Shy

Episode 11

Spirit's spat with her miniature mother ends this week on a sweet and sensitive note—and with the help of a couple of handles of vodka. There are no surprises, but that's due to how well the previous episode set everything up. Teru already helped Pepesha do the hard part, and now that she's earnestly engaging with Tzveta as a specter of her mother, her words come out exactly as they should. While this adds up to another assault on the audience's heartstrings, it still feels earned. The ultimate message is emotional maturity and honesty, a nicely nuanced resolution for a series about magic jewelry that bestows superpowers.

My favorite facets of this arc ended up being its focus on the mother-daughter relationship and the frank way it approached the complications of single parenthood. In trying to think of good reference points, I realized that there aren't a lot of examples in anime/manga of adult children emotionally grappling with their mothers like this, and there are even fewer examples in the superhero milieu. That's not to say Shy is blazing trails here, and the show still lacks the complexity you'd get from a pure drama that devotes its time to honing its characters and their relationships. This arc also cheats by resurrecting Letana, so it doesn't entirely escape the long shadow cast by all the dead/absent moms throughout literary history. The result, however, is still satisfying to me. Pepesha and Letana are similarly flawed (gosh, it's almost like they're related!), yet they love each other enough to push through their insecurities and embrace each other literally and figuratively. There's mutual acknowledgment and forgiveness.

"Mutual" probably deserves to have quotation marks around it, though. While the exact mechanics are kept ambiguous, Tzveta's explanation of Stigma's powers implies that he formed her from the desires and regrets that poured out of Pepesha's heart. She more or less unintentionally willed an incarnation of Letana into being, which makes this confrontation more of an internal one than a truly spectral one. I still think it's valid to read it the other way and imagine that Pepesha helped lay Letana's spirit to proper rest. But I like the added psychological complexity of Pepesha battling herself, which reinforces that this arc was about her, not Letana. She is, after all, her mother's daughter and the demons that haunted Letana similarly haunt her. She says that alcohol is a potion that lets adults become children, so given her propensity towards the sauce, we can interpret Tzveta's younger appearance and obsession with protecting children as a projection of Pepesha's dissatisfaction with adulthood.

There's irony, then, in how Stigma's attempt to prey on Pepesha's insecurities lets her process the repressed trauma of losing her mother and blaming herself for it. He should quit this world-domination business and become a psychologist! I would not be surprised if the other villains in Amarariruku hold to this pattern. Most of the heroes we've met so far have come with some degree of emotional baggage, so it stands to reason there will be a person from their past that Stigma will be able to materialize and manipulate. That does, however, raise the question of who Kufufu is related to. Pepesha having mommy issues is relatable and respectable. I don't want to imagine the depth of shame I'd feel if the coalesced anthropomorphization of my psychological hangups was a clown.

Once again, my main complaint has to do with pacing. As touching as this conflict is in its best moments—Letana's hug and promise, Pepesha seeing her mother's frozen body, the two of them sharing their final drink, etc.—the overall structure is a tad too languid and repetitive to have sustained the entirety of these past three episodes. More judicious editorialization could have made this a stronger and more bittersweet tear-jerker. Kufufu, for example, feels wholly extraneous this week. I liked her earlier comic relief and would have liked to see the series explore her relationship with Tzveta more. It seems like they genuinely cared for each other, and that's an interesting quality for a pair of presumed tulpas. Regardless, she's reduced to playing futile interference in this final act, and it adds little to the narrative or its themes.

Teru has once again acted as an emotional lighthouse for a friend struggling with self-hatred, and Shy has once again crafted a touching conclusion to a character's internal conflict. It's reassuring that the spark that pulled me into this anime continues to stay lit as this season winds down. It's not as fully formed as other dramas, and the series remains an undeniably odd duck as far as superhero stories go, but I like this unique niche that Shy has carved for itself.

Rating:

Shy is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Steve is on Twitter while it lasts. He is a recovering shy kid. You can also catch him chatting about trash and treasure alike on This Week in Anime.