Yuki Yuna is a Hero Season 2

Episode 4

By the end of episode 4, our worst fears are realized as to why Gin did not appear or even get mentioned in the main series. She didn't survive, but what a hell of a way to go out! With Gin's personality, nothing less than heroically fighting to the bitter, bloody end would have seemed appropriate, and we certainly got that.

That brings up one of the biggest telltale differences between this prequel and the main series: this one is vastly more graphic. Earlier episodes had shown this a little, with all of the minor scrapes and abrasions apparent on the Heroes after their battle; even the earlier part of this episode showed them with blisters from their training, a detail commonly overlooked in action anime. But with the key battle of this episode, the graphic content gets upped to a shocking degree. No longer are the girls just getting banged up; they're getting cut and skewered, and blood is spraying and dripping freely. The graphic intensity as Gin goes into her final battle against the unexpected trio of Vertexes is almost equal to this season's bloodiest titles, only beaten out that I've seen by the killing spree in the second episode of Inuyashiki – and that was a slaughter, not a battle. One out-of-focus shot near the end of the episode even shows a hole clear through her arm, which is also severed around the elbow. We've seen magical girls die in anime before, but rarely this young or this savagely.

Gin's death confirms some of the apparent red flags from last episode, and other subtle suggestions are strewn throughout the much more peaceful and fun-loving first half of this episode. The script doesn't beat you over the head with these moments, but nestled amongst all the funny frivolity of the class trip were occasional warning signs: the focus on Gin's interactions with her younger siblings when neither of the other girls were getting individual attention, plans made for next weekend with a faintly ominous air, and so forth. Those scenes felt nice and natural, so slipping in that foreshadowing feels especially sneaky in retrospect.

Gin's death also explains a lot of things about the main series. The girls discovered there that the fairies were meant to protect their lives, and while that could be taken to a negative extreme, it's now clear that they were originally introduced to prevent a repeat of what happened to Gin. We can also surmise that the Mankai forms came into the picture to compensate for there only being two Heroes rather than three, and Sonoko having to take the front-line load on her own explains why she will undergo Mankai many more times than Washio. That scene also reveals another interesting connection to the original series; these are the exact same Vertexes that the Hero Club encounters in episode 2, which now raises the question of whether Mimori's terror in that episode had anything to do with faint impressions of losing Gin to them, increasing that scene's sense of irony and retribution. (How appropriate is it that this encounter will induce Washio/Mimori to accept her second role as a Hero?) If you go back and watch that battle scene after watching this one, the difference that the fairies make becomes much more clear.

While this is the current series' best battle scene yet and allows Gin to show off her mettle in impressive fashion, the technical merits still aren't quite as crisp as the original series in terms of quality control or animation. The music is still nowhere near as sharp, either. Those factors don't detract from the sense of loss at the end of the episode, however. Gin was a great character and will be missed.

Rating: B+

Yuki Yuna is A Hero Season 2 is currently streaming on Amazon's Anime Strike.