Let’s Rate the Ayakashi Sisters!
I’ll be rating the Ayakashi Sisters as a unit because I’m not their biggest fan and it took me so darn long to get through their arc that the ones who stand out to me less have almost entirely faded from my memories. I know they come back near the end of the series, but I’m going to rate them now before I completely forget the things I still have in mind!
Personality: ★ ★ I could probably only tell you the personalities of Berthier and Petz -- not to say the other two had nothing going on, but their personalities didn’t resonate with me enough to stick. I liked Berthier and Petz for opposite reasons -- Berthier has a pretty common personality archetype: sweet and delicate about things as a thin veneer of cuteness over blatant ruthlessness and cynicism. It’s overdone, perhaps, but I really enjoy it! With Petz, I liked her hard edges. She’s played as the older, bitter, angrier one, and there’s an enjoyable lack of delicacy to her. For Koan, I felt like her personality shift was way too extreme and uninspired. She went from Generic Wicked Witch we mainly see menacing a child to a saccharine-sweet victim -- the tragic innocent maiden whose pure love was used against her. If there was connective tissue between the two, I missed it in the length between episodes in my rewatch. Calavaras -- I honestly don’t even remember what Moments she might have had that showed character, except that I enjoyed her reaction to two of her sisters changing sides -- sort of a fearful curiosity and doubt while trying to pay lip service to unquestioning loyalty.
In the early episodes, maybe as a placeholder before anything more specific got thought up, all the sisters except Petz seem to have a shared personality trait--obsession with beauty and makeup with a lot of infighting about it. This was kind of... boring and unfortunate and not enjoyable to me, but I did appreciate that they got to keep the beauty obsession when they were made ‘good’ -- since they otherwise became pretty bland and it would have made kind of a sexist statement if goodness had “cured” them of their love of makeup.
Style: The sisters all have very different styles and I’m going to rate them independently. The ratings are complicated because I have complicated feelings. Koan: -★ I have invented a negative star for Koan because I hate her style so much that I am pretty sure it has unfairly impacted my impression of her as a character. The full-body feathery tutu with thin vertical stripes and high heels. The incongruous, absurd cat-ears that make no physical sense! I just want someone to go in and fix it all! I even find her attack animations to be awkward and weird-looking. Whatever they were trying to do with her didn’t work with me at all, unless they were trying to make her absurd and off-putting. I think the cat ears were actually a 90′s anime mistake of sorts based on manga image ambiguity and that the cat ears are supposed to be triangular odangos. Triangular odangos would be 100% legit and totally suited to the show. But the idea that she had whipped her hair into peaks like a meringue and then wandered around lecturing strangers about the importance of taking care of your appearance just caused my brain to reject her and all the weird aesthetic sensibility she stands for. Berthier: ★ ★ ★ This outfit is fine. It’s basically a monochrome swimsuit with boots and gloves, so it’s on the boring side, but given that Koan is so over-the-top, understated is probably a good direction to go in for other members of the group. She does a good job adhering to her ice theme in dress, personality and manner, while also being asymmetrical from the others in doing this (I couldn’t tell you the others’ elemental themes offhand), which is satisfying and makes her feel unique. Calavaras: ★ ★ There’s nothing strictly wrong with Calavaras’s outfit. It seems to be inspired by a roman soldier uniform, except with a little skirt and what may be an armored bow. But why? Galaxia’s outfit is similar, but is in harmony with Galaxia’s personality, which is cold, commanding, and militant. Calavaras’s personality is cutesy and feminine, but her aesthetic is severe... with a bow on it. It winds up giving her an Ugly Stepsister vibe like Koan -- someone vain and looks-obsessed who is nonetheless Doing it Wrong by taking her look to weird extremes for the audience to side-eye. Petz: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ / ★ ★ If you just took the fricking eyeballs off her boobs this would be one of my favorite female villain costumes in the series. But... but.... the eyeball boobs. They break my heart. They remind me of the weird gimmicky sexual stuff going on with the youma. Does anyone ever talk about the youma and their weird boob cannons and such? If we pretend for a moment that she doesn’t have eyeball boobs, I love the shoulder feathers, the short hair/updo thing she has going on, the sleekness, and the dark color scheme. She has kind of an ominous, mysterious, regal style that seems to bolster her forbidding personality. I don’t even think the colored boob highlights looks bad in themselves, just don’t literally put eyes on them, what is wrong with you guys. Civilian Costumes: ★ ★ ★ ★ When they turn into good guys or are in disguise, the sisters all look great