10 Second Anime - Kiznaiver - Episode 8

The Kiznaivers get swept up in another mission to test the color of love.

Episode 8 - "Happy times don't tend to last very long."

Heh.

Hearing both Yamada and Urushibara say "loooove" was kind of creepy and interesting.

Maki's sensation was still yellow, but not exactly the color of emotional pain. Noriko called it the color of sadness. Perhaps they were all correct and the color signified lost love.

It took eight episodes to convince me, but there will be no superpowers or villains for power rangers to fight against. This show really is a farce doing a metacriticism on romance slice of life shows. There aren't enough side characters from the research city setting to provide drama and conflict, which is why the volunteers wear Gomorin suits to play the antagonists.

The scientists, Yamada and Urushibara, spewed a lot of biochemical jargon, but all the chemicals and processes they mentioned describe emotional responses.

Our main characters' motivations are pretty solid by now.

Nico wants friends. I want her to have friends too.

Hisomu still wants the pain and isn't too keen on the prospect of feeling positive emotions, although he figured out that's what the next development of their shared sensations was going to cover. He tried provoking negative emotions from Maki instead of just physical pain to see if he liked it. Yeah, having a masochist join the seven was always going to make things difficult.

I'm just putting this picture in here because I love how the girls are more annoyed with Tenga taking the experiment seriously than the ridiculous Gomorins in school gang get-up.

The teachers and their shipping charts seemed about as excited as regular otaku about all the love connections playing out.

The kids, even though they don't take these Gomorin attacks so seriously, still end up going along with the premise. It's Summer vacation after all, so why not have fun with the contrived situations you see in visual novels. Getting trapped in school while having to deal with a rival gang and dealing with rabu-rabu feelings is all about the Springtime of Youth, right?

Will all the relation-shipping going on, Noriko joined the fray to get a response from Katsuhira. She keeps referring to their first experiment and trying to find "herself" in him, so I'm curious in whose wound was actually shared and how the kizna system failed that first time around.

Noriko receives some kind of injection regularly. Is her condition related to the first experiment?

In the meantime, let all the shipping happen!

Tenga called Nico cute and whoa! That green color is something we totally have not seen before.

Yuta! Do your best!

Yes, Noriko is adding to the archive of S-Class zettai ryouiki. It wasn't made very clear how Katsuhira needed to be there at the subway entrance to rescue Noriko, but I suppose we put it together that he "felt" her through their old kizna connection and saw her through the glass doors.

What was interesting and revealing was how the scar on her neck was the exact shape of the other seven kids and the strong response she was emitting was a white color. White usually means a combination of all colors, so she could be feeling everything for Katsuhira. The problem is who is receiving this powerful response. From what we saw in the first episode, young Katsuhira's original scar was on his chest, but I didn't see that glowing in response. Perhaps we'll see it happen on the other side of the cliffhanger?

Hmm.

This episode was also the heavy exposition tl;dr for the backstory. Yamada explained how the first set of kids, of which we know from pictures that Katsuhira and Noriko were members, tested the kizna system by sharing emotions first. That ended up being too unpredictable and the consequences will be explained later, I guess. Supposedly, all the kids are still alive and I keep looking at them to see if they've been put into the show as their grownup selves already.

They learned that negative emotions were the easiest to predict and describe and they usually came from physical pain, so the next experiments concentrated on that. It was Noriko who came up with the 7 Toxic Personalities theory to connect these negative emotions and develop positive emotions in a "pure" environment. Since these kids were so psychologically damaged in their unique ways, they wouldn't readily share or even respond with positive emotions to mere strangers.

I thought it was a powerful moment for Katsuhira to ask about what happened to the kids from the first experiment. Obviously, the teachers know his role in it, so I was interested to see how they would keep it a secret and what clues we could get about the aftermath from their response. They're all alive, but it's all still mysterious. The overall plot's path should be connecting with these grownup kids pretty soon.

Well, we got a cliffhanger with some white color being provoked during the meeting of the OTP. Poor Chidori. She's going to have her own love triangle to distract her too!