Kaguya-Sama: Love is War S1E9: “Long Title/Seriously Long-Ass Title/Holy Fuck Why Is This Episode Title So Long?”

At long last, another Kaguya-Sama! I really enjoyed the pilot of this series when I reviewed it last year, so I'm excited to have several more episodes coming up in queue. Jumping straight from there to episode nine shouldn't be too jarring, I don't think, as this doesn't really seem like a plot-heavy show. So, in we go!


Man, I forgot how smooth this show's OP is. Not just musically (though it very much is smooth musically, in large part thanks to Masayuki's vocals), but also visually.

It's got the Bond-esque aspect for extra silliness, the character poses that give them so much personality, and also a sort of subtle heavier undertone to the composition, like an almost wistful aftertaste. Like a reminder to the viewer that this isn't just a show about comically awful prep schoolers trying to emotionally beat each other into submission, but also a commentary on how much of society is fundamentally anti-youth and anti-happiness.

Also, it's just really pretty to look at.

The episode begins with a fierce thunderstorm raging over the city, and Chika going mad with fear that storm lord Raijin will steal her bellybutton.

I looked this up, and apparently this is an actual thing, sort of. There's a children's superstition in Japan that the thunder god craves children's belly buttons, and so they need to hide them when there's a storm overhead. From what a cursory googling tells me though, it's sort of like believing in the tooth fairy; not something you'd expect to persist after a kid has more than one digit in their age. So, Chika is either holding onto this way passed the appropriate age, or she's doing a bit. Granted, that question applies to almost everything that Chika says and does, so.

While Kaguya tries to get Chika to calm the fuck down and stop tearing up the office in her panic to escape Raijin's hunger, Miyuki gets a text message from home that makes him start freaking out a little bit as well. Due to flooding, the train that he takes to get home won't be running. His family doesn't own a car, and getting a cab in these conditions with his budget isn't an option, so he's kind of stranded here at school.

Kaguya, naturally, sees an opening.

That might be exploitable. Make him indebted, put him in his place, and also create an intimate situation outside of school grounds.

...or maybe not. On second thoughts, Kaguya realizes that asking a boy to go for a drive with you - even in a chauffeured limo where they aren't technically alone - isn't an innocuous setup at all. In fact, it's a totally blatant overture. "Oh yes, please come on a nice, private drive with me through the rain while we lean over the radiator and listen to music together." Not subtle at all. Borderline indecent. Outright wanton. She might as well just wiggle up to him with half-lowered eyelids and ask him why he wants to go home so much when her family's private megacorp fuckpalace is just a few blocks away.

As she furiously thinks about all this, her hands - with which she had been grudgingly covering Chika's ears to drown out the thunder while Chika defends her belly button - start to tighten, squeezing around Chika's head like a pair of very confused constrictor snakes.

What makes this even harder for Kaguya is that the alternative is leaving Miyuki stranded at school. The way this misgiving is framed makes it seem like she might actually have genuine human concern and empathy for him. Maybe.

Then, she realizes that if she can just get him to ask her for the ride home, that would solve everything. Perfect! That's what she'll do!

Yep. Heeeeere we go again.

Chika manages to snap out of her terrified babbling long enough to notice that Miyuki needs a ride, and says that the three of them could take a cab together. She always cabs home herself (okay, that answers another of my questions regarding Chika's socioeconomic position. She's much closer to Kaguya's end of the scholarship to made of money spectrum), and sharing the ride with the other two could be a fun diversion from this miserable weather. Kaguya interrupts her and warns that the lightning is picking up again, which she uses as a justification to clamp her hands back over Chika's ears.

...actually, it's more than just that. She also covers her EYES as well, to protect her from having to see the lightning. And then frog-marches her out of the building while her own hands are clamped over her belly button to get her "safely" to her cab.

