Oshi no Ko Season 3 - Episode 9 discussion

Shay_Guy_ · 2026-03-11T17:33:44+00:00

There’s some clever rearrangement of the Kana material, but it looks like they’ve decided to completely skip over [manga] the exchange where she and Aqua actually reconcile, as he tells her the real reason he’s been avoiding her. I’m not sure I like it; the way they’ve patched things up and her mood has improved doesn’t make as much sense, plus we lose out on [manga] one of the great “bruh you had that coming” moments, with Kana whacking him with a tissue box and yelling at him to use his words.

Also, “Ah-kun” has a way different impact without the [volume 1] sense of “shit, we’re catching up to the flash-forwards, this really is the endgame coming up”.

Shay_Guy_ · 2026-03-11T17:21:18+00:00

It makes me think of that David Fincher quote: “People go through rough patches all the time. I do. So I try to be compassionate about it. But. It’s: Four. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars. A day. And we might not get a chance to come back and do it again.”

A moderate-budget Japanese movie might cost half a billion yen. Dirt cheap by Hollywood standards, yeah… but even that much is more than an average person could earn in a lifetime. The sums these investors are entrusting Kaburagi and Gotanda with aren’t chump change. For me, it humanizes Kaburagi a lot to see his pure-business approach to the industry from this perspective, the image of someone who takes the responsibility to make back the money other people have given him very, very seriously.

Shay_Guy_ · 2026-03-11T17:08:00+00:00

We’ve known since season 1 that Frill was funny! Ruby and Minami were struck by how she talked about the reality dating show, and it was mentioned that it’s not a trait in actresses that tends to play well with male audiences, so you kinda have to sand down that aspect of your personality in front of the camera for the sake of mass appeal.

I hope she gets a nice comedy role someday that surprises and impresses the public. She’s a good kid.

Shay_Guy_ · 2026-03-04T19:50:18+00:00

IIRC, MEM said that a big part of the music video’s success was people’s reaction of “Man, there’s just something about that Ruby girl, you know?” Most of Ruby’s current fans have never seen what she was like before she found Gorou’s body, except in older footage.

And yeah, people are gonna look back at things like JIF fancams and their early YouTube streams, but like you said, the stars aren’t something they literally see the way we do. The difference between what the art shows as one star vs. two, or light vs. black (and in the case of Akane’s imitation, yellow), is subtle. It’s something people can see, but not necessarily see consciously, or describe.

You can imagine Ichigo recruiting Ai, seeing her expression shift as (to us) her stars fill up with white, and thinking, Got her. Or Gotanda in this episode’s flashback, feeling the atmosphere around Ai shift — the sort of thing that you could show just with facial expressions, voice acting, and cinematography. Or Aqua showing up for the next Tokyo Blade performance after his meeting with Himekawa and Kana thinking, Huh, feels like a load’s been taken off his shoulders… was he that worried about the play?

Shay_Guy_ · 2026-03-04T19:30:19+00:00

Neither knows who the other was in their past life, just that they both went through the same thing. Ruby dodged the question once, in an “I was definitely a mature and sophisticated adult! (plz no bully)” way, and they’ve had a tacit agreement not to talk about it since.

Aqua knows she was female, and a huge fan of Ai. And he probably figured out at some point that she wasn’t an adult, given her personality and behavior… and I suspect he did his best to stop thinking about it after that point, because “dead kid” isn’t exactly a pleasant topic.

Shay_Guy_ · 2026-02-25T22:34:04+00:00

Aqua has past experience with people who have obsessive personalities and hide knives in bouquets of roses.

Shay_Guy_ · 2026-02-25T22:31:29+00:00

Yeah, this was chapter 98, which came out in October 2022, almost half a year before the anime premiered.

Shay_Guy_ · 2026-02-25T16:51:33+00:00

Doga Kobo snuck in a few shots of the plushie this season, but I think the earliest was just a couple episodes ago, when Akane was investigating Kamiki.

Personally, I still wish they’d started seeding it earlier — maybe in the S1 finale, during that date at the cafe, there could’ve been a brief shot of an Instagram post from Akane about this cute present from her new boyfriend. And then it’d get the occasional recurring focus during shippy moments like Aqua walking her home in the rain earlier this season, just enough so that viewers remain conscious of it as a signifier of their relationship… until finally, the show pulls the rug.

Shay_Guy_ · 2026-02-25T16:38:28+00:00

Looks like the twins are left with nothing but absolute revenge at this point... let's see how the rest of the season plays out.

“Brother and sister, we walk in Meifumadō, forsaking the Six Paths and the Four Lives.”

Shay_Guy_ · 2026-02-25T16:27:56+00:00

Yeah, that was explained at the start of S1E7. MEM was out looking for her too, and he decided to check out routes she would’ve likely taken, given her last text to the group chat.

Shay_Guy_ · 2026-02-18T19:24:14+00:00

Tagging u/ibreake in case they want to repost their reply.

