Pet is very slowly becoming the show I thought it was going to be in the first place. Unfortunately, the road to get there was way too long and arduous for me to recommend the series to anyone. But I am kind of glad for me. The lone viewer standing. At least I get to have some “fun” with this. Yes the quotations are supposed to be there.
Basically, last week Hiroki found out that Tsukasa crushed his own mentor and not knowing how to deal with this information, he simply ran away. There’s a lot of deep and not completely explained feeeeelings between the main characters of Pet. A lot of the action feels more instinctive than logical. For instance I can’t tell you what Hiroki’s plan was and I don’t think he had one. He was just overwhelmed by the situation and removed himself from it.
This said, now that the plot has started to circle around Tsukasa, Hiroki and Satoru, it’s markedly more interesting and focused. Since the three of them are more or less evenly matched and all slightly unstable, there’s really no way to know how it will play out. And that’s fairly unusual. Usually the show at least plays favourite with a character so you have an idea who you are supposed to root for. In Pet, it’s all up for debate.
This said, they do seem to be setting up Tsukasa as the big bad. This episode he is seemingly sacrificing Hiroki for his own ends and has made it clear that he won’t hesitate to crush his beloved pet if needed. But then again, it’s not like Tsukasa knows any other form of love. His childhood is by far the most tragic of them all. More importantly, Tsukasa is the character that stands in stark opposition to the shadowy “company”, which is the closest thing we have to a main antagonist. And he is the character we spend the most time with. As twisted as it may seem, the narrative has set him up as the protagonist.
Right now we’re in an interesting place where we don,t actually know where anyone’s loyalty lies and what their end game is. Tsukasa has seemingly betrayed Hiroki by setting him up to take the fall for Hayashi’s murder, and therefore become the object of Satoru’s wrath. But we do know he still wants to somehow get revenge on Satoru and keep Hiroki safe and by his side as possible.
Satoru did go into a blind rage seeing what happened to his mentor and seemed fairly convinced by the set up Tsukasa had created. However, a very brief scene between him and Mei hinted that he may have additional information from Hayashi. Up until now Satoru and Hiroki were pretty good friends after all.
Then there’s Hiroki himself. Lost and confused he probably doesn’t know what his next move is so how could we. But he’s strong and much smarter than he gets credit for so I wouldn’t count him out.
We now have three thugs playing a game of psychological cat and mouse. Although some of the heavy handed imagery remains it’s mostly background noise. The meat of the story has moved from the trauma and gross situations to the tension of a fight which is likely to end up with no winners.
Contributed by Irina
from I Drink And Watch Anime!