This weekend would normally be the time where I head off across the Atlantic to Atlanta to spend the Labor Day weekend at Dragoncon, one of the largest fan conventions in North America. I usually go because I have close friends who live over there, but due to me moving home and needing the money for adult stuff like rent and bills, I’ve had to put it on hold this year. On the bright side, it saves me from having to write one long epic post that covers two weeks’ worth of shows.
Let’s move on to these shows, among those the first is Harukana Receive. These girls have moved up a school year, with Haruka, Kanata, Claire and Emily now third-years, and Akari now a second-year. When she learns that, in the upcoming tournament, the two pairs are highly likely to face each other, she falls into a depression, fearing that this match could split the club up. This is a bit of a Azu-nyan (K-on!) moment, to be honest, and of course it has a happy ending.
I mean we all kinda anticipated that the two pairs would face off in this show anyway.
This week’s episode certainly felt shorter than it actually was. Perhaps this was down to the fact that there were only 2 real scenes here: Akari breaking the tournament news to the others, and the opening match of the tournament itself.
After Akari’s actions this week, is there room for a second season of Harukana Receive? The show has gotten the popularity it deserves, so I wouldn’t be disappointed if C2C (or any other animation studio) decided to renew the show, but I think the beach volleyball gimmick can only last for so long, and seeing the ‘are-they-aren’t-they’ in Haruka x Kanata (despite being cousins) and Ayasa x Narumi can’t really keep going either for any longer than necessary.
Also, still not a male in sight here. Not even in match audiences.
If one sports show needs to chill the hell out, I think it’s Hanebado!. This week all of us can finally really understand why Ayano is behaving the way she is, now that her mother has suddenly decided to show up at her doorstep after nearly a decade of being absent in her life. She is doing this all out of some kind of revenge, against the people who forced her back into the sport in the first place. Has this made her into a villain? Can she be talked out of doing something she’ll regret, like losing her friendship with Elena, or even permanently injuring Nagisa in their upcoming match? Nagisa was able to come around when she took out her frustrations against others in the team, causing some of them to quit, but these are two different people, and once again this is latent talent vs. hard work.
Despite the lingering plot point, this week was a filler episode, with all the secondary characters getting nearly all of the screen-time. This has had quite possibly the most bizarre love triangle, as Yu hadn’t really given much of an indication that she had a crush on any of the boys in the club, and all this pent-up emotions during Hayama’s match has just…weird to see. Even Hayama’s face was priceless when she ‘sort of’ confessed; it was a straight up oblivious face.
There is still one thing that I am finding a struggle in this show: the more and more these characters develop, the less I actually care about them. Even watching this show is becoming a torture, in the sense that I no longer want to know what end result either Ayano or Nagisa will have, and no longer care. Social media have been concocting all sorts of theories on what the final episodes will bring. Who will win in the finals? Will Ayano snap out of her nihilism and self-destructive behavior? I don’t even care.
The writers of this adaptation made a lot of dramatic changes, making it way different from the manga. Maybe they made this decision because they wanted to approach Ayano’s mental health from a mature point-of-view, instead of just covering it with heaps of jokes (one good example of that being 2013’s Watamote, where extreme Social Anxiety Disorder was treated as the gag). Even this week, as the mother finally makes her appearance, I don’t even care. That’s a tough thing to say for me, as I would normally applaud any show (animated or otherwise) that approaches mental health from a serious point-of-view, but it’s like every week as each new episode comes out, I tell myself that I can’t do this anymore.
At least I’m enjoying both Harukana Receive and Asobi Asobase.
This week was an Olivia-centric episode, with her family getting some screen time. In case you hadn’t been keeping up, Olivia was born and raised in Japan, despite being Caucasian and having English-speaking Caucasian parents, so to her, Japanese is her mother tongue (or what us ESL teachers call L1), and so there is long-running gag in the show that she is an absolute master when it comes to English when the truth is that she doesn’t have a clue. Along with that bizarre sex bot scene (yes, that’s right – Justin would kill me if I screencapped anything from that part of this episode), we also got to meet Olivia’s college student brother, who can only be described as a strange mixture between Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons and your average weeb user of the r/anime sub-reddit and 4chan. It’s an episode like this that makes you ask rhetorically whether a show with middle school students ought to be this…obscene. Reminds you of that other meme show this year (Pop Team Epic)? Well the jokes in these two shows are different, in that:
Pop Team Epic = Funnily obscene and anti-humor
Asobi Asobase = Obscenely funny and laugh-out-loud meme humor
But there’s no denying that this was a strange episode, and I think I will need to watch it again to fully understand it, as it went in some very bizarre directions…and that’s already saying something for a meme/reaction face show like this.
Even though I’m loving the beach volleyball girls in Okinawa and the obscene meme girls in middle school, this season has, it seems, been not the best for me. I had to give up one show (Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight) after it was frustrating the heck out of me, I had to drop one right from the start due to it going to Netflix (Hi-Score Girl), and now I’m starting to despair over Hanebado! This all had to come just as I was choosing to watch Serial Experiments Lain on its 20th anniversary as well.
Episode 9 is more of a filler episode in of itself as well, with a lot of time spent on some kind of conspiracy theory/computer science lecture than what it actually going on. In the show though, Lain has acquired a chip that would enable the user to rewrite memories. This comes just as she learns that it was the Knights that began spreading rumors about her; who she was, the assorted personalities that have manifested in her, and who her family really is (something that hasn’t been established still). This episode is where we also learn that the young boy who has taken an interest in Lain, Taro, is an ‘initiate’ of the Knights himself; he has limited access, and he isn’t told everything they are up to, but he decides to cooperate with Lain by telling him to be careful and to trust no one.
Okay, so that has been my week – just another week where I doubt my tastes in anime. What did you think of this week’s filler episodes? I suppose we have reached that stage in the season where plot points in final episodes are about to begin. Please tell me if any of the other shows that I didn’t pick were any good. Well I already have 3 shows in mind to watch for the Fall season; won’t say what they are just yet, but surely they will be better choices than this seasons’ ones. Feel free to air your opinions on my bad tastes in anime in the comments below…