Welcome to another week of Heaven’s Design Team with Nora! Hopefully my reviews come close to the series in terms of being enjoyable. This week we have one of the cutest guests, and other questionable creations that lead to real life consequences.
Using forbidden black magic to unearth someone’s dark past? Definitely sounds like something our design team would be up to. Of course, while they are at it they have to put effort into setting a certain vibe. Shimoda falls prey to Kanamori and Kimura’s necromancy party and together they summon an embarrassing part of Mizushima’s youth. No, sadly it’s not a confession that went wrong or him replying “You too!” to a cashier’s “Enjoy the movie,” at the local cinema. It’s a surprisingly cool dragon!
God’s order is an animal that ‘has no wings, but still flies’. Kanamori and Kimura are those long time friends who won’t let go of your embarrassing past self. We learn that during his edgy years, Mizushima obsessed over his dragon design, believing it’s the coolest thing ever, only to be flat out rejected by God. This seems to have left a deep impression on him that he barges in on the party to stop whatever’s going on. He’s not all bad, though. They manage to convince Mizushima to give the design another go! Hence, after a slight existential crisis, we’re back at talking about poop and farts.
Don’t let anyone convince you into thinking this isn’t an art form though. One thing we don’t talk about enough is Mozart and his scat songs! Our duo is very serious when it comes to their approach to meeting their client’s needs. Much to Mizushima’s dismay, they try to come up with a way to make the floating-dragon-slash-abdominal-hernia work. Forgetting that hydrogen is highly flammable and adding a flame-throwing feature to the dragon, their design is once again rejected. Mizushima manages to squeeze in a flying snake, which is equal parts amazing and frightening. Kimura gets an OK for his absent minded star doodling as well. Congrats!
Chief Tsuchiya was quite happy that his seahorse design was accepted after all the trial and error. But the last minute addition from a certain someone confuses Higuchi. Tsuchiya has handed in both male and female designs however, the mother label was put on the male, while the father label was put on the latter. Tsuchiya instantly recognizes his grandkid’s handwriting and as the responsible grandfather, he decides to leave it be! While Higuchi proposes that generally it’s the other way around, others come up with unique examples like clownfish that were accepted beforehand.
I have to say, I love this series’ approach to gender identity and norms. The cast is quite varied in terms of having feminine and masculine-coded traits and none of the traits make their way into conversation like “Although you’re a boy/girl…” or “For a boy/girl, you’re very….” and that’s honestly amazing. Every individual has their quirks and funny sides, they also receive praise or criticism according to what they succeed in or fail at. To some, it may not mean much but Kanamori’s suggestion of ‘mother was male at first’ instead of ‘male is the mother’ fits so naturally in the conversation and the idea finds itself immediate allies like Tsuchiya as well as different opinions is very important. It was something I certainly didn’t expect from an edutainment series.
While Tsuchiya and Higuchi are in the Prototype Lab, working on the updates on the seahorse, the rest of the team is busy entertaining Tsuchiya’s grandson Kenta. His idea of combining horses into a one giant Voltron inspires the designers. They all pitch in with their favorite creatures and the result is no less than an abomination. Mishaps don’t end there; while Uehara arrives in time to delete what’s possibly the Kraken prototype, one of Kenta’s scribbles accidentally gets approval and now the team has to deal with whatever that creature is. First, they have to get the design back for assessment so they decide to create an animal for the task. How do their imagination go from a giant gorilla to a blue gorilla with spikes and a comb to an elephant, I have no idea. Everything works out in the end, they convince both God and Kenta that the size of the animal is not 30 meters but 3 centimeters and earn themselves a thumbs up! Earth really dodged a bullet there.
How was this week’s episode for you? Would you want a real life hen and a floating dragon combination in real life? What would be your contribution to the animal Voltron? Let me know in the comments and hope to see you in my next post!
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