Finally Rikka joins the fray! I was waiting for her to appear. And thank god she did at that time because that was the DUMBEST argument I’ve ever seen, the 3rd claim. I almost want to believe that no one would be stupid enough to buy that, but then again here I am sitting on the toilet with no toilet paper. So who’s the real loser. It’s time to invest in bidets.

This episode had a distinct amount of Kuro deaths in it. Man is getting his face bashed in, cut in half (with a steel pipe??), and impaled just to better the odds of their fight. It doesn’t seem like they’re doing it on purpose, but somehow every time he dies they make it looked synced to the proclamation by Kotoko as if it’s conveniently at the same time. My boy is grabbing futures left and right. Of course, now Rikka is involved personally. I thought Kotoko’s strategy was interesting at first. That if they start to persuade even a few people, the futures Rikka can change can’t outright refute the claims, so some of Kotoko’s ‘facts’ remain. Repeating this process creates enough room for them to launch a counter attack and weaken Nanase to a point where… she disappears? Or maybe just weak enough that Kuro can snap her neck and she doesn’t revive. Let’s go over the claims real quick because honestly, there’s nothing else to do:

Claim 2: Nanase is a ghost, but her purpose is to tell the truth about her death to others

  • The father saw her success and developed a complex because apparently she was a dick and the breadwinner, so he decides to kill himself to drag her down.
  • she turns into a ghost, sees her father in the afterlife, learns the truth, and is overcome with revenge. Ergo, a ghost is formed.

Counter-claim: She is causing too much havoc for her to here for the reason of just telling the truth.

Yes, but no? If she was overcome with regret and revenge, couldn’t she easily have just gone mad and started killing people after losing trust in humanity or something? Either way, that doesn’t help with weakening her power though. I get Kotoko was trying to change her image to be more mild and peaceful, but the fact is that she’s already been scaring the shit out of people and now she’s killed someone. I think this is an awfully weak claim, especially the part about going to the afterlife. When Saki gasped and was like, ‘What?!’, I was just in total agreement. Thankfully, Kuro happened to be getting his face bashed in so everyone latched onto that pretty quickly. Now onto the worst argument I’ve heard so far out of the three.

Claim 3: Nanase is a fake ghost created by a living human being (a friend of Nanase’s sister), Terada was killed by them as well.

  • The sisters where not on good terms to begin with. So when their father died, her sister leaked the father’s note to the press about Nanase trying to kill him.
  • Nanase ‘dies’ but the sister can’t believe she would actually do that, so now she is convinced Nanase faked her death to get revenge on her.
  • A ‘friend’ of the sister decides the absolute best strategy is to… dress up as a ghost and kill people to reassure her that Nanase is dead. He also somehow kills Terada even though the whole first claim was devoted to proving that a normal person could NOT do that. Ok.

Counter-claim: that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard and there are so many… But Rikka’s specifically was that killing people would not put the sister at ease (yeah no shit).

I don’t really need to go into the specifics on this one. This was 100% the weakest of the three claims and if Rikka didn’t say anything I was aboutta hop in there. Look, I’m no master debator (hehe) and I say a lot of dumb shit. I work through thinks aloud which often leads to me looking like an idiot. This though, is just an awful claim.

Apart from the claims, the moments of action had me mostly laughing. Just the idea of a regular guy (ok, not that regular) face slamming a ghost’s head into the pavement. It’s such an amazingly hilarious concept! Maybe I should’ve been worried or empathetic for Kuro, but goddamn. I had to pause the episode to stop laughing.

Next week is claim #4, the final claim! Let’s see what they got in store for us. Kuro having the future branch just out of grasp does not bode well but I’m sure they’ll pull through. Now that Rikka is involved, it may come to a head to head debate, which will give Kotoko the chance to poke holes in her theory instead of spinning up stories. It’s a lot easier to see the flaws in someone else than to craft a story yourself, after all.