Manana is the Devil and the biker is on a quest for love. How Evil is the 9th episode of Chio’s School Road?

Chio’s School Road
Studio: diomedea
Genre: Comedy, Slice of Life

This episode was a mixed bag of all kinds of feelings. No inappropriate clothing this time but I’m still not sure how I feel about the events I just witnessed. One of the events, in particular, made me a little uneasy but enough of all that. Let’s get to this episode. It began with Chio studyi- what? That can’t be right. Let me check my notes on the episode real quick… Yeah. Turns out it’s true. Chio was studying for a test. At least until she decided to research something on the web. You know how it goes. You’re online looking something up, feeling good about yourself and then it hits you. You’re doing great on the studying time to reward yourself with a nice relaxing gaming break.

A few hundred games later you realize you have ruined your chances of passing the test completely but you keep gaming to drown your sorrows in the blood of your enemies. Chio’s mom stopped it before it got that far… Mine didn’t. My addiction aside, Chio has a killer Plan B for just this occasion. She heads to the nearest shrine and prays for help. And that’s when they run into a familiar face – Madoka’s old “master”, the pervy homeless guy. He tells the girls they don’t need to worry about brains and that they should focus on their looks. He even refers to Chio as a diamond in the rough and tells her he wants to “polish her.” And that demon Manana convinces Chio to go along with the makeover.

Manana uses her Stand: Extreme Makeover.

The first attempt to beautify Chio fails miserably. In fact, the old guy says it’s scary. With their first attempt up in smoke, the makeover duo regroups to contemplate their next move. This was actually one of my favorite parts of this show so far. Every time Chio asked these two a question, they would move further away as if answering the question meant they would automatically spill the beans of what they just did.

Anyway, after much deliberation, the makeover duo find the one thing that they need to fix Chio’s looks. This time Manana doesn’t even need to help aside with helping get the old makeup off. The second transformation does actually fit Chio a lot more but there’s still something not right with it. Chio starts to pole dance after coming to the conclusion that a wig made her sexier.

Thankfully she loses the wig during the dance and Manana decides to pull a “You’re perfect the way you are” speech and everything goes back to normal. That also made this entire section a major waste of time for Chio. Which is fine because it’s hilarious, which made it not feel like I wasted mine.

The second half of this episode is the part I mentioned left me feeling uneasy.  Chio and Manana are just walking along minding their own business when Andou – that biker guy from before – shows up again. We last saw him when Chio got that BL magazine and that didn’t turn out well for Chio. This takes what happened in that episode and makes it that much worse. Andou is showing off for Chio this episode.

The funny thing about it was just how bad he was at trying to impress her. Chio didn’t even realize it, through most it. Manana notices it as soon as the guy leaves the first time. Although I thought she was jumping the gun with her initial analysis. But when he tried the cat thing, I agreed with her.

The situation with Andou sort of fixes itself. Andou has researched BL games in order to impress Chio. Here’s the problem. She doesn’t really play the games she only owns the one magazine. So when he tries to impress her with something from one of the games he ends up looking like he’s into men. And now let’s talk about the most important thing in this episode – that poor cat. It appears to be so traumatized by the last time it met Chio that it ran away screaming. What did she do to the poor thing?

Overall I’d say this episode is about as Evil as a Super Villian (10). This is, of course, my enjoyment of the episode and not a rating of how good or bad it was. The whole Andou Chio thing kind of creeped me out and I’m not the only one, but at the same time, it might’ve been fun to see what they would be like. I think it’s funny that he ruined that himself, more than anything. Of course, those other creeps are still out there which means we’ll have to deal with that when they come back. If you’re like Chio and games are more of your thing check out this week Bulletoon Weekly. Well, that’s all I have for you today. Thanks for letting me waste your time, people.

Chio’s School Road Simulcast on Crunchyroll Fridays 10:30 am EDT.

Keep It Classy,
Evil Bob