end of his own show.

So, it looks like this is the start of a new arc where the remaining living humans are teaming up to try and find a way to bring back the spirits. For Nene and Akane, this is pretty much expected, since they both have people they want to see again. Kou is Nene’s friend and seems to like Hanako okay, so he’s naturally in as well, but it’s certainly surprising to see Teru willing to be a part of this, especially considering how against Spirits he was for so much of this series. However, he does seem to be rather aimless now that his job wrangling them is done, even pointing out that this is the first free time he’s had in ages now that he’s “unemployed”. The three guys all of have links to the spiritual side, even Akane may still be able to access his abilities as a now former Wonder, but Nene also basically got her normal lifespan back with Aoi being sacrificed. Will undoing this make that cursed fate reappear? Will she ever be in another situation where she might turn into a fish again (remember how that was a big thing in the early episodes but then they just dropped it and never undid or addressed it?)? All these answers and more in the next half a dozen episodes! Or heck, maybe it won’t and I’m completely reading this wrong again.