Episode 6 – Gorilla God’s Go-To Girl

It looks like my sister wins this debate. For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been trying to decide whether Louis was possessing/guiding the squirrel Sophia keeps meeting or if he was the squirrel, and my sister guessed it: Louis and the squirrel are one and the same. That works best with the plot because we can see how Squirrel Louis was always right there by Sophia’s side, helping and supporting her, and that makes their relationship a lot more mutual in all sorts of ways. It also broadens our understanding of what blessings from the animal gods can look like: we’ve seen Sophia and Isaac manifest the abilities of their gods, like Isaac sniffing her out this week. We’ve seen people manifest physical traits, like Adler and his wings or Araignée and her webs. Now we know that powerful blessings can give someone the ability to actually become their gods’ avatars. I’m looking at this as worldbuilding about how these blessings can work rather than the original author making things up as they go along…which, I have to admit, also occurred to me, given that there’s not much rhyme or reason to any of this.

This episode also feels like a throwback to the early days of fanfiction, or at least my early days of reading it. We’ve got both the cabin fic and the blanket fic, with Sophia and Louis falling (or jumping) off a cliff in the snowy mountains and ending up alone together in a secluded cabin with what looks like only one blanket, which they both do end up under at one point. Yes, this is a remarkably tame version of both tropes, but the basics are there: because of the closed world of the cabin, Louis can come clean about his secret and his feelings, and the whole cabin-in-the-snow thing means that the blanket is necessary for warmth…and Louis ends up naked. Fanfic writers could take this episode and turn it into a whole other kind of situation very, very easily.

But this is a nice episode despite the pat nature of the plot devices and the fact that fully a quarter of this week’s footage is recycled from last week, with a couple of scenes putting in multiple guest appearances. I appreciate that the romantic angst is kept to a minimum. Three months have passed since the bomb incident, and Sophia tells us that she hasn’t spoken to Louis in all that time, but we don’t have to see that, which is nice. Another reverse harem story might have used that opportunity to put forward Isaac or Eddy as a potential romantic interest. Still, The Gorilla God’s Go-To Girl focuses the love story on Louis. It trusts Sophia’s feelings for him and doesn’t try to invalidate them by throwing other boys her way; in fact, it says a lot that when Sophia throws Eddy back up the cliff, Isaac’s first reaction is to catch him rather than follow her – he’s focused on his job and the situation at hand. Louis is the one who panics and jumps after her, unable to think beyond the fact that she’s in danger.

There also aren’t any histrionics when Sophia discovers a naked Louis under the blanket. I love that instead, she gets an eyeful of his nipple-less chest, and that while he’s embarrassed and wants his clothes, he doesn’t freak out, either. They behave like relatively rational people, which they’re being trained to be, and their interactions feel natural. Sophia may be surprised that Louis’s opinion of himself and his popularity is so low. Still, if she’s been upset by her gorilla powers as being too masculine, it makes sense that he might feel the same way about his squirrel powers. As we saw last week, he’s not even strong enough in squirrel form to stop a clock hand from moving, and when he transforms, he’s at risk of ending up embarrassingly naked in awkward situations. Since, by his estimation, the only thing he’s good at is fighting, it seems reasonable that he’d be discomfited by his blessing.

Now that Louis and Sophia are moving forward in their relationship, maybe the story can make some progress on that opposition group. Since Louis also knew that the bombers were tied up in the old school building (resubbed as “the storage shed” this week), it’s not Sophia’s fault that they escaped. But they need to be dealt with, so hopefully, that’s where the plot’s headed in the near future.

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The Gorilla God’s Go-To Girl is currently streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.

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