It’s about time for Mahiru to star in her own episode. Since the first episode, you could see the gears turning in that girl’s head as Karen seemingly spends more time with Hikari than her. Sooner or later, the show has to address this conflict and the time is now. Also, if you somehow need more proof that Mahiru has gone insane, look further no here. This episode doesn’t hold back in this regard, not one bit.
We begin the episode with a flashback set in the day of the first performance of “Starlight”. Mahiru is nervous to go onstage, leading Karen to cheer her up. This results in Karen promising that the two of them will stay together forever. One curious detail is Mahiru seeing sparkling shapes when Karen makes her promise. This happens a couple more times throughout the episode. It’s basically a visual representation of someone’s shine. I want to say this is a stylistic choice but knowing Revue Starlight, it would not surprise me if this is actually a superpower of Mahiru’s.
Back in the present, Mahiru and the others notice a shift in Karen’s personality. Karen now wakes up on time, practices extensively by herself or with Hikari, and is taking classes much more seriously. This is of course the product of Karen and Hikari reconnecting last episode. With the two now on the same page and with Hikari helping Karen, the latter’s determination to shine has increased tenfold. It’s a profound change and the fact that Hikari is the catalyst to it makes Mahiru incredibly envious.
After school, Mahiru stumbles upon an old recording where she’s interviewed by the local news for her admission into Seisho. You find out that despite her talent, Mahiru only applied to Seisho at her grandmother’s suggestion. I’m guessing Mahiru wasn’t planning on pursuing theater and she grew nervous once she realized how tough the curriculum is and how good everyone else is. Assuming that’s the case, it’s easy to see why Karen has made Mahiru feel more comfortable at school, why that has such a profound effect on her, and why Mahiru is anxious to lose that anchor.
The next day, Karen’s improvement has gotten to a point that the leaders of Group B are considering her and Hikari as frontrunners to play the lead characters in Starlight, Flora and Claire respectively. The only one opposed to this (aside from Mahiru, I mean) is Nana, who wants Claudine and Maya to play Flora and Claire, if only because they played the roles in the previous school festival. How curious that Nana wants to do the play exactly as it was last year, when everyone else is aiming to give it a new spin.
A conundrum with Mahiru’s character is that you might side with her in the friendship/possible love triangle between her, Karen, and Hikari. That’s certainly the case in the first third of the episode. You’re very inclined to sympathize with Mahiru as Karen spends more time with Hikari than with her and is seemingly doing a lot better without her. Thing is, this sentiment comes at odds with rooting for Karen and Hikari to become Top Stars together. For them to win, Mahiru has to get the short end of the stick and that could leave you feeling sour if you’re rooting for her.
Fortunately, this episode has a solution and that’s banking super hard on Mahiru’s crazy side. The next day, Mahiru’s fixation with Karen delves into borderline stalker territory. She sniffs her friend’s pillow, stares at her sweaty towel, and she tries to take a sip from her water bottle (probably for an indirect kiss even). Honestly, if you change a few things in this bit, Mahiru would be a great yandere character. It’s creepy and it’s an extreme measure but it does work to great effect. Even if you sympathize with Mahiru, her relationship with Karen is clearly unhealthy and that makes it harder to take her side in the friendship triangle. It also helps that this bit of insanity is really darn funny, what with Mahiru stooping so low and Hikari conveniently being nearby in every instance. Also, R.I.P. to Kaoruko’s dignity.
After practice, Mahiru accuses Hikari of “stealing” Karen from her. In response, Hikari advises Mahiru to not use the word so lightly. Given Hikari’s personality, it’s easy to view her as apathetic to Mahiru’s feelings but honestly, she does have a point. That’s a presumptuous accusation for Mahiru to make. Hikari has been friends with Karen before the latter met Mahiru. She and Karen hasn’t seen each other in twelve years. Of course Karen would spend a lot of her time with Hikari. Plus, Hikari didn’t even want to be around Karen when the show started. With all that in mind, Hikari hasn’t stolen anyone. If anything, Mahiru seems rather possessive. She’s convinced that Karen belongs to her and her only.
So at long last, Mahiru is one of the featured participants in the main duel of the week. You’d think after her confrontation with Hikari, Mahiru would be fighting her but her opponent is actually Karen. Not having Mahiru versus Hikari in the show is a missed opportunity but it does make more sense for Mahiru to air her grievances towards Karen. Plus, as you’ll see in the episode, it’s a lot more entertaining that Karen is the opponent. This particular duel is called the “Revue of Jealousy”. Obviously, it’s referring to Mahiru’s envy over Karen’s friendship with Hikari. I love that the title only refers to Mahiru, denoting that her jealousy is completely one-sided.
