Oh My Goddess! E4-5: "Evergreen Holy Night" and "For the Love of Goddess"
Episodes 4 and 5 of the OVA are basically a two-part finale. OVAs are almost always compressed significantly from their manga source material, but this is an extreme case. The "Oh My Goddess!" manga ran monthly for over twenty-five years. Five of those years had already passed by the time the OVA came out. The first three OVA episodes adapt three introductory story arcs from right at the beginning of the manga, and then the last two are a completely original ending for the story written with minimal input from the mangaka and jammed in right after the introduction. No middle part. No act 2.
Add in the fact that the ending two-parter is a major tonal departure from the adapted material, abandoning the comedy almost entirely and doubling down on drama (and also trying to make these magic-technobabble elements that it introduces out of nowhere suddenly be super important), and it makes the OVA a bewildering and confounding experience as a whole. It ends as soon as it's gotten fully started. Also, the two-part finale's plot doesn't even make sense.
That said, this finale does make Belldandy a much more relatable character, which by proxy also makes Keiichi look a lot better. And also makes the writers look a lot better, assuming the first few episodes are faithful adaptations of the source manga.
"Evergreen Holy Night" starts with Keiichi having a nightmare. He's about to propose to Belldandy, when suddenly she announces that because of some arcane rules beyond his understanding she will now be returning to heaven and never seeing him again. Her entry into his life was incomprehensible and unpredictable, from his perspective, so who's to say that her exit from it won't be likewise?
The subtext of this nightmare is as important as the text. Belldandy has the same neutrally cheerful expression on her face that she usually does, and her voice is the usual clonked-on-the-head monotone. Suggesting that she never loved him, or was even capable of experiencing love in the way humans do, and that everything about her behavior since the first scene of the pilot has been affected in order to comply with his wish. They never had anything, and he was never anything to her.
He wakes up in a cold sweat and finds her making breakfast the same as always, but the underlying anxiety here is...well, it's totally justified. Like, seriously, looking at their relationship logically, this probably is exactly what he's afraid it is. The only possible alternative I can think of is that Belldandy got a crush on him while observing from the spirit world, and set up the whole goddess relief program thing in order to create a legal excuse for herself to go be with him. Which is possible, and watching this unfold while knowing that it's a story it seems like a twist an author might well deploy, but from an in-universe perspective it wouldn't seem terribly likely.
...
The funny thing? That's almost what this finale actually goes with.
It doesn't go with it. It goes with something kinda-sorta adjacent to it that makes much less sense. I was slightly disappointed and extremely confused by the actual backstory for Belldandy and Keiichi, in large part because of how easily it could have been made better.
...
The plot itself kicks off with an unseasonal snowstorm descending on the shrine. Unseasonal, and also seemingly limited to just the one neighbourhood. The anomalous freeze is followed by other temperature fluctuations, magnetic fluctuations, and eventually objects randomly moving or shattering without warning. The culprits turn out to be these little rabbit-spider yokai that Skuld refers to simply as "bugs."
In episode 3 we briefly saw Skuld hunting one of these things and bashing it to death with the sledgehammer she always carries around. We now learn that these creatures are living glitches in the software of the universe, and that - as a goddess with an engineering purview - Skuld is one of the spirits tasked with culling them when detected.
There shouldn't be so many bugs showing up in one place in the mortal world. Hell, they don't usually manifest on Earth at all. When more of them keep spawning and local physics keep hiccupping as a result, Skuld breaks out the heavy magitech sensors to try and get to the bottom of this. And, apparently, there's a hole in reality hovering between Keiichi and Belldandy, and whenever the two of them interact too closely it starts shitting more of these bugs out.
Keiichi's recent dream makes him very, very nervous about where this could be leading. For now though, they decide to just have Keiichi and Belldandy avoid being in the same room for a while until Skuld can figure out what's causing this.
Shit gets more serious than that, though, when Belldandy gets a call from her father. He's apparently some kind of major divinity. Perhaps even the major divinity. He looks...both very detailed character design, and very much not what you'd probably expect.
The fact that he has such an elaborate design and yet only gets less than a minute of screentime in this entire two-parter leads me to surmise that he's a major recurring character in the manga, and the OVA writers managed to squeeze in a bit role for him.
In any case, unnamed god-daddy tells Belldandy that the bug situation at her location is starting to get really worrying, and that he's going to have to give her a wish-countermanding recall notice until such a time as they can stop this from happening. It will take him three days to open the portal to summon Belldandy back to heaven through (I guess going there is a lot more complicated than travelling the other way). If she and her sisters can figure out how to solve the problem on their own before then, great. In any case, she and Keiichi are to stay out of each other's presence until the situation is resolved one way or another.
Belldandy is crestfallen, and tries to argue with him about this. The question of whether she's getting emotional because she actually likes Keiichi or because she's failing to be helpful to someone who thought she would keep helping them or because she's just loathe to break a contract, of course, keeps casting its shadow over her behavior.
From here on out, the two-parter is mostly split between Keiichi and Belldandy pining for each other from across the shrine as the former wonders if this will really be the end and whether or not he's been living a lie, and Urd and Skuld trying to come up with a technical solution to the problem before the three days are up.
