Akiba Maid War

Episode 11

An Akiba Maid War episode without a cold open indicates that things are probably about to go down on the mean streets of Akihabara in this one. How could they not after last week's episode and the dramatic landing strip it laid out for the series? The show is aware of its scope beyond that preceding preamble, as its writing is attentive enough to bring elements from all across the anime's run into this penultimate entry. It turns out to be the best kind of chapter in a story: One that builds on all the episodes that led up to it and makes them seem even better with the benefit of hindsight.

That previous episode trotted out the question of what happiness could look like for an Akiba maid and whether they deserved to dream of such a thing on account of all the crimes and killings that drove their existence. This week's entry keeps some of that same theme at its core and even centers it on Ranko. Ranko's whole raison d'être thus far had been her presumptive perusal of the person who killed her mentor, Miss Michiyo. With the answers at last given to her by Okachimachi, it would seem all she has left to do is pick up one more surreptitious firearm from the ramen shop owner and head out for that fated confrontation with Head Maid Nagi. Yeah, there's the added wrinkle of the other Oinky-Doinks initially seeming to let her go it alone before resolving to help out after all, but we've known they were up for that level of loyalty since they all turned out for Ranko's birthday party.

The driving ideas become deeper once we get a handle on Ranko's actual intentions and why. Before the question of happiness in a life after maidship, Akiba Maid War had used episodes like its fourth one to entertain the question of why these girls would work as maids in this gritty, grisly setting in the first place. The answer arrived at by Shiipon was that it could be fun and fulfilling. For Ranko, the time spent in this skewed service industry was what pleased her most after all. It's a shift in priorities that might have crystallized recently with her considering what happiness could be for the first time. She confirms that she had intended to kill her former sworn sister, as we could have guessed, but is now willing to prostrate herself and offer her life in exchange for the place and people she came to call home.

It creates an interesting, interconnected struggle to watch as we process Nagi/Uzuko's multi-layered attempts to sway Ranko to the power-based maid business structure she envisions for Akiba. Sure, she can list off things like security, respect, or wealth, but it's been apparent that none of that stuff was ever anything Ranko remotely wanted. We see the happier times she was striving to recapture in a flashback at her old café, and through her co-workers helping her, we understand that she finally found that.

The storytelling culminating in all this is elevated by Akiba Maid War's presentation this week. The show's always benefited from P.A. Works' satisfactory style, usually coming alive even more when the violence popped off. But this episode devotes most of its resources to the character acting for Ranko, Nagomi, and Uzuko during this tense confrontation. They don't just tell us how much Ranko cares for her co-workers; we see how she visibly shakes when forced to choose between killing her former sister or letting her new best friend, Nagomi, die. Nagomi's frightened but still confident conviction comes through in her movements and Reina Kondo's vocal performance, following up on the episode's earlier scene where she pointedly flinched just from an unloaded gun clicking in front of her. Uzuko's self-righteous indignation and confusion at these pigs not adhering to her philosophy rings as she becomes slightly more unhinged in her attempts to sway them. We cringe as she stabs Ranko through the hand, then roar with uproarious approval as Ranko dramatically uses the blood of that hand to demonstrate the power of the ketchup-drawing techniques she honed with her café comrades.

All this, plus the epic shootout happening back at Oinky-Doink, culminates into what feels like an early season finale. We have followed up on the goals of a maid, seen why one would be a maid, and found out what it would take to make a maid happy, and all of these turned out to be intertwined as the same pursuit. Ranko even managed to save Oinky-Doink and settle things peacefully, just as Nagomi wished back in the baseball episode. What can be left but…the end of a maid? Yes, even Nerula's traumatizing death in Nagomi's arms and the inevitable tragic fate of Manami must have foreshadowed this conclusion, as it's proved for Ranko that a full, happy life can't ever be an option for a Maid. Dear viewers, you know I was screaming at this last-second twist in the best possible way.

Arguably, Ranko's sudden stabbing and apparent death as Nagomi watches trips into the same too-sincere pathos of Nerula's demise. Still, as with other elements in Akiba Maid War, I think it pulls it off here. There are still serious storytelling elements powering it, like the tragic cycle from Ranko witnessing her mentor's murder in the show's beginning, to being taken out herself by a vengeful, anonymous maid assassin. Is this payback for the maid accidentally killed by Zoya at the previous confrontation's conclusion? Or any of the other servers disposed of by Ranko across the show who were treated like mere statistics otherwise? Does it matter? That's the earned effectiveness that makes watching our beloved main character bleed out on the street feel like both a genuine tragedy and a brilliantly outlandish genre pastiche. Yes, there is one more episode after this tragic turn, but they could have run this as the final episode anyway, and the point would still have landed. We'd never seen anything like Akiba Maid War before, and now, it is made apparent we might never again.

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Akiba Maid War is currently streaming on HIDIVE.

Chris is a freewheeling Fresno-based freelancer with a love for anime and a shelf full of too many Transformers. He can be found spending way too much time on his Twitter, and irregularly updating his blog.