The Helpful Fox Senko-san 08
Sewayaki Kitsune no Senko-san 08
世話やきキツネの仙狐さん episode 08

Spoiler Summary/Synopsis

Nakano has a day off, so Shiro pops by to bring them to a secret beach. She brings the sleeping Koenji along, whom Shiro has now befriended. At the beach, Shiro shows off her swimsuit. Nakano is puzzled when Shiro addresses Koenji as “Jasuko” (or possibly Jazzko). Koenji explains that this is her mangaka pen name.

The group have fun playing beach volleyball until Senko-san hurts her back. Koenji has brought a new grill and stuff, but no one brought any food. Nakano goes exploring on the beach and finds a beach house restaurant. No one seems to be there, but then a woman appears behind the bar. She points him to a table filled with foods for grilling, including lobster. She then disappears, so Nakano takes the food and returns to the others.

After telling Senko-san of what happened, they start cooking food. They continue having fun and that evening, they light sparklers and such. Nakano laments that his day of fun is over. Senko-san acknowledges that all good things must end, but they have the next time to look forward to. She sets off a lot of fox fire balls, which Koenji thinks are fireworks. Meanwhile, the woman who provided the food observes them from a distance. She has multiple fox tails.

Thoughts/Review

Well, it is time for the traditional beach episode, which is what The Helpful Fox Senko-san 08 provides us. The episode takes the material from chapters 19 and 20 of the source manga, and puts them to good use.

Koenji

One thing that The Helpful Fox Senko-san 08 did was begin to address the issue of Koenji suddenly becoming a regular with the two kitsune loli-babaas. I think Rimukoro-sensei basically decided to blow past this and not deal with Koenji having to go through a learning process about the truth of kitsune and such. (I can’t remember if the manga eventually does this or not. I do know that Koenji does currently know that Shiro and Senko-san are divine kitsune.)

Still, it is hard to fault Sensei for doing this. Koenji is a fun character and works well with Shiro. But in the anime, the production team have tried to make more sense of things. So they have Koenji accept the incredible things that are happening to her, but she does notice things. I guess it works for the most part.

Modifications to the Manga Story

As is usual, The Helpful Fox Senko-san 08 had to make some modifications to the source manga material. This mostly came in the form of extending scenes from the manga. Obviously, the still shot, pan-and-scan stuff was added material to fill time. But there were lots and lots of small additions here and there.

The major addition came from taking a single frame flashback in the manga, then expanding upon it to make it include Shiro. And that does work to help retro-fit Shiro and Koenji spending time together.

The only other significant change was the reveal that the woman Nakano dealt with at the beach house restaurant was another kitsune, only with multiple tails.

FUNimation Sucks!

Every time I see that blasted “Kuroto” on screen, I really want to punch something hard. A name that was used in ONE flashback featuring some kid means that Senko-san (and pretty much everyone else at this point) MUST address Nakano as such. I cannot fathom for the life of me why the FUNimation adapter would think that this level or rewriting was better than using a term of endearment like Senk0-san actually does.

Man, I know I won’t get my wish, but I seriously want the Kuroto flashback kid to be Nakano’s dad or something. That would allow me to go off on the Mother of All Rants!

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

In the end, The Helpful Fox Senko-san 08 is a fun beach episode. It manages to touch a lot of anime beach episode tropes, but adds elements for the larger story as a whole.