Eight episodes, and it spends most of them punching you between two registers that shouldn't fit together: a middle school where Mato Kuroi chases a friendship with the closed-off Yomi Takanashi over a chain bookmark and a couple of star hairclips, and a cracked blue wasteland where a girl with a flaming eye and an arm cannon gets impaled and keeps walking. The CGI-assisted otherworld fights still hold up, Dead Master's scythe and chains, Strength's oversized Ogre Arms, that scarred blue horizon rendered so it looks like nothing else on the schedule. The premise gets explained in about four lines and then dropped, which is exactly why half the audience bails and the other half rewatches it, because the actual story is the emotional accounting: someone in the other world eats your pain so you can stay smiling. Kagari in her wheelchair clutching that doll is the show's whole thesis in one shot. Yuu's turn recontextualizes everything. Not a masterpiece, but it commits.

Middle-school student Mato Kuroi is drawn to her classmate Yomi Takanashi, a quiet, withdrawn girl who will not open up. Her best friend Yu Koutari teases her attempts but backs her anyway. Things change when the two discover a shared love of the picture book "Li'l Birds At Play", and Mato is invited to Yomi's home, where she meets Yomi's best friend Kagari Izuriha, a girl in a wheelchair. Meanwhile, in another world, a black-haired girl with a glowing blue eye called Black Rock Shooter fights with a huge cannon. Each girl has a counterpart in that other world: Mato's is Black Rock Shooter, and Yomi's is Dead Master. What happens on one side appears to ripple into the other, though the girls do not realize it. Across eight episodes, the psychological drama moves between school life and fantasy action.