Summary
Girl from Nowhere: The Reset once again delivers an extremely muddied point in “Only Nanno”, as Nanno targets yet another influencer.
As much as I can get behind the idea of new Nanno’s entire character arc seemingly being that she’s just mad at influencers, it does kind of muddy the point of Girl from Nowhere: The Reset. The original series was exceptionally grim and revolved around a mysterious, quasi-supernatural avenging angel punishing the worst of the worst for truly heinous behaviour. Here in Episode 4, for the second week running, Nanno is just targeting minor social media stars who were mostly just minding their own business.
I’ll grant you that there is an underlying point to “Only Nanno”, or at least the ghost of one, but I’m once again left wondering why. Why is Nanno targeting the people she’s targeting? What underlying point is she trying to prove? It isn’t totally clear to me what she’s even getting at here, and as the episode — the shortest of the season thus far, for what that’s worth — progresses and gets a bit more appropriately weird, things become even more inscrutable.
The target this week is Blossom, a popular social media influencer whose gimmick is pushing the “my body my choice” argument through titillating live streams. She claims to be all about female empowerment, but she’s just a self-obsessed exhibitionist. The boys in the school are all buying it, though, at least until Nanno comes along and sets up a competing page, “OnlyNanno” — clearly riffing on OnlyFans — and begins stealing Blossom’s attention by going further and further with her displays.
A lot of this episode, then, becomes about leering at Becky Armstrong. And, look, fine, I get it — she’s attractive enough that if she’s going to be turning up at schools and unbuttoning her shirt, the boys are going to take notice. But if you separate this idea out, what is Nanno really up to? She isn’t targeting the lecherous boys, which is proved later (I’ll discuss how in a minute). None of them suffers any consequences. Her target is Blossom, pretty unambiguously, at least at first. But why? The conflict basically devolves into Nanno being jealous that Blossom is getting more attention, and then becomes about Blossom being jealous that the boys think Nanno’s hotter than she is.
There’s more to it than this, but the developments aren’t especially clear either. When Nanno starts going further than Blossom is willing to, Blossom reports her to the faculty, kind of undermining her own promotional message. This was always a trap, since Nanno explicitly framed her own channel as being inspired by Blossom’s, so Blossom couldn’t really do anything without exposing herself as a hypocrite. But she’s willing to bite that bullet, and initially, the school’s higher-ups agree. But then Nanno takes it a step further by bribing the faculty with a bunch of branded merchandise and then offering a one-night stand with herself as a prize for whichever student donates the most to the university fund.
Suddenly, the faculty are totally okay with this initiative. The students donate tons of money to the cause, and Nanno announces the ID number of the lucky winner during a presentation, during which she also shares the location of a hotel room where she’ll be taking the philanthropist to bed. Earlier, Nanno had already upset her fans by going on a date with Sky — back again for the second episode running — rather than one of her subscribers, so her loyal fans are furious that she seems to be duping them again. They storm the hotel and discover that the lucky winner was the university dean, who had creepily nicked all their donations for his own mammoth bid.
At this point, I assumed that Girl from Nowhere: The Reset Episode 4 had been a fakeout, and that this dude was the real target. But that doesn’t seem to be the case, as all the boys just toss him out of the way, having decided that the fact they have paid for Nanno’s body means they’re now entitled to do whatever they want with it. In a messy metaphorical flourish, they rip Nanno limb from limb while she addresses Blossom directly, pointing out that her attitude of “my body, my choice” enables boys to think this way.
But… aren’t the boys the bad guys here? Blossom isn’t the villain; she’s just being blamed for the boys misinterpreting her slogan. But Nanno seems to be implying that Blossom is directly at fault, and the episode, as if to confirm it, ends with her stripping off while villainously smirking at the camera. It’s just a very muddled end to what might have been a rather resonant point. And that seems to be becoming a trend of the series overall.
