[Hyper]

Originally Posted by Goggen

I don't know if I'm really putting the blame for zombie Rikka on her mother. That work was done before she got there. What I'm saying is Rikka is basically substituting her own personality with a fake one that is what she believes her mother wants to see. But it doesn't seem to be just a baseless belief on her part, since apparently her mother is specifically asking her to do stuff like getting rid of the chuuni related stuff in her room. I suppose we don't really know to what extent her mother is influencing her current behavior, but she at the very least makes up a significant part of the reason for it.

I wouldn't even assume that her mother makes up a significant part. Here is one scenario I can think of that make her mother should get almost no blame for the current Rikka: Unlike Touka or her grandparents which she use chuunibyou-speech, Rikka completely refused to talk to her mother after her father's death. So when Rikka talked to her again last episode, she is overjoyed. You can imagine a hugging scene and stuff. Rikka interpreted that as "Her mother is happy that she took off her eye patch and colored contact and talked normally." But that was not true--her mother was happy solely because her daughter finally talked to her again. Yes, she will be happy if Rikka is graduated from her chuunibyou, but that was not her concern currently. It is Rikka who assumed that her mother is unhappy with her chuunibyou-self.

Now that scenario takes a lot of assumptions, so I wouldn't argue that's the case. My point is we know too little to put any blame on her mother. Also, while it's true that those around her certainly deserve some of the blames, I personally think the zombie Rikka is the result of she doing it to herself mostly. Still, I recognize that is a subjective take on my part.

Originally Posted by Goggen

I'll reply to this specifically, because I think there's a lot of confusion about this point.

Rikka is not delusional, nor was she ever.

I mean, yeah, she was "delusional" in a joke-y sense of the word, but she didn't really believe her own delusions. She was aware that her make-believe was just that - though she would obviously never admit it, as that would break character. Sure she got caugth up in her own fantasies to an annoying degree, but it was still just make-believe. So yes, Rikka was pretending. And if that wasn't clear before from those moments where she briefly breaks character or "cheats" in her chuunibyou rants by filling in parts of her sentences with "blah blah blah" when she couldn't think of anything cool on the fly, for instance, it should certainly be clear after this episode. If she was truly delusional, she wouldn't have been able to just switch it off like that.

You are probably right, but the anime-Rikka, to me, comes out as dangerously closed to truly delusional, or on the way to be. I actually believed that she was not delusional since I heard her said "wait for me to put the contact back on" in the first episode. But after the event at the beach, I am actually not sure, especially when the situation is directly related to her father's death. It is one of those "pretending long enough and you forget which is your real self". I think Touka for one probably had a huge sigh of relieve when she saw that Rikka can still just switch it off. That she was not too late.