English Dub Review: 18if “The Witch of Ordinariness”

You do not belong to your destiny. Your destiny belongs to you.

Spoilers Below

Mirei Saegusa was a figure skater. Now, she’s a sleeping beauty. Each night, she remembers the day she fell into her coma. It would be hard to forget. She took a hatchet to her leg. The last few nights, Haruto has been joining in on her jaunts into self-mutilation. After a bit of research, Dr. Kats tracks her down. At first, he asks Haruto if they can skip this one. Something about Mirei in the real world disturbs him. Haruto ignores him since he’s sure that Mirei was calling out to him for help. He takes the red door into her realm and finds himself on a common college campus. Though he runs into a mousy girl in glasses, he has an impossible time locating Mirei-HEY! That mousy girl IS Mirei! This is her dream. She wants to be an ordinary girl, with an ordinary life, doing ordinary things. She never had a childhood. Her entire life was training and doing commercials. She never wanted to be a pop idol. She just wanted to skate. But here, she can be away from all that… She just has no idea how. Fortunately, Haruto is a college student (hard to tell, we’ve never seen him awake). He has decided to show her the ropes of this ordinary life.

Classes, part-time job at a McDonalds, getting crushed in an overfull bus, karaoke with your study group. All along the way, Lily is watching on, she seems a bit… jealous? Impatient? Then comes the big one. A boy from their study group calls Mirei up for a date! She’s so thrilled but has no idea what to wear or how to do her makeup. All the time that she looked good as a pop star, people told her what to do. In any event, the boy thinks she looks beautiful and shows her an amazing evening. She doesn’t want it to end, so he takes her to his favorite place. A skating rink. Though she’s afraid to take to the ice again, she joins him, and her real self-breaks free. She’s home here. He vanishes into darkness, and when spotlights come on, the only thing she can see is the droves of spectators. She’s back on the competitive rink, in her skating outfit, fans begging her to return. Her dream world shatters. She realizes the truth. She can’t run away from skating. It’s her life. She has to choose it, or she’ll be running from herself forever. Her date reappears, telling her that this is the true essence of destiny. As he turns to walk away, he transforms back into Lily. When Mirei awakens, we find what it was that disturbed Dr. Kats so. She’s an old woman. She’s been in a coma for most of her life. This was his greatest fear, that his own sister would become like Mirei.

At first, I was unhappy with this episode. A girl living out the life she was denied? We did that two episodes ago, and it ended sadly. However, the irony at the end of the story was an interesting twist. She finally decided to embrace her destiny but woke up to find herself too old to engage in it anymore. There is a subtle point made there. If you run from your destiny, you’ll eventually put yourself in a spot where you’re staring at it from the outside, looking in. Your life will have been a waste. Destiny is not a thing that rules you or a plan that dictates your every step. It is a calling, uniquely suited to you. If you take up that task, you will find yourself equipped to complete it (one way or the other) and fulfilled in spirit. That is your destiny. It isn’t shackled. It’s power. To set it aside is to deny your power. And who in this episode is tied to the return to said power? That’s right. Lily. Here, she appears as Mirei’s dream boy. This is only further evidence that Lily is, in fact, Haruto’s Anima. How? Because in this episode, she acts as an Animus, the male opposite within Mirei who leads her to her true ability and destiny. Lily is, for Haruto, the link to other people’s unconscious minds, where he can help them heal. Her own playful, exploratory nature echoes his own curiosity into the story behind each Witch, wanting to help them.

So, as much as I enjoyed this episode’s story and its implications, it lagged behind a bit in its technical department. The art was fine during many of the montage shots of her figure skating, and the scene where she was about to chop off her leg (we later saw that she went into her home just before she got to chopping, no worries, folks). The rest of the show, there were errors galore. This episode must have been given to the lowest animation team on the totem pole. And the errors weren’t just on the in-betweens. It was on the key frames, too! This is kinda hard to believe, considering how much the character designs have been dumbed down from the source material. At the same time, I feel like Mirei’s voice was a crap shoot. At some points, she was relatable and had depth. At other points, she was flat and relying entirely on her whistle register to sound like a “cute anime girl”. While the story was good, the execution left to be desired, and I have to give this episode six double axles out of ten.