English Dub Review: Conception “Will You Have My Child BlehBleh!”

Now is the dawning of the Age of Stockholm Syndrome!

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

The next girl on the docket is the Maiden of Aquarius, Collette, a determined little bread baker who even Mana makes very clear is too young for this shit. Itsuki, still having a soul, is hesitant but we can’t just end the show here, can we?

…can we?

Unfortunately, we cannot, so Itsuki goes to help her out at her grandfather’s bakery. Though it seems she’s at least smart enough to tell where this whole thing is headed for the two of them, but Itsuki says that he won’t worry about making a Star Child until it’s “the distant future, once they’ve gotten to know each other.” Spoilers: they end up doing the deed NEXT episode, which I suppose would seem like the distant future for Itsuki’s crotch. For now, though, it’s time to get baked.

But things aren’t all well, as no one goes the bakery nowadays because a rival company is taking all of their business. That company is owned by the family of Femiruna, the Maiden of Leo, so Itsuki tries going over to her in order to reach some sort of agreement. During the not-so-good negotiations, Femiruna trips and hits her head on a table. Mana sees only one solution to this problem…

…and that is to kidnap Femiruna, imprison her Saw-style within the bakery for DAYS, then have Itsuki wear a bag over his face when he comes to feed her bread so that maybe she’ll be so moved by Itsuki’s sincerity that she’ll “open up” to him. As it turns out, Mana is absolutely correct, because that’s exactly what’s happens. Though in between that, she starved herself because she was scared something weird was in the food, so now Itsuki has to health back to health, and she grows to love him because he seems to genuinely care for her and not her money…even though that care involved kidnapping her and keeping her in a cold cellar against her will. Japan, everybody! But whatever, another Star Child down, four to go.

Also, Collette’s ailing grandfather shows up to give her his special recipes so she can compete in the school festival!

Also also, glasses guy is reading lots of books while looking concerned.

OUR TAKE

Well thank god we avoided crossing the line into Chris Hansen territory…and stumbled over into arguably even worse stuff. Yes, our brief stint in the less shitty parts of this series have come to an abrupt end as we see what backwards and insane limbo dances we must make in order to even remotely understand the mindset of the people who made this show. Where before we had growing moments of real development in the interactions between Itsuki and his future conquests, here we toss that aside and do Olympic Medal Winning mental gymnastics to reach the conclusion that you should kidnap the daughter of the company that is trying to buy out your friend’s bakery and force her to eat your friend’s bread in order to keep them from outright having you arrested and having the bakery forcibly bought after your friend is forced to sell it for legal fees trying to get your dumb ass out of prison.

As you can probably tell if you’ve bothered to read these reviews this far, I really haven’t cared for what this series is about, what it was made for, or anything it represents, and we have a prime example of that right here. It can’t even keep its plots straight anymore, since the focus of this episode was squarely on Collette’s bakery, but then took a huge left turn into dealing with Femiruna. I guess next week will deal with Collette more since Eps 6 and 7 are kind of a pair like 4 and 5 were, but I’m already barely hanging on to some comprehension of what’s going on, so I’d appreciate if the show didn’t make it even harder for me.

I really don’t need to state my objections to the fact that we have young girls among the maidens again, do I? I think that’s self-explanatory at this point. Trying to pull any significant themes or meaning from any of this is hard enough without having to seriously wonder about the fate of my immortal soul once the Season Review is done with. And lucky me, next week has two lolis for the price of one bullet in my head!

See ya next time!~