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IRODUKU: The World in Colors
Episode 7

by Rebecca Silverman,

How would you rate episode 7 of
IRODUKU: The World in Colors ?
Community score: 4.1

Well, that didn't last long. When this episode opens, we learn that Hitomi's color-vision left almost as soon as she got it. It does make sense with one potential meaning behind her colors, however – if, as the golden fish suggest, Hitomi and Yuito need each other in order to fully experience the world, then being away from him after their breakthrough very well might return her vision to black and white. Not because she needs to be with him constantly, because that would be weird and a little uncomfortable, but because their relationship is so fragile and new. It doesn't matter what that relationship is – friendship, romance, or something else – what matters is that they both are able to trust in its continued existence.

Trust isn't something that appears to come easily to Hitomi, either. In large part we can read that as her inability to trust (and believe in) herself. She's felt incompetent for so long, and her black-and-white vision is just one symptom of it. While we don't know the direct cause (or, more likely, sequence of small events that caused it), we can see that she's more comfortable in the past than she ever felt in her present. There could be plenty of reasons for that, chief among them that here in the past she has the support of someone her own age in Kohaku, who believes in Hitomi implicitly, but the one oft-stated in time-travel fiction with a romance component is that she didn't belong in the time she was born into. This could factor into Kohaku's episode one decision to send Hitomi back to the past – learning time magic could simply have been a happy accident that she later used to save her granddaughter. (Yes, I'm leaving out the whole time loop issue here. But the loop has to start somewhere, right?)

In some ways, we could trace this back to Hitomi having come from a much more automated world. Yes, it's one where magic exists and where people clearly still live basically the way we do in 2018, but there are things that she has to learn that involve greater human interaction than she's used to. Whether that's just buying something from a vending machine or having to look up at the teacher and the chalkboard during class instead of at an interactive desktop, Hitomi is being forced to spend more time doing the little things that she got to avoid in her original time period. Each of those tiny details marks one more occasion where she interacts with someone, becoming more comfortable with them, both personally and in a broader human interaction sense. Episode one Hitomi would never have dropped her things and run after her friends. Episode seven Hitomi barely hesitates.

She's getting braver about trying to talk with and help her new friends as well, as we see this time when she attempts to cheer up Kurumi, who is busy beating herself up for not knowing precisely what she wants to do with her life at age eighteen. (And, if we cast a romantic eye on things, is having trouble with the fact that she may have a crush on a first year.) Hitomi may not fully succeed, but Kurumi recognizes that she's the least likely person to have tried, and that makes a world of difference.

Speaking of potential romantic subplots, did Sho just challenge Yuito towards the end there? Both of them are invested in creating impressive new works, be they drawn or photographed, and Yuito hasn't been all that subtle about Hitomi being the source for breaking through his creative block. Yuito also seems confused by Sho's statement, which in a way lends credence to the idea that Hitomi is the “prize.” It certainly bears keeping an eye on.

Rating: B

IRODUKU: The World in Colors is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.


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