You know, if Kaguya wasn't reflexively opposed to anything outside of her control (and, probably, to anything Chika proposes just due to developed reflexes), she might have realized that sharing a cab home would actually work pretty well for her. Chika coming with them would make it less intimate and less suggestive, and it would still give them some friendly-ish alone-ish time away from school. Especially if she manages to concoct a reason for the driver to drop Chika off first. But no, that wouldn't be a controlled enough environment for Kaguya.

So, she bodily throws Chika into her cab and then returns to the office, in which she and Miyuki are now alone.

Just watch, it's going to turn out that Chika forgot something and needs to run back in in fifteen minutes lol.

So, Kaguya starts scheming on how to get him to ask her for a ride. Meanwhile, Miyuki is worrying over whether he'll be able to make it back to his neighborhood in time for work. Holy shit, this kid is holding down a part-time job on top of being a top student AND council president of this ultracompetitive, ultraritualized dystopia of a high school? When does he sleep?

Well, when she hears him worrying about making his shift, Kaguya is sympathetic. And by "sympathetic," I mean that a fiendish grin splits her face and she smugly tells him that missing work due to a mere typhoon would be a disgrace to Japan's workforce and a certain disqualifier for him from prospective entry into high society in the future.

...

I remember some readers telling me I was reading too much social commentary into this series the last time I looked at it.

Five minutes into my second episode, and here's a corporate princess nonchalantly taunting a working class boy about how only a lazy, degenerate worker lets things like literal hurricanes get in the way of making their shifts. Phrased in a way that makes it seem like she's repeating monstrous shit she's heard her family say, with her immense privilege and ideological blinders preventing her from realizing what it actually means to someone like Miyuki, especially coming from someone like her who represents the entrenched aristocracy. All framed within the context of two teenagers being unable to flirt with each other like normal ass people without bringing the weight of the very hierarchy that created these factors crashing down on them.

Just learn to accept that I'm always right, seriously, it's not that complicated.

...

Anyway, she adds in at the end that getting a cab would probably cost more than he'd make in today's shift, but maybe he could ask someone for a ride. There, that ought to get things moving in a good direction. Just need to rub his poverty and desperation in his face a little, that always makes boys like you.

To be clear, I'm not actually judging Kaguya herself that harshly here. To her, this whole "money" thing is just a game. She doesn't seem to understand the full unpleasantness of how she's acting. And, really, she's hurting herself almost as much as him by doing it.

Miyuki tells her he'll need to think about what to do now, and excuses himself to the bathroom. Kaguya smugly thinks to herself that since Miyuki is "such a cheapskate" he'll obviously choose to ask for a ride rather than paying for a cab.

...okay, maybe I need to judge Kaguya a little more harshly after all.

Before she can celebrate her victory though, Kaguya sees an update on the weather situation; the typhoon was receded a little bit, and they just announced that the trains will be running this afternoon after all. Scare chord. Dramatic music. Kaguya panics as if she just heard that her family's employees were all unionizing. Her only hope to salvage this situation, and to make herself not have been a total bitch to Miyuki for no reason, she takes out one of the spare dead cell phone batteries she keeps in the office (lolwut) and hastens to replace the one in the phone he absentmindedly left on his desk. He can't take the train if he doesn't know the trains are running again!

The music gets even more tense, and there's a bomb-disarming sequence with the number of seconds until Miyuki gets back from the bathroom ticking down like a detonator timer.

She completes her task just barely in time, and has to quickly hide his phone behind her back and replace it on the desk while he's looking away before he notices it's gone. When he sees (and is confused by) the battery being empty, he asks to borrow hers, and apparently Kaguya the absolute brainlet didn't think of that eventuality while concocting her cunning scheme. She's forced to grab her phone and shout that her own ride is here before dashing out of the office, hoping that he'll chase her.

