The World God Only Knows Flag 3: A Daughter’s Pride

October 21, 2010

The World God Only Knows Flag 3: A Daughter’s Pride

This is the type of megalomania you usually see in extreme fictional characters and usually applied on their fellow people.  You don’t always see such grandiosity in a strange meta scale.  We’re watching a show about character extending his megalomanic (sp?) muscles over a fictional character inside a fictional world.  The metaphysics of this plot device will hurt heads so I won’t go into it in detail.

Megalomaniacs are probably hard to properly play.  There’s usually more than the overinflated ego and the loud voice and laughter, so it takes a lot of skill to properly play one.  I haven’t been very positive about Shimono’s work as the Kami-sama of galge, but with this episode suffice to say that he’s really warming into the role.

He might just pull off something awesome in the end.

Lesson 2: Tsunderes

Keima takes it as a positive event flag that discovery that Mio is, in reality, a pauper.  They were rich before, but when her father had died and left the fortune in ruins, her mother was forced to work to support the both of them.  I guess it’s just a bit sad that Mio didn’t take the new lifestyle quite well, still insisting on her upper crust life when she clearly can’t sustain it.  When it gets so bad that the family driver, who still drove her around due to his loyalty to her father, quits out of sheer frustration, Keima takes it as his cue to act beyond a mere confession.

But as we all know, Tsunderes are tough nuts to crack, even if the cracks are already showing on their faces.

The things we men do for approval...

As I mentioned above, Shimono’s slowly but surely getting very accustomed into his tole as the Capturing God.  The entire Yodeling scene as he explains his plans to Elsee was very impressive and downright hilarious.  The range I’ve been looking from him to carry the character is slowly but surely coming out, and with this episode it looks like he might really be able to do it when the pure galge glory of Keima is needed to be presented.

He can already see the ending.

Keima as I mentioned before, despite his eccentricities as a pure gamer, is actually a very thoughtful and wise sort of guy.  Changing the Tsundere is as cliched as an anime arc setup goes, but Keima is really one of those characters that really put a very different twist and approach to the entire thing.  Most anime fans probably want to themselves make the moves on these character types even if they’re pure fiction, but Keima on the other hand is living it.  As I mentioned before, it might be ridiculous that fictional plans would work in real life (in this case on a purely meta sense).  He might be using gaming methods for his capture, but the essence behind his plans are very much rooted in the natures of humanity, which is ironic for someone who prefers to reject reality and substitute his own.

Perhaps Keima isn’t that rejecting of the real world as he thinks.  I’d again say that it’s rooted on the fact that even fictional girls in his galge are still based on real life, so there is still a bit of reality in his games.  Thus you could say that Keima is also indirectly learning about real life women from his fictional galge.  Galge then actually isn’t as fictional as he believes.  He’s linked to reality more than he thinks.

They're actually a really adorable pair...

My initial complaint with the manga, and obviously with this episode, was more on Keima’s insistence on Mio before successfully purging the spirit.  His insistence on her letting go of her father so that she’d have space in her heart for him actually felt a little selfish, if understandable.  The gap in Mio’s heart was due to her desire to live according to her father’s wishes in order to keep his memory alive.  I still personally think that it’s still very possible for Keima to capture her heart without forcing her to “forget” her father, so to speak, but then again it’s become rather unhealthy for her to be so obsessed with her father’s memory that she is on the road to destroying her own life in the process.

Any daughter with a good father would want to keep the memory of their father alive.

Captured!

Next week is… actually I’m not too sure.  Based on the preview and some people’s assumptions, it’s not going to really be about capturing and be one of Keima’s extensively intellectual lectures on, what else, galge.  As a minor spoiler, it’s pretty impressive how rather eloquent Keima is whenever he teaches Elsee and whoever else on the finer points of gaming, and these are the times that really show his character, so it’ll be interesting to see how the VA handles this.

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