Notes on 07-Ghost Episode Two

The only show which features a character named ‘Mikage’ who isn’t a pedophile.

…if Revolutionary Girl Utena is the only show you’ve seen that has a character named Mikage.

Basically, all you need to know about this episode is the following: Teito ends up at a church after falling out of the sky into a bishop’s lap. He has flickers of past memories, gets accosted by over-friendly nuns, and watches the bishounen bishops wow crowds of on-lookers. The whole time he rattles around in chains, because the manga-ka couldn’t figure out how else to work in bondage since good hosts always leave the chains of their guests intact for no apparent reason. Meanwhile, Ayanami kind of, sort of grills Mikage about Teito’s whereabouts and whether he helped him escape or not.

Running commentary:

0:00 – hey, they stole the bells from MariMite

0:40 – Teito’s getting sodomized by a steeple again!

2:54 – did they jank Tohma from Gravitation and dye his hair purple?

4:40 – anyone can take refuge in the mysterious place? why does this feel worse than those anime that take place at all-boys’ academies?

4:56 – mysterious chains! just like Mai-Hime Destiny! but without the massive rack!

6:13 – clergymen are always so weird in anime – in the real world, guys like this would never be religious figures in a million years

7:59 – whenever I hear ‘Mikage’ I just picture the one from Utena – y’know, the pink-haired homosexual pedophile who kept leading kids astray during the Black Rose Arc, all the while groping a twelve year old boy who turned out to actually be a fourteen year old (well, physically) girl

8:04 – is it butt rape time?

9:05 – oh, fuck, even pseudo-BL these days has nuns

9:40 – I feel like I fell into a harem anime – what the hell is this crap about nuns waiting on him hand and foot? I tuned in for the fakey-BL, not this junk

10:39 – LOLZ fake homoerotic dialogue!

11:22 – wait a minute, no one bothered to take the chains off? I smell a bull-shit plot device lurking

12:09 – yeah, I’m sure that bishops are always cute, young guys

12:35 – I’ve always hated conveniently placed locals who spew all the pertinent information out whilst the protagonist stands by listening

13:45 – like hell you climbed a ladder while in chains

14:33 – oh, looks like bishops are just like sensory-deprived male otaku

15:00 – I always hide my porn in library history books

15:04 – they’re just trying to kill any whiff of BL, aren’t they?

16:35 – well, if that isn’t them pretty much saying the history books lie, I don’t know what is

18:40 – great, just when I was feeling like this is all too ridiculous, they had to pull theological stuff out of their asses and actually make me interested in it all…

20:27 – as if you weren’t already the lead candidate for ‘most likely to be gay’

20:46 – damn, more Utena references! somehow, I doubt this ends in a slap, though

21:38 – insta-drama!

On some other points, I find the fact that the bishops all wear veils to be hilarious. This show is so overwrought in some ways that I can’t help but keep watching, even though its really not all that good (at least not yet).

I also kind of wonder why they don’t just straight-up plunge headfirst into BL territory instead of hovering around in innuendo land – let’s face it, the only folks watching this are desperate/crazy fangirls like myself, so its not as if they’re going to scare off any prospective others. The moment that 80% of the guys who checked it out saw Mikage rolling around in Teito’s bed, they ran away, so why not just make it a bit more clear on that point, huh?