NTR: Netsuzou Trap Episode 8 Review: Uncontrollable Feelings

Yuma can’t control her feelings in the latest episode of NTR: Netsuzou Trap. Her infatuation with Hotaru was well hidden until now, but Hotaru played the most sinister trump card of them all: she drifted away from her best friend and stopped her advances. When you want something very much, just let it go…

Japanese Title: 制御できない感情

Plot

Maids, part-time jobs, unresolved feelings. Hotaru starts working in a maid café to get enough money so she can move out on her own. While Fujiwara tells Yuma that Hotaru just wants to get far away from her, I don’t think that his past behavior gives him any kind of credibility. As Takeda is slowly starting to sing the swan song of his relationship with Yuma, she is starting to feel a jealousy towards her best friend that can only be described as ‘uncontrollable feelings.’

Episode Highlights

Maid Outfits: Both Hotaru and Yuma look great in their maid outfits, but to be completely honest, which female anime character doesn’t? Quite the sexy scene with Hotaru helping Yuma get dressed. I expected more from a yuri anime (not that I am an expert on the genre) but the eroticism was enough to make me smile a bit. Hotaru and Yuma are clearly in love with each other. I wonder if next episode’s emotional outburst will be Yuma confessing to Hotaru.

Electric Guitar: ‘Blue Bud Blue’ by Touji Haruka is one of the few things that keep me glued to the series. An amazing intro song with an even more amazing guitar riff that I can’t get enough of.

Themes & Trivia

Honesty: Many stories retain their conflict by removing the one thing that could have resolved it from the first page/episode/minute: honesty. If only Hotaru and Yuma were honest about their feeling and their intentions, they could have reached a situation where less people were hurt. If only, but this anime, like real life, is more complicated than it seems. Many situations can be judged objectively by an outside observer, but when inside a situation, many obvious choices are not obvious at all.

Drifting Apart: I’m so sorry for Takeda. If there is one person who doesn’t deserve what’s happening, that’s him. He is getting more irrelevant to Yuma by the episode, but he is still dragged to this farse. Yuma can’t think of anything else than Hotaru. In the first couple of episodes, she seemed like she genuinely cared about his feelings, but now he just seems like an unneeded second role.

Cliffhangers: This is the wrong way to do cliffhangers. It’s worse than the false cliffhangers of Tales of Zestiria the X. When you have a massive cliffhanger, you don’t resolve it in the most uninteresting way possible in the first couple of seconds and you certainly don’t disregard it as unimportant. Every cliffhanger in this show seems not relevant to the story and the characters just seem to forget about it.

Maid Café: Cosplay restaurants are very common in Japan. Cosplay is part of the unique Japanese otaku culture, and with such a unique industry, restaurants and cafés are offering specialized experiences, such as the only-maid costumes restaurants and cafeterias. The waitresses in these places are wearing maid costumes and act more as servants than employees. Customers have the feeling that they are being served by their maids in their own private house. The maids are referring to the café patrons as masters and mistresses. The first café of this kind is the famous Cure Maid Café, which you have probably stumbled upon in our themed café section here at MANGA.TOKYO. It was established in 2001 in Tokyo.

The otaku clientele is a huge market in Japan and these cafes are catering to their fantasies. Fans of anime, manga, and video games have been used to maid imagery and master- servant relationships in their fiction stories and they want to experience that relationship for themselves. If you thought that the maid café Hotaru is working at looks more like a hostess bar than a cafeteria, you were probably right. Many maid cafes in Japan are the equivalent of hostess bars for otaku.

If you want to delve deeper to this sub-culture, an important concept you should learn about is that of moe, one of the most prevalent character tropes in otaku media. Moe is a characteristic of overly cute and innocent-looking female characters.

As its natural with everything culturally unique, maid cafes are attracting a lot of tourists and have been expanding all over the world.

Comments

The anime has no clear indication of where it wants to go. When the prime relationship it examines is that between Hotaru and Yuma, the plot has no clue how to build the drama that surrounds them and has no idea how to resolve the various plot points that it brings forward. What could have been a good story about a same-sex couple that is trying to discover their place in the world and make sense of their feelings was downgraded to a confusing tangram of unfitting feelings. If there is one hope for the show, that is to have Yuma and Hotaru discover how they really feel for each other.

To Maid or Not to Maid

There is something rotten in the kingdom of NTR: Netsuzou Trap and it’s probably the way Takeda is going to have his feeling hurt once again. Judging by the way the series handles its cliffhangers and major plot points, Yuma is NOT going to confess to Hotaru. They are probably keeping that for the last episode.

Did you like Episode 8 of NTR: Netsuzou Trap? Let us know in the comments below by using either the forum or the Facebook tab! Join us in our new forum and let’s talk about our favorite series! Also, don’t forget to check our new Summer 2017 reviews!

You can check the official anime screenshots from our NTR: Netsuzou Trap Episode 8 Preview Stills and Synopsis. Click on the article link for the full gallery!