Summary:
Youko is weighing herself and isn’t happy with what she sees. For whatever reason, she starts to suspect her tail, so she starts a workout and diet for it. At school the next day, Youko pays a visit to Keita to show off that her tail lost four grams. One of Keita’s schoolmates, a guy named Kawarazaki Naoki, then comes onto the roof with a request for Keita to find a person. Actually, Keita doesn’t have to do anything because the person Kawarazaki is searching for is none other than Youko, who he had seen on the street one day. Kawarazaki wants Youko as the model for his heroine for his comic. Youko initially is thrilled, but that turns to anger when he compares her tail to a raccoon’s.
At home, Keita tries to speak up for Kawarazaki. Youko suspects something is up and she’s right: Keita promised a date between her and Kawarazaki in exchange for one week’s worth of lunch bread. Just as Youko is about to kill Keita again, the cat from the hot springs shows up, dressed in a Buddhist costume. Soon after, a black shadow comes into their apartment and puts Keita and Youko into costumes too. The black shadow is actually a wooden chicken, the one Karina had told Keita about on the previous night over the phone. This chicken has special cosplay powers (ones that prevent the victims from taking off the clothes) and followed the cat here.
When Kawarazaki comes to their apartment, the chicken reacts to him and takes a spot on his shoulder. It seems to read his mind, transforming Youko into a magical cat girl and Keita into a cat boy in a girl’s school swimsuit. Kawarazaki runs around town with his newfound powers transforming everyone in sight. Keita knows that the cosplay wears off after two hours, which will leave everyone naked. He finally confronts Kawarazaki by the water during the sunset and the two proceed to have a fight. It ends in a draw, and Kawarazaki escapes via the river. The special investigator Karina arrives and takes the chicken, which is now smoking because its used up its powers. He explains that the chicken read people’s minds and changed appearances. Back at home, Keita is combing Youko’s tail and comments that it’s thinner now. Youko blows him up because she thinks he’s being sarcastic since her tail has actually gotten fatter.

The first half of the episode wasn’t that funny, but once the cosplay started, so did the laughs. So many random costumes and references to random series (Gundam, various sentai shows, etc), and almost everyone got neko-mimi (cat ears) lol. Actually, the DBZ scene was the best one, just because of how well they parodied it (in the very over-the-top fashion). I could have done without seeing Keita in a girl’s swimsuit though. I probably won’t ever look at one the same way. >_<
The return of the cat was a bit random since I didn’t expect him to be a recurring character. Maybe Kawarazaki, the fighting otaku, will return too to continue his fight lol.

10 Comments

  1. This episode gave me a stomach ache from laughing. Where’d all these parodies come from? All we’ve seen otherwise was Nausicaa… I think. Always good to see the studio screwing around and having fun with the show though.

    AC
  2. Though I would like to know what Karina was talking about at the end when he’s holding the chicken. For example, that picture of the 3 skulls on the belly of the chicken looks exactly like the one behind Karina in the OP.

    Gil
  3. This episode really gave off Urusei Yatsura vibes. Youko(Lum) always preventing Keita(Ataru) from girl~hunting and it made all that much more hilarious in this episode when they introduced megane.!?

    SS
  4. Omni, why don’t you try watching this alongside Rizelmine? I promise you, you’ll start getting different views of the world for some time.

    Plus, I want to see what the comments people make about Rizelmine ^^.

    Izaak
  5. Yeah, episode 8 was the absolute best. All the most awesome stuff in the whole show happened in that one. The fight between Keita and the otaku king was mighty epic. Although he was pretty badass in pretty much the whole series. Like the fight with the shinigami. It could be taken to be even crueler satire of DBZ than that flash video “DBZ in a nutshell”, maybe, yet so much more – since after all, he’s wearing a school swimsuit and cat ears and a tail. Also the fight sequence was animated way better than DBZ ever was. Though probably few people besides myself would ever notice this. His conversation with the policeman when caught wearing this insane combination is so memorable. “Is there a law against wearing cat ears, a tail and a school swimsuit?” “No…. but it’s just wrong.” or something like that. And of course, that was the one where Youko was trying to put her tail on a diet. Weighing it on the scale and lifting the soda bottle was kind of funny. What that does is make a mockery of regular human girls’ trying to make themselves look like stick figures by having her act so similarly with a part of her body that they can’t identify with. But she really has a huge freaking tail. But it’s certainly an aesthetic width for its length. Realistically, it would have to be very muscular to support that length. And she’s a growing girl (even if her kind ages so slowly that she’s like 300-something years old already) and the rest of her looks practically anorexic already. Definitely she suffers from an unrealistically poor self image.

    But you should definitely check out the manga. Episode 8 of the anime is volume 3, chapter 14 in the manga. It’s fun to see the story retold, a little bit different. For instance, in the manga, it seems the costumes the chicken generates aren’t really costumes but are not costumes but real (and they last until the chicken runs out of magic, not until some time limit), and Youko’s completely thrilled that the chicken turned her into a catgirl because now her tail is so slender and catlike. And the chicken just grants people’s hearts’ desires, it doesn’t merely create costumes – it’s just that the chicken got into the hands of the super otaku guy and he wanted to create a nekomimi world. So the manga’s a little different from the anime. Worth a look.

    Sandor

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