A quick rundown of what happens in Beck volume III: Koyuki meets The Dying Breed; Beck cuts a demo; imagine John Lennon as a garbage man; and, things get screwed up with the ladies. Oh yeah, and finally, via Momoko we find out that Saku isn’t gay for Koyuki, I think.

Ever since Maho’s introduction in the first or second episode, I’ve been dreading the impending romance stuff hijacking Beck for a while. I breathe a sigh of relief in that it’s not overly dramatic and mostly we see it from the outside instead of living inside the character’s heads.

It goes down like this. Things were going great between Koyuki and Maho, she even leans in and gives him a kiss at the end of their date. Then a few days later, after The Dying Breed concert, Beck is hanging out at Remedy and Maho strolls in with some friends, male friends. One of those friends is draped on Maho and they’re looking pretty chummy. On top of that Maho ignores Koyuki, which leads him to wonder what the hell that kiss was about. Not only were those guys dissing him, so was Maho. K and M aren’t really going out yet, so he’s really got no say unless he wants to declare then and there, but hey one kiss is not a lot to go on, so I’m with K on the wtf when it comes to M.

So then, wouldn’t you know, Izumi comes back around and Koyuki hangs out with her for a little bit. They go swimming at night at Koyuki’s school pool, the same night, one year later, that he and Maho won the talent competition at the festival. Of course, Maho shows up (pretty much after Izumi admits she waited too long) and Maho’s crying, singing their song through her tears. Am I supposed to feel sad for her? I don’t. Don’t ignore your man when it’s inconvenient.

A couple of episodes later this leads to my favorite scene on the disc, a showdown between Izumi and Maho on the streets of Tokyo. Like two opposing gunslingers they stare each other down. Instead of chewing tobacco, Maho chomps on a donut — a rather large donut too big to be a Krispy Kreme, or even a Dunkin, I mean it’s as big as her face and we all know anime characters have huge faces, so that’s a massive donut — grinding it with her mouth open to show no respect. Izumi stares back, cool, the one with the answers. A pair of pedestrians skitter like tumbleweeds across the screen. Okay, so I’m exaggerating twelve fold, but a catfight would have been fun, but no they just have tea or something. Don’t ask me why I love that scene. Maybe it’s the donut or it could be the contrast of the two girls with totally different styles. No, it’s definitely the donut.

A few scenes in episode 14, particularly when Izumi leaves and when Koyuki in his sexy purple rugby shirt looks up at The Dying Breed poster, reminded me of Kite for some reason. A search of the credits and sure enough Umetsu is the animation director for this particular episode. End random observation.

After seeing the first fourteen episodes of Beck, I have come to the conclusion that Koyuki is in the wrong band. He needs to dump Beck. Ciel Blue is where it’s at. For realzzz. (Just kidding.)