He does not chase her. At least, not immediately. We jump ahead to Kayuga standing in the wind and rain right outside the school entrance, waiting. She's sure he'll come and start begging for a ride soon. She launches into a whole extended fantasy of him beseeching her like a cheesy romance protagonist, complete with grainy mid twentieth century style footage:

Probably one of the funniest uses of art shift that I can readily recall.

She's snapped out of her increasingly cheesily-written daydream by...um...whoever this girl is:

I'm guessing she was introduced in the intervening seven episodes. Well, from what I can tell, it looks like she's a maid or attendant or something, and she's made at Kaguya for making her wait with her for this boy who may or may not ever show up. I think? The dialogue is kind of hard for me to follow. Anyway, the lady is mad at Kaguya for not just taking the limo home at the usual time and making it hard for her, over something as petty as this attempt at manipulating her way into some boy's pants.

Oh wait, I think I do remember this lady! She showed up very briefly at the end of the pilot, when we saw Kaguya at home. Yeah, she's that maid who advised her to stop being so psychotic about this crush, and who still seems to be (fruitlessly) attempting to make this case.

Suddenly, Miyuki goes shooting passed them on a bicycle, screaming like a maniac as he ramps off a rise in the driveway and goes flying away down the street and into the storm, splashing Kaguya and the maid lady as he tears by without seeing them.

I'm sure he'll be totally fine, biking through a storm and flood at breakneck speed while panicking about what will happen if he doesn't make it in time.

They end up cabbing home alone. Kaguya was waiting outside so long in the rain and wind, though, that she's started sniffling. By next morning, the maid - named as Hayasaka - has been proven correct about karma and Kaguya's relationship with it. She's not going to be making it to school today. In fact, she'll barely be leaving bed.

Kaguya blames Hayasaka for not trying harder to talk her out of that stupid scheme. Hayasaka's expression is just a masterpiece:

That is 100% the face of someone who's about to vanish with eighty million yen worth of jewelry and live a completely guilt-free life under a new name somewhere in Latin America.

...then Hayasaka says she'll take off school today too to stay with her mistress while she's sick.

She's a student herself?

And also working apparently full time as one of her classmate's maid?

What?

Japan, I fear that I will never get you.

Kayuga asks Hayasaka to stay by her side instead of making her an early breakfast, apparently needing company. It's a humanizing touch for Kayuga, but simultaneously a DEhumanizing one given that she isn't reacting whatsoever to Hayasaka miserably saying that she'll have to stay home with her today too. Hayasaka, seriously, steal some shit and ditch.

Anyway, jump to school, where Miyuki - who managed to avoid breaking anything on his way to work, miraculously enough - is recieving the news that Kayuga is home sick. Hmm...Miyuki spent a lot more time out in that weather than she did, but then his body is probably way more accustomed to that kind of exposure. Anyway, someone will need to run some handouts and paperwork to her after school, it seems. Chika volunteers. She's been over to visit Kayuga while she was sick before (hmm...seems like Kayuga is prone to illness in general). Also, she kind of loves how adorably needy and babyish Kayuga gets when she's not feeling well.

Miyuki, realizing that he needs to do something really awful in this episode so as to not let him become any kind of hero to Kaguya's villain, thinks that this might be the perfect opportunity to get her to make a move. She'll be emotionally vulnerable, cuddlier than usual, very easy to do nice things for which she will have to appreciate. It's perfect!

Chika wants to bring the entire student council over to cheer Kaguya up (or at least, one other boy who's in the office right now. I'm guessing he was introduced in episodes 2-8 and is some kind of student government guy). Mr. Otherguy isn't sure if bringing a whole crowd over to barge in on her while she's already low on energy would be the best idea, though (internally he's scared to go to her house, probably because her parents nonchalantly pick up and messily devour any middle or lower class child that happens to come within arm's reach. Before Miyuki can volunteer himself though, Chika produces a deck of playing cards and declares that they're all going to play Concentration over who gets visiting rights.

Concentration is a really weird choice, but, well, Chika.

I'll split it here.