Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-kun Season 4 ‒ Episode 22
It was always going to be basically impossible to top Lilith's Carpet for musical performances, in any show really, but especially in this one. Nevertheless, this episode made a good effort – not to be better than the Misfits' performance, but to do something different and yet still striking. If Punk Irumi didn't do it for you (and the value there was in the “shocking” transformations of the Devimuse team), then maybe Gyari's on-stage contortions did. I may dislike her – I rarely find her type of character entertaining – but boy, did she ever look good bending her body around onstage. It's particularly interesting to compare her gyrations with Elizabetta's much smoother, classier approach to sexy in Lilith's Carpet - Elizabetta is a femme fatale, and one who's saddled with the role. Gyari is doing her damnedest to be sexy in as overt a way as possible, powering through on sheer chutzpah. She believes she's the best, so you should believe it, too.
She's also really, really annoying, which in some ways may be because of that chutzpah thing. We tend to view the word as a positive when it's used in English as a loanword, but in the original Yiddish, “chutzpah” can also have a negative connotation; in fact, the Hebrew word it evolved from (and probably the Aramaic as well) means something more closely related to “insolent,” and some Yiddish scholars and speakers use it strictly in a negative sense. Gyari embodies both usages of the word, both the positive English and the negative Yiddish – she's got guts to spare, but she's also rude and entitled. She is, in many ways, the embodiment of what a classic demon is supposed to be…at least, according to people like Kiriwo and his crew. She's just the slightly less toxic variant, because she really does appear to have a crush on Kuromu and can be made to back off, albeit temporarily.
She also has a version of the good grace to allow Team Devimuse to win without belaboring the point or attempting to steal the prize along with Kuromu and Irumi's hearts. (Or bodies. Or both. Hard to tell with her.) A piece of her recognizes that they really did outshine her – their song was, like hers, a remix of their norm, but unlike Gyari's one song, Team Devimuse made a concerted effort to alter their music to fit the theme. Gyari just did what she always does: charge onstage, kick Beeber out, and sing her one song basically how she always does. The crowd loves her for this, because she's nothing if not entertaining, but there's no real skill involved. Team Devimuse changed their look, their song style, and their performance before switching back to their classic, demonstrating that they're not just a gimmick: they have talent. Gyari's basically just loud.
Their performance is also as close as we've gotten to Evil Cycle Iruma again. It's obviously artificially induced by ALI, but fans should take what they can get, and it's just as clear that Irumi's not acting; for the entire time he's in that punk outfit, he's plainly evil. That's probably the safest way to go up against Gyari, really, because Evil Irumi is unflappable, even when faced with a stuttering Ameri who has definitely gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick where Iruma and Kuromu are concerned. In fact, I'd bet that Lindy wishes he had some of Irumi's evil energy, because Beeber and his bandmate are not going to be easy to shake off…he'd probably be fine with being replaced in next year's competition by Azz and Clara for that sole reason. It didn't really work out for him in terms of meeting his music hero this time, after all.
I didn't love this demdol storyline, mostly because of Gyari, but I also liked it better than the previous one, if only because it felt shorter. (I guess I'm just not into demdols.) The whole “MVA” versus “MVD” thing, where the writing reflects the “akudol” name used in Japanese rather than the “demdol” English translation, is a little awkward, but overall, I feel like translators did their best here. And now I'm looking forward to learning more about Sabnock next week. He's been kind of a two-note character for most of the series, so I'm ready to see another Misfit who's been in the background shine.
Rating:
Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-kun is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.
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