©阿賀沢紅茶／集英社・TVアニメ「氷の城壁」製作委員会
We finally get the full truth of Koyun’s bullied past and her relationship with Igarashi.
What They Say:
Weighed down by memories she can’t shake, high schooler Koyuki Hikawa keeps everyone at arm’s length — until three schoolmates draw her out ..
The Review: (Please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With Akine Atagawa, the younger sister of her main junior high tormentor, approaching Koyun and asking if they can be friends, the memories Koyun’s been trying to bury are forced to the surface. When she joined the basketball team as a first-year in junior high, a friend from her neighborhood was a senior who leaned on Koyun to help bring the other first years along. Her easy friendship with the seniors on the team, which led to a building camaraderie with other seniors, made her first-year teammate, Manatsu Atagawa, jealous and the target of Manatsu’s bullying. When she discovered that Manatsu had a crush on Igarashi, Koyun decides to accept his confession just to spite Manatsu, despite Koyun not liking him in that way. While this led to Manatsu’s underhandedness being brought to light, it also heightened Koyun’s anxieties, as she knew she was being unfair to Igarashi and was just using him. These memories bring her to question Akine’s intentions but also force her to confront the difficult feelings she had been running from.
After a relatively fluffy episode last week, this one returns to type. We finally appear to get the full story as to everything that happened to Koyun in junior high, as she no longer seems to be able to ignore her suppressed emotions. It’s difficult for her now, but of course, it will be good for her in the long run, as even when she has been having a good time in high school, there has always been a sense of, “Yeah, but…” to it. She still has a lot to process before she can really move on, of course, but she needs to get on with it before she can.
What I will be curious to see is what others’ interpretations of events are. I found it interesting that Koyun does actually seem to have a legit reason for feeling like her bad junior high memories are just as much her fault as everybody else. Often, we hear characters say this, but when they reveal the past, we find out they are just being hard on themselves. In Koyun’s case, she freely admits that she dated Igarashi only so that Manatsu would suffer. Gotta love pre-teen drama. In this case, it seems like Manatsu deserved some kind of comeuppance for how she treated Koyun, just because Koyun was friendly with the seniors, but in Koyun’s attempts to get back at her, Igarashi is caught in the crossfire. He seems to be fully exonerated and the real victim in all of this. He thought she liked him back, and he protected her from Manatsu, only to have his feelings betrayed. He was honest with his feelings towards Koyun, but she wasn’t honest with hers, and he was made to suffer for it. There have been enough twists and turns in this so far that I’m not sure we’ve got the final word on any of it, but it was definitely some interesting revelations.
©阿賀沢紅茶／集英社・TVアニメ「氷の城壁」製作委員会
Of course, a major piece of the puzzle that I assume we’ll be getting at some point is the Atagawa outlook on this, whether Akine’s, Manatsu’s, or both. Clearly, Akine has a part to play here. It is understandable why Koyun would be skeptical of her, but our initial impressions of her seem pretty solid. She’s the cool type, so it’s hard to get a full read on her, but Yuki has decent things to say about her (though he’s clearly a ditz, so who knows if we can trust his judgment), and she seems very supportive of Kuriki’s pursuit of Minato (in a positive way). When Miki shows Koyun the social media post from Manatsu of the sisters together with the hashtag “Besties,” it certainly intensifies her suspicions, but we see Akine looking at the same post later and seems bothered by it. The implication is either that Akine is not on the same wavelength as her sister, or that she has knowledge of the events of the past and/or how things have gone since then that might change Koyun’s outlook. Either way, there are still fireworks to be had.
In Summary:
We seem to be starting to turn up the dial a bit with Koyun’s past, and I’m really curious to see where it all goes with Akine. Add that we have a new rival for Minato’s affections (not that Koyun is fully vibing him at the moment…and her hanging out with Yota is still too adorable), and there is a lot of intrigue for the near future. We’re coming to the end of the Spring broadcast season, and there’s been no official word on episode count for The Ramparts of Ice, so I’m not sure how much time we have left with these characters in anime form, but I really hope it keeps going (whether just directly into Summer or a second cour in the near future) because it’s starting to get spicy. Highly Recommended.
Grade: A
Streamed by: Netflix
Mark Thomas
Mark teaches English and Creative Writing in Florida and learned the awesomeness of anime through Akira and Dominion Tank Police while growing up in the UK. Since then, he has spent most of his life watching anime and playing video games–sometimes at the same time if he can arrange it (ADHD-much?). This would be the point in the bio where he would normally share where you could find him on social media, but as a general curmudgeon when it comes to social media since the MySpace days, he has recently given up any pretense of enthusiasm for the form.