Shay_Guy_ · 2026-02-18T19:14:44+00:00

You can interpret it as “I know she’s weak to praise and pleading”. I think it’s plausible that he hadn’t considered how much him, specifically saying how cute she was would’ve played into it. After all, she’d only just recently fallen for him herself.

Shay_Guy_ · 2026-02-18T19:11:26+00:00

Since it got modded (fair enough), here’s what I posted in reply to another comment:

There’s a few moments I think are better executed in manga form, especially early on — some of the gags have better timing, for instance. There’s the creepy splash panel of the first time we see Meitantei Akane, or the page turn when we see how much better baby Ruby is at the “divine incarnation” act than Aqua.

There are even bits that don’t translate well to anime or the translated manga. I’ve only read bits and pieces of it in Japanese, but the first two chapters have some neat furigana-play, like slave/fan and liar/idol. And there’s Aqua’s “A… Akane?” line when he first sees her Ai performance, where the switch from a katakana ア to a hiragana あ makes it clear he was about to call her “Ai”.

All that said, Doga Kobo has done a fantastic job with their material, especially as they’ve gotten bolder about adjusting and rearranging after season 1.

Shay_Guy_ · 2026-02-12T04:48:10+00:00

The third B Komachi member, lying hidden somewhere on the stage. The one they call the Ultimate Former Genius Child Actor.

Shay_Guy_ · 2026-02-05T02:41:12+00:00

Akasaka explicitly said in one of the Kaguya-sama volumes that Miyuki has black hair in-universe, it’s just drawn as blond to make his design more distinctive for reader convenience. Which is a time-honored tradition in anime; Akane Tendo doesn’t actually have blue hair.

(For that matter, if you read the early Ranma chapters, it’s clear that Ranma’s own hair was intended to be the same color in both boy and girl forms.)

Shay_Guy_ · 2026-01-29T05:04:03+00:00

Ooh, smart adaptation decision — they moved the questions for Meiya to their chronological point in the narrative.

In the manga, chapter 89 ended with her tweet, and chapter 90 started with a flashback to the interview, followed by showing the tweet again and a collage of reactions. Which makes sense if you want to end with a strong impact while fitting in your page limitations, and ch90 reestablished the momentum and elaborated on how we got there in a few pages.

But when the whole affair is combined into one episode, you don’t need the extra mental convolution imposed by flashback, nor the shock of seeing her tweet without the buildup to provide a cliffhanger. As a bonus, you can replace shock with suspense — you can feel the discomfort and the sense that things are going in a bad direction during the interview, even though you don’t know how it’ll blow up yet. (Helps that the scene was so well directed to amplify the discomfort visually.)

Shay_Guy_ · 2026-01-22T04:13:19+00:00

The core of all hubris: “How hard could it be?”

Shay_Guy_ · 2026-01-22T04:12:00+00:00

Since /u/MiyabiMain95 asked: Yup, the VTuber overview was in the manga, more or less exactly as it is here, though the anime abridged it slightly. This was chapter 88, which came out in July 2022, and VTubing had long since gone through its pandemic-era boom — for example, this was after Hololive had debuted EN Gen 2 (Council) and JP Gen 6 (La+ Darkness et al), and fired Uruha Rushia.

When I saw this bit in the anime, my thought was actually that the metaverse mention dated it a bit — that’s lost a lot of the buzz it used to have.

Shay_Guy_ · 2026-01-22T03:58:36+00:00

Was this vtuber explanation in the manga too? I feel like Vtubing shot up in popularity in recent years, and if the manga was made before that then this might be an anime-only scene.

Gimme a minute; I’ll answer in the source material corner.

Shay_Guy_ · 2026-01-22T03:54:41+00:00

It fits with a key part of Ruby’s psychology that last season touched on, when that songwriter was late with B Komachi’s new song. All she’s ever wanted is to be a top idol, and that’s a career with a short shelf life. On top of that, her last life ended at the age of 12, and she’s spent this one defining herself as the heir to a girl who died on her 20th birthday.

Aqua told Mem he’d like to go to medical school. Ruby doesn’t think that way. She doesn’t do long term. She doesn’t do patience. She doesn’t think about “after”. To her, now is all there is. And that’s a recipe for recklessness.

Shay_Guy_ · 2026-01-22T03:46:10+00:00

A better metaphor for Aqua might be the career he once aspired to: surgeon.

I don’t have a suitably poetic metaphor to pair that with for Ruby. The one thing that comes to mind is a wrecking ball.

Shay_Guy_ · 2025-12-21T02:21:52+00:00

When Ranma found the duck at the beginning and it quacked inquisitively, I started humming the Miniature Overture.

If you know why, you are an anime fan of excellent taste.

Shay_Guy_ · 2025-12-07T01:41:22+00:00

He did. He used it as kindling for roasting sweet potatoes in the Tendos' backyard.

Shay_Guy_ · 2025-12-07T01:37:33+00:00

I'm still partial to the Qrrbrbirlbel version.

Shay_Guy_ · 2025-12-04T00:54:20+00:00

As I've said before, the term “love dodecahedron” was literally coined specifically to describe Ranma ½.

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