Oh My Goddess! E3: "Burning Hearts on the Road"
This review was commissioned by @ArlequineLunaire
"Burning Hearts on the Road" makes me considerably less comfortable with this series than I was after the pilot. Not because Keiichi behaves any differently. Not because Belldandy behaves any differently. It's more of a troubling recontextualization than any kind of change or escalation.
Apparently, the episode I skipped contains a major development in the form of Belldandy's big sister Urd having moved in with the gang. We're still going with the Norse fate goddesses for naming inspiration, I guess. From context, it seems that Urd has been temporarily banished from the divine realm for some kind of transgression, and is crashing with Belldandy, Keiichi, and Keiichi's sister Megumi in their reclaimed shrine for a while. Then, early in this episode, we're introduced to Belldandy's other sister, Skuld, who comes to join the others out of loneliness with both her sisters away.
I love the character design here, with them all falling alone a spectrum of height, skin tone, and hair color, with the "past" goddess being the tallest and most weathered and the "future" one being the smallest and youngest looking. Lots of little details in each of their appearances that help support the theming. But, regardless.
Skuld and Urd do not act like Belldandy. At all. Both of them are far more human, with humanlike priorities and humanlike self-interest. Urd thinks that Belldandy's devotion to a mortal is unwarranted, and that the domestic labor she performs for them is beneath her. Skuld desperately misses Belldandy, and feels betrayed that her sister would abandon her divine family in favor of this human lover. When either of them confront Belldandy about this, her answer is always something to the effect of "I'm sorry, but I need to obey the terms of the wish, it's what I want to do."
If it's what she actually *wants* to do, why does she need to appeal to the rules to justify her decision?
The fact that Urd and Skuld have emotive faces and their voice actors put some passion and feeling into these conversations, while Belldandy retain these dully placid expressions and sounds like she's half asleep when speaking her answers, doesn't do anything to help.
The most charitable interpretation of this is that Belldandy had been looking for an excuse to flee her home and family and Keiichi's wish provided her with one. But I don't think that's the intended one, and it's not the most intuitive one either.
The main plot for the episode involves Keiichi being roped into yet another task he doesn't want to do by his "senpais" within the motor racing team. I'm not sure how and why these people still have any leverage on him, after they threw him and Belldandy out on the street and the two of them found better accommodations off-campus on their own, but apparently Keiichi still can't say no to them. They tell him he's going to be participating in a bike race against a highly aggressive rival league, and give him a bunch of parts that they instruct him to assemble into a racing bike with unreasonably high specs by the date.
Including a twin-engine setup that doesn't even properly fit into the vehicle frame.
Also, apparently the Chief Senpai made a bet with the leader of the opposing league. The bet being that if the opponents win, Belldandy has to join their team. And...the leader of said opposing team is a comically unpleasant Karate Kid-esque villain who seems to be taking it for granted that if Belldandy is on his team, it means she'll necessarily be taking his D.
I swear I've seen this guy in memes before.
I'm not sure how that follows, personally. I guess the logical inference would be that he's banging all of his teammates on the reg, and that Belldandy would need to participate in this tradition in order to be a proper member.
Also, what the hell is Chief Senpai getting if Keiichi wins the race? Presumably someone bangable, but come on show, we need the deets!
Now, Japan might be weird, and the sitcom logic here might allow things to be even weirder, but Keiichi still knows limits when he sees them. He points out that this stupid bet between two guys she barely knows isn't binding on Belldandy. But, Belldandy herself agrees to the terms, over Keiichi's, Skuld's, and Urd's disbelieving objections. Promises are sacred, and must be kept whenever possible. If she can prevent a promise from having been broken, she feels obligated to do so.
Once again, her own sisters - goddesses like her, who have known her for their whole lives - find this as deranged as Keiichi does. However, at no point - either in this scene or in the rest of the runtime - does the episode make the logical next step and have people ask Belldandy wtf is even wrong with her, or have the others sit down together and try to figure out what's up with her. This isn't treated as a character flaw of Belldandy's; if anything, the framing leans more toward the others just not being too impure to comprehend her.
...
You know, if it turns out that Belldandy just has an extreme submissive fetish that her sisters are weirded out by, and the only reason she's going through with all of this because it makes her wet, that would actually redeem this.
It wouldn't just make the story more palatable than the alternative. It would also make the story make more sense than the alternative.
...
Granted, Belldandy is also supremely confident that Keiichi will win anyway. To a degree that suggests she might be planning to use magic to cheat. So, that might be a mitigating factor.
The racing plot and the Skuld introduction come together when Skuld turns out to have technology powers. The show apparently is going a bit deeper than just name-level with the Fates naming, with Urd having some old fashioned mannerisms and often invoking spirits of the ancient past and the like, and Skuld having a futuristic scifi vibe to her powers and childishness to her personality. Erm...I don't know what the hell Belldandy's characterization is trying to say about the present, looking at her in the context of the other two, but I digress. Urd's technomancy allows her to build a motorcycle to the impossible specs mandated by the senpais using the hardware given.
However, Urd also realizes that if Keiichi loses the race and Belldandy has to join the other bike racing sex cult whatsit, Keiichi might not want her anymore. At which point, she'll be free of her obligations to him and can return home like Urd wants. So, Urd decides to sabotage the bike.
When the race happens, the resolution is...a little anticlimactic. When she sees Belldandy cheer enthusiastically for Keiichi, and then start looking genuinely fearful and horrified when the sabotage kicks in and it looks like he might lose, Skuld becomes remorseful. Realizing that this actually is important to Belldandy and not just an obligation for her, Skuld does...something? Or else maybe Belldandy does, I'm not sure...that magically causes the rival racer's bike to fail harder than Keiichi's does, letting Keiichi beat him.
So, Belldandy doesn't have to join the other jerk's motorcycle sex cult, and Skuld decides to stay at the shrine with her sisters so as to not be lonely. End episode.
Belldandy actually seeming to be afraid of what would happen if Keiichi loses unfortunately weakens my "she gets off on this" interpretation. So, that leaves us with...what, exactly?
Meeting Belldandy's sisters and learning that they're NOT like her - and not even inhuman in different ways than her, like you might expect from goddesses with different purviews - makes it hard to not conclude that there's something wrong with Belldandy and that she shouldn't be put in these kinds of situations. It's hard to have a sympathetic view of Keiichi or his feelings for her in light of this. But I'm pretty sure the show wants me to be totally on his side.
It's the same problems I had with "Bewitched" all over again, only without the queer/racial subtext and with more weird misogyny of the "fetishized infantilism" persuasion.
The next couple of episodes...well, they're different. Very different. I'll cover them in another post.
