English Dub Review: 18if “Curses Return Upon the Casters”

Alright everybody, here’s your anti-bullying PSA episode.

Spoilers Below

Courtesy: Funimation

After a week of inactivity, Haruto and Dr. Kats have a new case! This one is a slight bit disturbing, but not as bad as some in the past. Natsuki Kamikawa is an otaku. She absolutely loves this one show about an Onmyouji (exorcist). Her room is covered with memorabilia from the show. Her one issue is: bullies. Four girls in her class not only take her money and demean her in the bathroom, but write terrible insults all over her things and constantly send her horrible texts telling her to die. Everyone in her class sees this, but none of them do anything to stop it. Finally, this comes to be too much for her, and she slits her wrist in the bathroom. Next thing she knows, shes on a recreation of the sets from her favorite show, dressed as the main character. She goes around town, living the dream, exorcising angry ghosts. When she realizes that she’s all alone, it dawns on her. She committed suicide, so she must be dead. And that means that all those kids who bullied her or let her get bullied, they killed her. She refuses to forgive them, and chooses instead to curse them with everything she has.

Courtesy: Funimation

Her curses result in her entire class losing sleep because of disturbing dreams. That gets the attention of Dr. Kats. He interviews the victims and finds Natsuki is the cause. He loops Haruto in, and the two of them walk into her territory. They meet with her and confront her with the ramifications of her actions. In her lust for revenge, she began bullying those whose only sin was cowardice. She was assigning them value, just like her tormentors did to her. Haruto and Kats then begin listing off all her good qualities. This opens up her heart, and allows her to heal. Together, the three of them indulge in all her favorite geeky genres. After a thrilling battle between her giant dream robot and a massive alien invasion fleet, Haruto leaves her, confident that she will return to the real world all the better. When she does return, she proceeds to bully the bullies, except for the one who apologized.

Well, here we are in the second half of the series and… still no plot in sight. I get it. This show is deriving its structure from shows like Golden Boy. Go to a place, meet a girl, deal with the girl’s issue, girl falls in love with him, he leaves. These are all well and good, but they have to be entertaining within each episode. These aren’t bad, but they are starting to feel a bit samey-samey. There just isn’t enough going on anymore. Even as I say that, I wonder why this episode flew by so fast. It felt like a half episode and lacked content in general. This show has a great concept, but it needs an overarching story to tie it together and keep you paying attention to what’s going on. It just isn’t there. As a result, you could see this whole series and feel like nothing happened. The closest we come is the cameo we saw of Lily, but even that has little to no meaning.

I wish I could say that the art and animation are getting better. It isn’t. It isn’t getting any worse, either. There are a ton of animation errors. This seems like par for the course with this series, and it’s kinda sad. The show could be loaded with mind-blowing visuals and trippy art because of its subject matter. Instead, we get horribly animated junk that only puts effort into its art for close-ups. Voice acting, on the other hand, was not bad. The voice actors did what they could, and kept the characters relatable. Ricco Fajardo (Haruto) and J. Michael Tatum (Dr. Kats) honestly made me smile while they were having that chat with Natsuki. They felt like they were really trying to connect with the girl, and Haruto sounded like he was having fun in her dreamland. So, while the animation is still terrible, and the writing really needs to shake stuff up, at least the voice actors are putting in the work needed to keep this show going. Unfortunately, I still have to put this episode at five browbeaten bullies out of ten.

SCORE
5.0/10