English Dub Review: Boogiepop and Others “VS Imaginator 5”

The powers start to come together.

Overview:

Masaki realizes he’s being followed, and Suema tries to see what’s wrong with Asukai.

Our Take:

A lot of people in the general comments seem to be confused by this series, but I am LOVING Boogiepop.

Suema confronts Asukai, and boy, she is really something. She is scared down to her bones the entire time, and she still manages to push through, to make her promise come true. That’s the thing, Asukai says that she has no obligation to help people she isn’t close to, and she agrees, she doesn’t. But she has a strong sense of reason and obligation even to strangers, and that’s what makes her see things through. Suema is truly the bravest character for someone that has no powers whatsoever. She’s just a normal girl with a sense of how people act, and she’s going to see this through to the end. That’s impressive.

Masaki also really goes above and beyond- he is a truly dedicated person, and also, I completely forgot that he was trained in martial arts. He’s committed to Boogiepop for sure, but now we see how he was able to get away with it for so long. He’s well adapted to physical combat and was able to fight off a group of guys twice his size. Also, he is surprisingly unshaken at the idea that Orihata was manipulating him- it is a surprise, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t care for her.

Asukai also gets rid of Spooky E, and good riddance, won’t be missing him for anything. In their confrontation though, we get an idea of what Asukai’s powers really are. We know that he trims the flowers and thorns of people’s desires to make them more flexible, but now we see that what he actually does is manipulate people’s minds. What he is seeking, as Imaginator, is to find someone with an even heart without desires, so that he can blanket all of mankind in the same feeling. If nobody has desires, nobody can feel upset or break down. Since Asukai himself can’t feel sadness, he wants to extend that to everyone. Of course, doing so would completely erase people’s personalities, as that would fundamentally change how humanity exists. It’s no wonder that Boogiepop is after Imaginator, since the power to do so would radically change human existence. Orihata seems to have something to do with that, but we’ll have to see how that turns out.