This is my second favorite revue in the whole show (I’ll of course reveal #1 when I get there). For starters, the beginning of the revue is simply glorious. Mahiru giving a one-woman show where plays both herself and Karen, acting out the friendship that she thinks she had (or should have) with Karen. It’s as ridiculous as it sounds and Karen’s reaction to it is great. I also love that the insert song’s instrumental intro is long enough to let Mahiru act everything out. In fact, it’s the longest intro out of all of Revue Starlight‘s insert songs, clocking in at 2 minutes and 6 seconds. Even better is that when Mahiru finally does sing, her first line is, “Hold on, wait a minute”. She’s been monologuing for about 2 minutes and she begins in the song by telling us that she’s not done talking.
I admit that when I first watched Revue Starlight, I didn’t expect Mahiru to be a particularly strong fighter. Like, she uses a baton. How dangerous could she possibly be? Imagine my surprise when Mahiru starts fighting by slamming into the ground with her baton, creating a very large crater. To say I stand correct would be an understatement. I love how violent it is. Like, just when you think Mahiru has gone insane, she more or less telegraphs to Karen that she is out for blood. Maybe this girl really is a yandere. Needless to say, Karen appropriately runs for her dear life.
The aesthetic of this revue is a tougher nut to crack than the ones that came before it. A good chunk of the fight is notably baseball-themed. Why baseball, you may ask? Well, if you look closely at Mahiru’s side of her dorm room with Karen and Hikari, you’ll see that she has a baseball cat mascot plushie. That honestly is the connection and you very much can miss it. For the record, there is a professional baseball team based in Mahiru’s home island of Hokkaido. However, none of their mascots are cats so I believe the mascot here is an original one created to avoid copyright issues.
I’m not 100% confident as to how the baseball theme ties into Mahiru’s character. There’s one line of dialogue where Mahiru explains that everything on her stage is “‘what [she] want[s]…and what [she doesn’t] have””. In other words, her stage is representative of her desire to have things back to the way they were. Obviously, she wants to be Karen’s super special awesome best friend but other than that, she probably wants to go back home. She only attends Seisho because her family thinks it’s a good opportunity for her and she only stays there because of Karen. It’s likely that she’s homesick and assuming that’s the case, the baseball cat is likely a representation of her home in Hokkaido. That or this is like Hikari and jellyfish. It’s just something Mahiru likes.
You also have recreations of Seisho’s campus and the stage used in the previous year’s festival as well as cut-outs of Mahiru and Karen. This set is way easier to understand than the baseball one. They visualize the fact that Mahiru enjoys life at Seisho when she’s with Karen and she wishes to keep it that way. I love how all these props look as though they were drawn by a child. Maybe that really is Mahiru’s drawing skills (if so, I apologize to Mahiru) but I think the intent is convey a sense of innocence. Technically, Mahiru’s desire is innocent. She just wants to stay friends with Karen. It’s only wrong in how warped it’s become.
If nothing else, all these props makes the fight a blast to sit through. Mahiru happily runs after Karen with the deadliest baton of all time and the two of them are accompanied by their respective cutouts that perfectly match their feelings at the moment. Mahiru uses her baton as a baseball bat. She uses Karen as the baseball. Karen cartoonishly blasts off like Team Rocket and then rolls like an armadillo into a trap door, bringing her to somewhere else in the theater. There’s actually a scoreboard keeping track of Mahiru’s homeruns. In the midst of their own commotion, the two fighters accidentally enter the other duels, eliciting some confusion. At the Seisho set, their attacks are accompanied by sound effect bubbles, Batman ’66 style. It’s the wackiest fight Revue Starlight has pulled off so far and I love every minute of it.
Towards the end of the fight, Mahiru begs Karen to go back to how she was before Hikari transferred to Seisho. While Mahiru’s fear of losing Karen is understandable, her phrasing here is very questionable. She literally tells Karen to oversleep and be late to class. In other words, she wants to Karen to back to sucking at school. Mahiru says she wants this because she wants to feel useful again but this means that she’s been friends with Karen to feel like she has a purpose and to ignore her own insecurity. Judging by these lines of dialogue (and Mahiru going stalker mode earlier), it’s evident that Mahiru’s relationship with Karen is an unhealthy. She’s far too dependent on Karen to feel better about herself and she wants Karen to hold herself back, when Karen wants to push herself further.
