Otaku Elf

Episode 4

This is getting out of hand; now there are two of them! The end of last week's Otaku Elf teased us with the arrival of another reverse-isekai'd elf, this one acting as a patron deity in the Kansai region, and now Yolde has properly arrived to bother Elda and Koito. It's a formal enough introduction, wherein Yolde and her attendant Himawari stop by to chat for the first half of this episode, with little conflict apart from some verbal spats and a game of tic-tac-toe. It's all about getting a handle on the personalities of these new characters alongside the new sides they might bring out in our established cast.

I feel like I should love Yolde because she's an adorable, tiny, sharp-tongued dark elf. In practice, however, I wonder if she's fully living up to her entertaining potential. Her main thing is throwing even more shrill petty tantrums than Elda can indulge in, but since she looks like an actual child rather than a shrinking shut-in adult, there's no gap to propel the charm. Yes, there is the detail that Yolde is, in fact, the older of the two elves (by a single year), but she hasn't shown off any other parts of her personality that might play off of that alleged more mature positioning.

I'm hoping we'll see more done with Yolde as the series goes on since the concept of Elda having another elf she interacts with is a perfectly natural addition to the dynamics of Otaku Elf. Koito herself even calls it out for us, questioning what kind of relationship these two share before all we get is them acting like adversarial dipshits at each other. One of Elda's main elements of interacting with the people of her region is their mortality versus her eternal status. So the idea of how Elda might get on with a fellow immortal is compelling, making it feel much more squandered when all we get for now is "They've stubbornly maintained a tic-tac-toe stalemate for centuries." At least Koito establishes a friendship with Yolde's miko Himawari, who shows off as an entertaining embodiment of contradictions. She pointedly takes an opposite approach to handle her charge and turns out to be one of those people who says a lot more in a text message than they do talking in real life. That's more amusing in Otaku Elf's usual light way than Yolde's one-note outbursts.

Even the cultural edutainment stuff is dialed down alongside all these low-key, low-stakes introductory interactions. Yolde potentially brings with her the possibility of elucidations on Kansai regional history. Still, in practice, all we get is a brief sequence of Elda correcting her on food names. It leads into one of the little spats between the elves, informed by Yolde's tiny inferiority complex. It provides some relationship details in terms of Yolde being seemingly the one person Elda knows how to handle. That might result from the age mentioned earlier, showing that it takes Elda hundreds of years to become accustomed enough to someone to deal with them this way.

That theme runs into the other segment in this episode, with an ill Elda shirking from treatment by Akane, the newer doctor from the area's clinic. Elda's attachment to the old, now retired doctor from the generation she was used to demonstrates how her outbursts are more adorably amusing for her character than Yolde's more cacophonic portrayal. It could be just Ami Koshimizu's voice acting, she injects just that right amount of sympathetic energy into her fits, and you know those Elda Noises still carry some segments. A whole scene gets by on the bizarre, cute noise Elda makes when she sneezes; now that's confidence in your material.

Everything else in this segment embodies that sweet, lightly chuckle-worthy energy for Otaku Elf. Koito's attempt to make porridge for Elda could have gone the more typical route of her producing something gross and inedible. But even with the animation paying surprisingly impressive attention to details like her amateurish cutting of the green onions, it still winds up making for a more sweetly amusing payoff of just having Koito accidentally make curry and Elda enjoying it anyway. It is just nice, and shows that even after trying to introduce a foil in the form of Yolde, the Elda/Koito dynamic is irreplaceable as the heart of the show.

Rating:

Otaku Elf is currently streaming on HIDIVE.

Chris is keeping busy keeping up with the new anime season, and is excited to have you along. You can also find him writing about other stuff over on his blog, as well as spamming fanart retweets on his Twitter, for however much longer that lasts.