Just a reminder: The future of LiA is very much in doubt, and it’s up to you to decide what happens next.  Thank you for all your support!

We’re at the point in the production now where thoughts of “what’s next?” start to assert themselves.  We still have three episodes to go, but Call of the Night is certainly leaving a lot of irons on the fire.  New characters are being introduced pretty much every week, and there are substantial manga characters we haven’t even met yet.  The central mythology has only just had the surface scratched.  This could of course be one of those endless one-and-done adaptations with a “read the manga” ending, but…  It doesn’t feel that way to me.  I don’t know whether a sequel is in the cards (the series is doing quite well by most measures) but I do think that was at least the hope going in.

That said, while we continued on new the character train, this episode played more as a one-off.  It was certainly the most comedy-driven yet, and didn’t do a whole lot of deep character exploration with Kou (which is the meat of Yofukashi no Uta, really).  It finds Nazuna roped into working at a maid cafe – apparently exclusively vampire maids, though I’m unclear whether the customers know that – by Midori, when one of her co-workers calls in.  Who knew Midori even worked at a meidokissa?  I thought for a second Kou would get recruited too, but no – he just had to park himself and order a drink.

Midori sees this as a perfect opportunity to win over Kou, that “you’re probably a no” still stinging (and his “for me, pretty much everybody is a no” doesn’t salve the wound).  She’s become rather obsessed with this, but he remains quite unmoved by all the moe moe kyun charms that won her the first place ranking at the shop.  In fact Kou obviously has more chemistry with Arisa (Oonishi Saori), the former #1 who’s been dislodged by Midori.  As for Nazuna she’s predictably terrible as a maid, totally lacking the give a fuck gene as she is, but the money’s good enough to make her decide to become a regular part-timer.

Mostly this is a lot of Naz and Midori making jokes about how horny Kou is (for a boy of fourteen I think he’s actually pretty under control), along with a mystery subplot that allows Kou to show off his junior detective stripes.  Someone has been snapping candid shots of Arisa and posting them on the net, and Midori asks Kou if he can solve the case (remember what I said about boredom being a major driving force in a vampire’s life).  Turns out Kou has a bit of repressed meitantei in him, and rather takes to the challenge.

Again, this is pretty light material by Yofukashi standards – there’s not a lot of sense that it (or Arisa) will be of much import in the long run.  The most interesting part of this is that Kou demonstrates that he’s quite sharp in figuring out the culprit  (Arisa), but has a huge blind spot where her motive should be even though it’d actually rather obvious.  This fits –  partly because he’s just a kid, and partly because he’s not wired to have any of the motivations that drove Arisa to snap the candid selfies and post them online.  The motive of a theoretical stalker snapping illicit photos he can understand; the motive of someone faking their own stalker for attention is totally foreign.  That last thing in the world Kou wants is more attention.

The only semi-serious thing I can see coming out of this episode is that there did seem to be a genuine spark between Arisa and Kou, but I find it very unlikely that’s an angle the series is going to pursue.  Rather, I think this was the calm before the storm, and we’re likely headed for three weighty “canon” episodes to close out the season.  After that is anyone’s guess, but it’s pretty obvious that Yofukashi no Uta will still have a lot of story to tell, if the will is there to give it the chance.