The second season of Monogatari has prompted an overarching shift in the show's narrative priorities. Both Bakemonogatari and Nisemonogatari were largely focused on introducing various characters, using Araragi as the lens through which the viewer came to know Monogatari's strange family of players. Arcs were about Araragi attempting to “solve” the aberrations haunting each character, and though the show often punished him for trying to resolve issues that weren't his to fix, his centrality to both the narrative and the individual worlds of all the other characters was never in question. Monogatari was a story of psychological pain expressed as supernatural drama, but it was also a story of Araragi “saving” a whole bunch of women.

Season two is done with this.

From Nekomonagatari White onward, Monogatari Season Two largely focuses on moving the various characters past Araragi. Araragi is no longer the sole narrator, the world no longer clings directly to his perspective, and the show is beginning to break down all the conventions it initially created. Having engaged with their initial aberrations, the characters are beginning to come into their own as people, and though Hanekawa somewhat bookends the season and Hachikuji's nature is central to both the second and fourth arcs, it is Sengoku Nadeko who runs the show in this arc, the season's centerpiece.

Nadeko herself is a perfect representation of both what Monogatari has pretended to be in the past and what it's turning out to be now. She started off in Bakemonogatari as the most cliche and harem-ready of any of its characters - the helpless little sister archetype, hopelessly in love with her faux-brother. In Nisemonogatari, she first began to express real agency, but it was all directed at Araragi himself - though he's oblivious to her advances, her central scene in Nisemonogatari is full of fanservice that strongly implies her own desires. Building off the secondhand images we've received so far, Otorimonogatari paints a vivid picture of a girl cast as a victim by the world, one who acknowledges and manipulates the helpless image she gives off while hating it at the same time.

Nadeko is a mess, but that's what makes her compelling. The arc's constant refrain of victims and wrongdoers helps clearly emphasize how Nadeko sees her actions less as inherently good or bad, and more as things that will either leave her embraced or condemned by those around her. She has internalized what the world of Monogatari has allowed her to be, and though her actions throughout Otorimonogatari paint her as selfish and naive and often cruel, her anxieties and petty pains are tangible and human. Otorimonogatari's nuance and acuity help evoke a great humanity in a fairly unlikable protagonist.

Monogatari is a show obsessed with liars and personal, subjective realities, and Otorimonogatari takes both of these concepts the furthest of any arc so far. Nadeko herself is a liar on multiple levels, making Otorimonogatari a constantly engaging exercise in parsing unreliable narration. Information is withheld, false narratives are presented as Nadeko's true reality, and only Nadeko's clear propensity for falsehood and the inconsistent nature of the world around her offer clues as to what's really going on. What is real, what only Nadeko sees, and what she only pretends to see are all distinct, contrasting realities in Otorimonogatari.

That “world around her” deserves some emphasis, as Otorimonogatari also represents Monogatari at its most visually purposeful. Though the second season lacks most of the stylized interludes of Bake and isn't quite as animation-heavy as Nise, it has replaced these embellishments with a consistent and commendable “house style.” In lieu of attempting naturalistic colors, the show instead discards any pretensions of reality in order to make beautiful color palettes and dynamic visual contrasts. Nearly every shot is beautifully composed, and the color and composition of scenes changes constantly as the emotions of the characters involved shift. The lighting enhances the feeling of a stage play, with characters constantly shot in spotlights or obscured in shadow. And Nadeko herself is regularly framed as being “behind bars,” with props like the railings at her school or the splintered wood of the shrine visually emphasizing her sense of entrapment in this story. The generally understated soundtrack does a fine job of matching this visual tension, and the sound effects in particular offer a punchy counterpoint to the show's frenetic direction.

Monogatari has always used visual framing to promote the idea of “personal realities” - that what you see isn't necessarily the objective world, but instead whatever the character you're following sees as their world. This is emphasized in Otorimonogatari, where for the first time, the show actually includes background characters. Though characters like Hanekawa or Araragi (our two viewpoint characters so far) were too self-involved to really notice those around them, Nadeko's obsession with how she appears to others means her school is filled with ominous strangers, figures represented as creepy outlines filled with circles. The aesthetic choices and direction strongly evoke a sense of constant paranoia and tension, through the spectral snakes, through the non-people around her, through the constant quick cuts and low-angle shots. Even Nadeko's obsession with Araragi is painted more as fear than longing - her constant refrain is “I hope he doesn't blame me,” and the panicked direction of all their encounters make that fear a tangible thing. This is a viscerally paranoid narrative.

In spite of all that paranoia and deception, Otorimonogatari also possesses a kind of easy humor that Monogatari rarely manages. Nisio Isin tends to pack his conversations with dense, self-indulgent quips and references, but Nadeko isn't one of Monogatari's wittiest characters, and so her jokes don't drag themselves out. Instead, we get great single gags like Nadeko commenting on Araragi's taste in porn magazines (“Maybe your object of worship is between the pages of a book like this!” she tells the angry snake god), or Shinobu dragging an unconscious Araragi around by his feet. It's a tense arc, but not an overly dense one, and its highlights are triumphs. Moments like Nadeko's initial confrontation with Araragi and Shinobu, her ranting explosion in her classroom (a great out-of-type performance for Hanazawa Kana), or her final, surreal conversation with Senjougahara count as some of the best moments of the series. This arc is Monogatari at its most playful, purposeful, and beautiful.

The show comes in a nice slip case showing off the two sides of Sengoku Nadeko. There's also a collection of Otorimonogatari-themed postcards and a booklet with synopses, character bios, and all the text of the Fire Sisters previews. On-disc extras are pretty limited - this collection includes the show's third recap episode, covering from Tsubasa Cat through Nisemonogatari, but there's sadly no character commentary or other meaningful bonuses. The whole product gives off that same glossy, sharp-cornered style as the show itself - this is a pricey collection, but you get what you pay for. Overall, Otorimonogatari amounts to one more feather in Monogatari's fairly feathery cap - it hones Monogatari's aesthetic style while directly interrogating the characters and themes this winding series has built.