Dark Gathering – 03

「ふたり」 (Futari)
“Friends”

Dark Gathering’s third episode gives Keitaro a way out by turning his back on Yayoi for roping him into supernatural happenings that he truly despises for ruining his life. But when Yayoi tries to find a way to break Keitaro’s curse, he is brought back into the fold and is led further down a supernatural rabbit hole.

GET IN MY BELLAY!

I remember reading earlier this season about how the anime had a bit of a mean streak, especially with how Keitaro gets dragged into all of these haunting places against his will. It definitely leans on the cruel side knowing that they constantly made someone who has trauma from ghosts and has been a shut-in out of fear of meeting ghosts get dragged into situations where he’d be exposed to them.

In a sense, Keitaro’s behavior in this episode has been a long time coming as he puts his foot down and tells them to stop taking him to places where he can be re-traumatized over and over again out of the whims of an insensitive little girl. Even when he decides to save Yayoi, it takes the guilt of knowing that she was trying to cure his condition to make it an obligation to stay within the inner circle that continues to trigger Keitaro’s fear for the supernatural.

At the same time, it’s great to see how he has a lot more agency in this episode considering how the past two have had Keitaro be a test dummy for the ghosts to strangle. Doing football jukes against the ghosts to grab Yayoi was a fun solution to getting her out of there, and helps to steer away from the pattern of Yayoi having to save Keitaro’s skin.

It is interesting that the secret ingredient for curing Keitaro’s curse would be to conquer Kishimojin, a goddess of children whose army of dead and/or unborn babies pursue Yayoi throughout the episode. It lends itself to the morose, macabre mentality that goes into exactly what kinds of apparitions they’re forced to go toe-to-toe with.

I was also very impressed with the kinds of solutions Yayoi has to go through in order to tame the spirits to her liking. Engineering them to keep Yayoi safe while having their spirits harnessed into becoming poison bombs is so wild, as is the methodology she put into using a statue’s finger to torment the goddess. It’ll be exciting to see how the show continues given how it hints towards what Eiko might be afflicted with, and what Keitaro might do to help the girls out with their spirit hunts.