For the past few months I was writing about Monogatari Series: Second Season for Population GO, but now that I’ve resigned from my position as Anime Reviewer there, my weekly posts on Monogatari shall be posted here on Anime Is Dead. You can read my thoughts on episode 1–13 at Population GO.
I laughed throughout that entire sequence of Sengoku’s outburst. It came so suddenly and out of nowhere, and sheer rawness of Sengoku’s rage was hilarious. It was truly a beautiful climax for these past three episodes of Otarimonogatari; after a couple episodes of nothing but other characters pointing out to Sengoku everything that’s wrong with her, all that stress has built up and finally given an outlet to release.
The snake apparition took down the barriers of anxiety that usually kept Sengoku from really acting on anything and gave her the confidence to express her rage and contempt with the world in the most raw and intense way she could. And she technically does say everything that she’s needed to say all along, from asking the teacher to back off and stop shoving responsibility onto herself, to going up to her classmates and shouting at them to stop whining and face reality. The only problem is the snake apparition also seemed to have taken down barriers of restraint, causing Sengoku to literally just shout and kick doors down to really get her point across. Hilarity ensues.
Last week Shinobu pointed out how “privileged” Sengoku is and how bad it is that she victimizes herself, and now in the first half of the episode Tsuhiki explains to Sengoku how futile and pointless her crush on Araragi is. She’s had a crush on him for six years, but since she never actually does anything to pursue that relationship (aside from that one scene in Nisemonogatari, but like I’ve said before Nise’s canonicity is weird,) it’s really nothing but a target of admiration.
Which isn’t really too weird considering that Sengoku is just a middle schooler—middleschoolers tend to have weird crushes like that. The whole thing about Araragi being more of a “target of admiration” instead of a feasibly love interest, is that’s it’s yet another way for Sengoku to distance herself from reality. Aspiring to date someone who’s older and already has a girlfriend allows Sengoku to just comfortably not do anything about it and continue along sulking and daydreaming about her crush.
Hilarious how the snakes corpse turned out to be in the form of a talisman being used as a bookmark for Araragi’s porn collection. With Araragi showing up at the end, I think I have a good idea what’s going to happen next episode.
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