The Summer arrival of an all-new sequel series to Monogatari comes as a total and immensely pleasant surprise to yours truly. The last installment, Zoku Owarimonogatari, aired a whole five years ago. Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one who thought the series should just go on indefinitely as long as there’s Nisio Isin material to adapt.
Off and Monster Season’s first episode eschews the high school graduate Koyomi entirely, instead choosing Ononoki Yotsugi as the POV and protagonist. Those like me who leap at the opportunity to hear Hayami Saori deadpan for a half-hour will be pleased.
The story is fairly self-contained: Yotsugi’s cover as Araragi Tsuhiki’s lifeless plushie has been blown thanks to her being caught eating ice cream, so she has to tell Tsukihi an elaborate story about how she’s an interdimensional magical girl who borrowed her plushie’s body so she could defeat the enemy.
But because Yotsugi brings up an enemy to be defeated, the younger Fire Sister (Iguichi Yuka) won’t be denied the opportunity to lend a helping hand. Bereft of an enemy to fight, Yotsugi goes to aspiring manga artist Sengoku Nadeko (Hanazawa Kana), who is Doing Just Fine, to draw her a slug, like the one Kaiki used to extract the snake god that possessed her.
Yotsugi picks the familiar and iconic Namishiro Park, and its playground equipment that doubles as postmodern art, as the venue for her and Tsukihi’s battle against the slug monster, the drawing of which she previously hid in the sandbox. Tsukihi arrives all gung-ho in her traditional combat garb and brandishing a polearm.
Yotsugi’s job was to observe Tsukihi, who is the vessel for the Shide no Tori, AKA bird of death, AKA phoenix. As she puts Tsukihi to work salting the grounds, Yotsugi contemplates whether an everlasting apparition like the phoenix even grasps the difference between life and death.
While Yotsugi was presumably assigned to observe Tsukihi due to the latter’s potential to wreak havoc on the human world and anyone she interacts with, the chaos that ensues in the park is entirely of Yotsugi’s making.
She bites off more than she can chew with the slug monster, who gives her a thrashing and burns her corpse body. Tsukihi, unaware as always of her own immortality, still sacrifices herself to protect Yotsugi, as she and her sister Karen have always been champions of justice.
Yotsugi is spared ruin by the town god, Hachikuji Mayoi, who simply folds the slug drawing back up, causing its monstrous form to fold in turn. Mayoi didn’t want to interrupt a professional at work, but as she saw a friend and ally was having some trouble, and that the slug might threaten her town, Mayoi took the tiniest bit of action to resolve the situation.
As such, Yotsugi’s ruse ends up actually succeeding, albeit in a roundabout way. Because Tsukihi “died” in the park, when she’s resurrected in the morning she remembers nothing of the events that occurred, or that her plushie ever moved.
Yotsugi equates memories to trauma, and that in the phoenix’s flames of rebirth, all of that trauma is purified. This is how despite everything she’s been through, leading to her various past deaths, Tsukihi can remain as bright and cheerful and shiny as ever.
After Tsukihi washes her face, puts on her uniform, and heads off to school, Yotsugi believes the coast is clear to eat more of the ice cream Koyomi gave her. That’s when Tsukihi suddenly bursts back into her room and screams—discovering all over again that her plushie is moving and eating ice cream.
Thus the cycle repeats, and Yotsugi must again convince Tsukihi she’s an interdimensional magical girl who has possessed her plushie in order to defeat the enemy. With this spectacularly slick and stylish episode that’s a cut above anything else this season—visually, musically, and nostalgically—Monogatari announces its triumphant return with its typical quirky confidence.
