Episode 8 You are the servant girl

Of all the tools that lead us into a more detailed look at Yuki’s past, I certainly didn’t expect it to be pointless – but against all odds, that’s exactly what happened. On paper, I really liked the idea of ​​this episode revolving around Yuki, who loves sauce so much and couldn’t get it for a while because the store was closed. I actually thought it worked for the first few minutes of the episode. But as a continuation of her nightmares, an empty bottle of soy sauce to continue looking back at her painful childhood? I’m not sure about this part. The term “pitch whipping” comes to mind.

It’s really hard to take the exhibition crap about Yuki’s childhood seriously when it’s delivered by a giant, cartoonishly empty sauce bottle. It annoys me that the episode didn’t need to tell us about Yuki’s past in such a jarring way. I think it’s safe to say that Yuki has been through so much that no one would question that she was just having nightmares, without any particular rhyme or reason. The show doesn’t need to make excuses for her, let alone a conflict with such an intense tone. But since this sauce-less plot more or less disappeared later on, that’s exactly what it turned out to be: an excuse to have no sauce, both literally and figuratively.

I say this storyline “more or less” disappears because we’re quickly told that the school is having a festival and the class that gets the overall highest ranking in the festival will be rewarded with some premium sauce. Needless to say, this was an irresistible prospect to the sauce-starved Yuki. But I don’t think Yuki’s unquenchable thirst for sauce is necessary to the plot; of course, she wants good quality sauce regardless of whether she’s in a sauce-free state or not. So the whole sauceless plot ended up feeling completely redundant.

And speaking of school, it turns out that Yuki’s grades are very poor. On the one hand, it does happen – someone can be smart even if they didn’t do well in school (and vice versa). But on the other hand, it’s in this episode that we learn that the whole thing that led to Yuki becoming an assassin was that she was a brilliant prodigy. So I have mixed feelings about the credibility of her poor grades in school. Her powers of observation and photographic memory, already strong enough to speak fifteen different languages, were particularly emphasized—and would give her a huge academic advantage. But at the same time, during Yuki’s bloody upbringing, I wonder if she’s learning about the French Revolution, or how mitochondria are the powerhouse of cells. So let’s just call it a wash; Yuki did poorly in school, which isn’t necessarily unbelievable.

Finally, this week’s episode further confirmed what I’ve been thinking for the past few weeks about this anime trying to do too much in too little time. It was very clear that we wanted to know more about Fei Qianlichaos; childmay or may not be Yuki’s sister. At the very least, she’s someone who deeply admires her – which makes me think that, based on what we learned in this episode about the strained relationship between Yuki and her sister, maybe she’s not Yuki’s sister after all (she Probably just another assassin, in this case). As we’ve seen in previous episodes, the anime likes to introduce new elements into the story, but it never really does anything with them. So if the anime stays as is, she will no longer be relevant after next week – destined to be replaced by another supporting character or story element with a maximum shelf life of two episodes.

So that said, in a lot of ways it’s all pretty tame. Don’t get me wrong; I’m more interested than ever in the details of Yuki’s backstory, and I’m glad the series is finally shedding more light on the matter. But at the same time, this anime seems to have a hard time deciding what it wants to do and what kind of anime it wants to be. Lately it feels more and more like I’m throwing everything at the wall instead of waiting to see if anything sticks. At the moment, there are only a few episodes left and I’m not feeling very optimistic about it getting back on track anytime soon.

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you are a servant lady Currently streaming on Crunchyroll.