English Dub Review: Tune Into The Midnight Heart “Feelings Are Impulsive; Feelings Can Escalate; Payback Achieved”
OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
While Nene continues to practice voice acting, she finds acting for theater is still escaping her, so Yamabuki tries some unorthodox methods to bring her acting ability out of her, including pretending to have an affair with Iko.
OUR TAKE
Oh hey, turns out Nene did end up getting her own episode all to herself! I mean, Iko is involved but she’s very much not the focus. If anything she’s kind of a prop, but she seems fine with it as long as she can just mess with Nene and flirt with Yamabuki at the same time. The collective crush that all of the girls have on him seems to just be an assumed thing that the audience is aware of but Yamabuki can’t because then the story would be over or something. Anyway, since Nene’s first story was about her gaining the courage to audition for a bunch of different roles, the next step there is to get her act specifically for theater, which requires both more physical presence and more projection. And this can be even harder when you have to act out a scenario that you don’t personally have any experience with. A lot of actors just try to find the emotions from a similar and more realistic event to try and apply that to the performance, but when Nene has to learn how to act like someone cheated on her, Yamabuki decides to take drastic measures, especially since he still seems to be unaware that Nene actually likes him.
Nene’s main predicament here is that her acting isn’t convincing because it doesn’t come from a real place, so while she doesn’t quite get what the play is going for in later rehearsals, her scene partner (who may have a name or not, I dunno and I’m not going to go back and check) notices that her reaction of betrayal and lividness is genuine, so that’s improvement. So yeah, that’s it for that episode and holy crap, we’re already two thirds done with the season. We’ve still got at least two more character specific episodes to go, since Iko and Shinobu haven’t gotten their own second episodes yet (actually Shinobu got two in row but you know what I mean), and then who knows what they have planned for the last two! As I have no doubt mentioned a few separate times by now, I don’t really expect we’ll make much significant progress on the mystery about who is secretly Apollo, but we should at least get some more adorable rom com antics, which is ultimately this show’s bread and butter anyway. So, see ya next week when we return to the world of V-Tubing!