In response to Mahiru’s plea, Karen says she’s remembering something important. You think for a second that she’s referring to her promise to Mahiru, to be with her forever, but she’s instead talking about her promise with Hikari. The fact that this is happening right across from Hikari’s duel is a nice touch, to better visualize Karen’s promise and to show that even when she’s right in front of Karen, Mahiru is still getting friendzoned. That Karen is laser focused on becoming Top Star with Hikari is to be expected but I admit that these lines do make her seem dismissive of Mahiru’s feelings.
Mind you, that notion is very short-lived as Karen then proceeds to talk very glowingly about Mahiru. She disagrees that Mahiru has nothing without her, arguing that deep down, Mahiru must have something that motivates her to attend in Seisho as well as participate in the revues. By saying all that, Karen gets Mahiru to remember that she did want to make her family proud and she was quite happy with her past accomplishments and those are what ignited a spark in her as a performer. It’s a little cheap to bring these up at the last minute but then again, it matches how buried they are in Mahiru’s mind. More importantly, this is a nice demonstration of Karen’s feelings towards Mahiru. The real reason she doesn’t depend on Mahiru the same way she doe with Hikari is because in her eyes, Mahiru is a fine performer on her own and she doesn’t actually need her to shine. And while the status quo has changed, Karen still admires Mahiru and she sees the best qualities in her. Ironically enough, it’s when Karen branches away from Mahiru that the latter is reminded why she was attached to her in the first place. Having this conversation take place behind the Seisho set is a nice touch. It effectively feels like they’re talking “backstage”, much like they did when Karen first made her promise to Mahiru, and it accentuates the intimacy of their confrontation.
Given Karen is ranked last, the show pretty much has to have her defeat Mahiru. That said, the win is very earned since Karen ultimately convinces Mahiru to let go of her fixation on her (or at least dial it down). It only feels right that the actual result of the fight reflects that. Since girls have patched things up by the end of the fight, their final bout is very friendly in nature, which is very refreshing from the intense finishers seen in the previous revues. I kind of want to nitpick the fact that Karen disarming Mahiru’s jacket button as a homerun in baseball. Obviously for the revue, that means she’s won but technically Mahiru has scored more points when she made Karen blast off again. Then again, neither girl has been following the rules of baseball so this is just a silly thought of mine.
The insert song for the Revue of Jealousy is “Love’s Wicked Pitch”. I’m assuming the title refers to Mahiru batting Karen into oblivion. I adore how this song sounds more like a Broadway dance musical number than the more operatic pieces we’ve heard so far. Given the tension between Mahiru and Karen, this is an interesting tone to take but I think it greatly sells Mahiru’s wackiness and it compliments the aesthetic of the duel in creating a fun and whimsical tone. Plus, it’s a nice change of pace.
Given Mahiru’s dominance in the plot of the episode, she naturally sings the first couple of lines in the song. Mahiru’s lines generally have her singing to Karen, asking her not to look away and focus her attention on her. The first chorus is particularly interesting as Mahiru refers to her relationship with Karen as a both a duet and a game. She calls it a duet because she thinks she has something special with Karen and she calls it a game because she’s trying to win Karen’s affection and she’ll keep “playing” it indefinitely. In Mahiru’s last solo verse, there’s a lyric that really stands out to me: “there’s a small light that will disappear come midday”. Hikari’s name translates to “light” while Mahiru’s translates to “midday”. Given those meaning, Mahiru is essentially arguing to Karen that her friendship with Hikari is short-lived while hers will last a long longer.
Karen’s one solo verse has her singing about the promise between her and Hikari, which lines up with her recalling it during the fight when Mahiru begs her to go back to “normal”. She then joins Mahiru in the second and third chorus and I really like how it’s different each time. In the second chorus, the two go back and forth as if they’re dueling in the song just like they are in real life. But after they make up, they sing the last chorus in unison, reflecting the friendlier and more wholesome note that duel ends on.
After the Revue, the gang enjoys some potatoes Mahiru received from her family (admittedly without her permission but don’t worry about it). It’s funny seeing everyone hang out likes this when they literally just spent who knows how long beating each other up. Mahiru’s friends stumble upon the recorded interview though Mahiru stops being embarassed about it when everyone showers her with compliments. I like that this even includes Hikari. After Mahiru accuses her of stealing Karen, I was afraid that there might be some bad blood between them so it’s nice that Hikari makes it water under the bridge.
Overall, this is one of my favorite episodes in the entire show. I think what I love most about it is how well it mixes the character development with the musical element. As much as these revues bring out the darkest sides of the characters, they are ultimately a learning experience for them. Things don’t go as planned for Mahiru but she does recognize her obsession as cowardice, grows from it, and despite the hostility, she’s still friends with Karen. This episode is also just really entertaining, thanks in part to Mahiru’s insanity (both in school and in the revue) and the incredibly catchy and whimsical insert song.
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