Gorilla God's Go-To Girl

Episode 8

Bomb threats? Insurgents? Potential war? Who cares! This week The Gorilla God's Go-To Girl tosses all of that out the window in favor of three vignettes about how everyone loves Sophia! Well, more or less – in the final third of the episode, we do get some potentially important information that paints Carissa in a slightly better light: it turns out that she didn't know Leohart, the mastermind of the bomb-the-ball plot. He simply approached her before the party and asked to accompany her, correctly assuming that his good looks would be enough to have her get him into the event. While that may seem a little too easy, it indicates that Leohart was doing a bit of research, because of all of the characters we've met in the series, Carissa is the one who would be taken in by a boy's handsome face. She'd consider a random hot guy hitting on her nothing more than her due, and he seems to have known that. That Carissa almost waltzed the entire school right into destruction highlights her shallowness and the fact that she's not so much intentionally mean as she is foolish. That doesn't excuse her behavior up to this point – and if I were Sophia, I would still steer clear – but Carissa's real threat is that she simply doesn't think.

This episode makes me think that her Blessing comes from a peacock, a bird of paradise or some other flashy avian. Her love of fine feathers combined with her birdbrained behavior are both indicative of that. It makes me a little sad she's probably not Blessed by a naked mole rat or a vulture, though.

Still, it's nice that she's cooled her ire towards Sophia, even if it's not for any noble or goodhearted reason. If this episode is to be believed, everyone's ing the Sophia Riller Fan Club. The club seems to have both a romantic and a platonic section, although I could see Araignée having a crush on her. The townspeople all adore Sophia because she's kind and helpful during her patrols. Isaac, Eddy, Louis, and now Adler all have crushes on her. Carissa's decided to be her new best friend. If Sophia wasn't such a naturally kind person, I'd accuse her of having Main Character Syndrome. What saves this from devolving into a treacly soup of undeserved fawning is that Sophia really is that nice. And it's not in that “not like other girls” way, either. Everything she does is because she enjoys doing it, and she takes her work seriously. She's a bit oblivious to her charm and appeal but it's not obnoxious, because it's tempered with her crippling anxiety. It's interesting to note that she's more comfortable with older people than she is with her classmates, and that's a really solid detail. Many people who have been bullied by their peers shy away from social interactions with their agemates. I used to spend every summer with a group of octogenarians because they were safer and kinder. (And amazing history teachers.) Sophia in many ways feels like a very real person, and that helps this otherwise fairly standard old-school reverse harem fantasy stand on its own two feet.

Sophia's timidity around her peers is still likely to cause drama going forward. The fact that she doesn't want to her relationship with Louis is giving Isaac, Eddy, and now Adler some false hope (clearly Louis kept names out of his discussions with his superior), and that's going to bring a bit of angst into the story. Hopefully, it's better balanced with the bomb plot in the show's final third. This was cute, but I'd like to know what's going on with that.

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