Dead Dead Demon's Dededede Destruction

Episode 4

Is there anything more representative of this series than five normal high school girls celebrating Christmas while the government offhandedly kills a group of aliens simply for existing?

Anyway, up until this point in the series, the story has been mostly focused on Kadode (with the last episode branching out to explore the ancillary cast). This episode, on the other hand, is about one person and one person only: Ouran.

Ouran has mostly been comic relief. She spouts chunibyo delusions about the corruption of the world and how she will become the world's greatest villain. She lashes out in jealousy at Kiho for getting a boyfriend and is more interested in gaming than school. However, this episode shows that she is more than just a comedic foil.

Ouran does care about those around her—despite how disconnected from reality she can seem to be. We got a hint of this last episode where she turned from teasing Kiho to comforting her the moment she learned the girl was depressed. In this episode, she is also the one to get Kiho to open up about her breakup and share her pain with her friends.

And when Kiho dies, Ouran takes it upon herself to keep the friend group from falling into despair. She acts as crazy as normal—acts as if she doesn't know that Kiho died. She gets her friends to go out for something fun rather than mope around at school—and then tries to be strong when the rest of them break down and cry. All this is fantastic character development for Ouran, however, what's even more interesting is the reason why she does all these things.

A few episodes back, we learned that Ouran is the most important thing in Kodade's life. Finding love with her teacher or figuring out what to do with her future—these problems are manageable as long as Ouran is by her side. This episode shows that it is the same for Ouran. She's just as ride-or-die for Kadode as Kodade is for her. They share their joy and sadness. They also aim together (and fail together) to get into the same college.

And then we get a peek inside Ouran's head—get to see how she views her longtime relationship with Kodade. What we see is a young girl trying to belong to the in-group but is constantly impressed with the class outsider—the girl who stands up for what she believes in regardless of any ridicule. It's easy to see why Ouran's awe would grow into a genuine friendship.

There's just one problem with this flashback: It contradicts what we have seen before. Instead of Ouran jumping in to protect Kodade from bullying as we saw in Kodade's flashback, Ouran simply watches on. Their memories don't match—and to our resident alien dressed as a human, this means that Ouran is a bit less normal than she appears to be.

Rating:

Random Thoughts:

• Man, not being able to read the Twitter text makes Hiroshi's subplot incomprehensible. (The girl he was catfishing left her bag on the train. It had her ticket for the college entrance exam in it. Without the ticket, she couldn't take the exam and thus her whole future is suddenly thrown into chaos.)

• If you didn't already think the teacher was scum, he has a girlfriend whom he was willing to cheat on with his high school student.

• Kiho was always afraid she was the odd man out of the group—and she was right. While sad at the time, the other two pairs of friends were able to move on without too much trouble.

• In the modern-day portion of this series, a total of 36 humans have died so far in alien-related events. Of course, all of those have been killed by the actions of other humans rather than the actions of the aliens.