And um...then there's this bizarre scene where Skuld and Urd determine that this big cherry tree growing near the shrine is somehow related to the problem. The camera slowly pans up at it amid creepy music and unsettling lighting effects, like it's the tree from "Poltergeist" or something.
I don't know if this is on the localization or the writing, but there's a gigantic disconnect in the exposition here. Apparently, this tree has some kind of aberrant energy sealed inside of it that's attracting the bugs. However, nobody says what that could have to do with Belldandy and Keiichi. If the tree is the source of the problem, how did it end up extending into their relationship? If their relationship is the source of the problem, how did it end up extending into this particular tree? Nobody even raises these questions.
Also, if the tree is part of the problem, shouldn't that change the entire calculus of the situation? Shouldn't their divine father be reconsidering what measures need to be taken in light of this new information? Apparently not.
...
Well, okay. There's a moment at the beginning of "For the Love of Goddess" when Urd tries to inform their father of the tree development. Which he's apparently not aware of on his own, despite having mysteriously learned about everything else that happened while it was happening. But she can't get through to him, because he has a new secretary who doesn't recognize the sound of Urd's voice on the phone and won't put her through to him.
That's what we're going with? Well, um. Okay I guess.
It seem like she gives up awfully fast, too. And neither of her sisters are shown trying to attempt this on their own. So I really am not sure what to make of this.
Especially given that this two-parter otherwise eschews comedy almost completely. If this was more like the early episodes, this could have been a decent throwaway gag. With the situation being treated this seriously though, all I can think is "why did they give up after just the one Urd call?"
...
As a final baffling detail, when the tree is pointed out to Belldandy she lets out a gasp of horrified shock and starts staring at the tree in mute, trembling terror before stammering out some incoherent words of dread and disbelief and then running away and ignoring everyone's demands for an explanation.
On one hand, it's a well-executed "shit has gotten serious" moment that increases the mystery and anxiety of the situation.
On the other hand...this tree is literally growing a dozen meters away from the building they've all been living in. It's been there this entire time. It's a big tree, you can't miss it. I can't believe that pointing it out to Belldandy would make her react as if she saw it murder her entire family in front of her, but that she didn't even notice it at all for the entire time up until then.
The explanation we eventually get...um...I'm not sure that you can even say that this gets an explanation at all. The tree does play a minor role in the twist backstory that gets revealed in "For the Love of Goddess," but not a role that seems like it should merit this metaphysical weight, and absolutely not a role that should make Belldandy see it as the monster under her bed.
And then, um. Urd and Skuld try doing this magic ritual in front of the tree that's apparently highly illegal to perform without authorization and that would get them the kami equivalent of felony charges if they got caught.
Is it just me, or does that look an awful lot like Brothar's philostone-breaker?
This culminates in a weird sequence of events where they try to use the illegal superglyph to exorcise whatever's in the tree, while simultaneously the portal manifests and starts trying to suck Belldandy up away from Keiichi while both of them struggle for each other, and um...this causes an explosion that almost kills Keiichi and then Belldandy has to do inception and go into his mind to foqdsqfljislfdnjd
Okay. Whatever. I literally cannot make sense of this resolution. So I'll just go into the revealed backstory stuff that also doesn't make sense, but is at least the sort of nonsense that I can summarize in text.
When Keiichi was a kid, his family took a vacation to the area where the shrine is located. At the same time, Belldandy - herself a child at the time. I thought she and her sisters were a hell of a lot older than that, but apparently not - ran away from home to Earth and they ended up meeting under that tree. They spent a week being cute preteens together.
At the end of that week, Belldandy got caught. As a punishment for her unauthorized playtime on Earth, she was made to erase Keiichi's memories of their time together herself.
...
Once again, this would lead in really well to a twist of Belldandy long having chafed under her father's authority and the divine society in general, latching onto Keiichi on account of his connection with the one escape from it that she'd ever had, and then setting up the Goddess Relief Hotline incident knowing how it would play out. That would make perfect sense. It would also make Belldandy a much more interesting character, and while her feelings for Keiichi might not be healthy per se they'd at least be genuine in a way that makes sense.
Maybe that is in fact what the viewer is supposed to read from between the lines.
However, it is never made explicit. As far as the show ever SAYS, the Goddess Relief call was an astronomically unlikely coincidence that happened to see Belldandy and Keiichi reunited.
For that matter, there's absolutely nothing in the episodes before this two-parter to imply that Belldandy already knew Keiichi before the pilot. The only thing that could be seen as foreshadowing for this is how Belldandy guided him to this particular shrine to move into in the pilot, but even there the causality is unclear.
...
Apparently, Keiichi starting to recover his suppressed memories after living with Belldandy for a while is what caused the reality distortion bugs to start showing up. But then the SOLUTION to it ends up being to...go into his head and restore those memories, rather than erasing them more thoroughly. I don't know. This is some of the most stream-of-consciousness plotting I've ever seen. Anyway they all live happily ever after or something.
On one hand, I feel like this finale does more to humanize Belldandy, or at least rewrite the story around her in a way that could hypothetically let her be humanized. On the other hand, it's almost completely incoherent.
My monthly fast lane order for this January is the first few episodes of the later 2000's OMG adaptation, so I think I'll dive into that next for compare and contrast. With how inane the direction the OVA creators took this in was, I'm not even sure what the hell I can say about it until I've seen some more material.