and the costumes do a much better job of selling them as image-obsessed! I feel like the fact that they were designed to die so swiftly in the original manga led to some goofy costume experimentation that the anime showrunners felt compelled to be faithful to (although they were faithful to nothing else). When allowed to improvise, they made decisions that seemed to fit better with the personalities the Sisters had been given. Backstory: ★ ★ What even is their backstory? They used to be regular women until Rubeus recruited them... maybe? Or maybe not. Did they grow up brainwashed by Wiseman’s magic? Is everyone on their planet/moon whatever brainwashed? Some of these questions might be answered later in the season. Petz has a history with Sapphir that is probably the best-foreshadowed thing in the series -- they throw it in so many episodes in advance of the reveal that I can’t help wondering if it was an accident or coincidence. If nothing else, maybe the reference to an ex spurred the pairing idea, not the other way around. But knowing about it in advance doesn’t seem to add anything to it (it’s not like she gives early hints about Sapphir, or even the relationship’s specifics), so I still feel like this is a low-star situation. Hero Relationships: ★ ★ ★ I love villain heel-turns. This is a weird case where they gave me all I might have dreamed of and I didn’t appreciate it. The writing in the Rei/Koan episode was just so inconsistent and confusing. What were they even talking about? What lesson were they teaching one another? Why did Koan’s situation move Rei’s heart in particular, besides the fact that it was a Rei feature episode and Rei happened to be there? Ami and Berthier going head-to-head as rivals was less emotionally driven, but more narratively satisfying. Their extremely brief connection made me contemplate What Could Have Been -- imagine if Ami had gotten to have a smart, sweet, yet competitive and slightly conniving friend. Villain Relationships: ★ ★ ★ While overall I didn’t find their relationships that compelling or memorable, they did have some nice moments. I loved that the show broke its symmetry to have Koan reach out to Berthier rather than having the inner senshi line up and each convert a sister to goodness. It was also interesting to see the show cop to and address the toxic infighting of the group as something that was actually kind of tragic for all of them and should be fixed. No one had to really learn any lessons of course, because it was treated as something caused by an invisible evil force, but it was nice to have the show step back and be like “actually it’s kind of super sad that the only people this lady has in the world are snarking about how she might fail at her mission and die.” That’s a level of self-awareness I always yearned for in the DK arc and ended up having to inject into it via fanfic. Likeable/Love to Hate: ★ ★ ★ There were variable levels for each of the sisters, so I’ll round them out to a “satisfactory.” As I mentioned above, I found Berthier and Petz to be the most likeable, and disliked Koan in a non-fun way. Although I maintain a regretful curiosity about her because I feel like the show LOVED her and treated her emotions with a lot of reverence toward the end of her arc and sometimes I wish I “got” it so I could appreciate something that obvious love and effort was put into. Resolution: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ If I am willing to take the Sisters as they are, I couldn’t have asked for much more from the show than to redeem them, keep them around and participating in the senshi’s lives and storyline for multiple episodes, and even bring them back for an encore episode long after the audience thinks they’ve been discarded, for a surprise tie-in with another character’s tragic death. Well -- okay, actually, I could. Make the redemption deeper (don’t just turn them into generic Nice Sweet Girls in a flash of light) and commit to keeping them around long term to deepen their connections to the senshi. But to really dig into that, I think they’d have needed to focus on just ONE character to do it with (Berthier would have been my choice). But I give it five stars because it’s probably the most ambitious villain redemption the show ever attempts and I think it exceeded anyone’s expectations for continuity in a monster-of-the-day, villain-of-the-week show. Overall: ★ ★ Eh... fairly or not, these guys were one of my least favorite villain groups. I always spend their arc kind of waiting for the show to get on with it. Their aesthetic seems deliberately unsettling, and mixes poorly with their group identity as beauty experts. The twists some of them take from scary to sweet seem a little cheap, and I wind up wishing that their redemption arc had gone to other characters. On the other hand, NOT dying tragically means they never had a chance to wring the kind of audience pity that makes one wish for second chances and alternate plotlines. Maybe if they had died I’d be in here writing about how I have this brilliant idea, wouldn’t it have been great if they’d gotten to live and peacefully sell makeup as offscreen BFFs to the senshi, maybe even cameo at the end of the season... I guess you never know how you’d feel about a plot if it had gone differently.
