English Dub Review: Heroines Run the Show: The Unpopular Girl and the Secret Task “Battle of the Hated Heroine”

Overview (Spoilers Below):
The Mobius agency isn’t the same without Hiyori. But Hiyori has her own problems to deal with at school…

Our Take:
The infamous scandal may have died down thanks to LIPxLIP’s press conference, but the damage has already been done to their young manager. As shown in last week’s episode, Hiyori made a difficult decision to quit her manager-in-training job to protect her new friends and herself from a bunch of jealous fangirls. Now, LIPxLIP will have to continue their journey to the live countdown event without their determined manager. Meanwhile, Hiyori attempts to focus more on schoolwork and hanging out with her friends, Juri and Chizuru.
The episode focuses on the scandal’s aftermath, which sees LIPxLIP dealing with Hiyori’s decision to quit. More importantly, it also reveals the true identity of the scoundrel responsible for starting the scandal. It was none other than Chizuru, who’s jealous of Hiyori for spending time with LIPxLIP despite her being a “nobody”. Additionally, she has a major crush on Aizo. Realizing that Chizuru may be hurting, Hiyori attempts to talk some sense into her. Unfortunately, things escalated quickly, resulting in Chizuru punching Hiyori.
This episode emphasizes how much harm a person like Chizuru can cause when overwhelmed by jealousy. Chizuru took those photos of Hiyori and LIPxLIP together to get her away from the group, but all she did was make their lives the center of attention for the wrong reasons. Chizuru’s actions resulted in her harming someone who cared about her throughout the school year. The episode provides plenty of emotions in its plot twist and character development, with the main one being anger, and the result is an intense tease of what’s to come in the finale.
The fact that Chizuru hasn’t been expelled after punching Hiyori is very baffling to me. Understandably, she’s hurting on the inside, but this is one situation where I can’t show empathy towards Chizuru after the crap she pulled. At least, not until next week’s finale. What Chizuru did to Hiyori, Aizo, and Yujiro was wrong, and I’m hoping she faces the consequences and admit her faults in the next episode.