天下制覇

What, you expected a twist?

Impressions:

Kana tells Chiaki about Haruka. Chiaki wants to go ask Haruka face to face, but Kana stops her, telling her that’d just be interfering and might make Haruka miss her chance because of them, so they have to smile and be happy. The rest of the episode is the rumor spreading and everybody reacting as you’d expect. Makoto is in tears, most of the rest are jealous, and they all wonder where she’s going.

Kana decides that they should learn to take care of themselves for Haruka. Usual food preparation/burning montages while the ‘guys’ (Makoto and Touma) are forced to eat the failures.

The next morning, Chiaki and Kana start cleaning up the apartment on their own, shooing Haruka back to bed even while causing multiple disasters. They manage to make edible food and only break a few plates/spill half a bottle of detergent in the end. Chiaki finally loses it and starts crying, saying that she doesn’t want Haruka to go, causing a chain reaction and tears all around.

To the surprise of nobody, Haruka’s not going anywhere and hugs them both. The first season OP starts, I roll my eyes, and then we get a montage of life about school, including Haruka’s classmates mistakenly sending her off, Kana continuing to challenge Fujioka, Makoto getting chummy with whoever, etc etc. Chiaki comes home and finds a letter from Fuyuki (what?) and smiles.

After the OP finishes, we see Hosaka in a plane, en route to Haruka. Or something. Then we get the ED.

Well, to be honest, that was pretty stupid. I mean, seriously… did anybody actually think that Haruka was going to leave? They could have easily just dropped a travel brochure in the first 20 seconds of the episode instead of delving into flashbacks to the previous episode and parts beyond and just left this as a standalone episode. The little Fuyuki postcard at the end irked me greatly too. I still hate the kid. This is also the first episode out of I think the last two months that didn’t have Makoto in drag. That’s a little curious in and of itself. Why mess with a winning formula? Oh right, because we need to add drama to our episodic comedy. We unfortunately return to the blackfaces for the final episode too… along with some really really funky facial expressions. Damn creepy faceless people.

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Final Thoughts:

Well, it was certainly a somewhat different experience from the first season. There were some definite growing pains at the start, with Haruka’s disturbing floating breasts, the occasional misshapen eyes and of course who could forget… the faceless black masses. Some charm was loss, Hosaka didn’t get anywhere near as much screentime, but Makoto spent a lot more of it in drag than I remember in the first season. I guess we could call it a more or less even split there. The art was better this season, but at the same time, it felt like the animation and consistency took a bit of a hit. Many episodes had at least one or two cringe-worthy moments of facial distortion, usually involving Yuka growing an extra cheek or a giant chin. I think the animators may have hated her.

It was still a fairly charming little experience marred only by the awful attempts at drama. Fuyuki was a waste of time and space and didn’t really serve any purpose whatsoever… not to mention that he wasn’t even a part of a single joke for the entire time he was on the show. Likewise, the drawn out drama at the end was completely unneccessary. They introduced this in what… episode 9? And just for an episode about Kana and Chiaki trying to be independent. I’d rather have had 10 minutes of "NINOMIYA-KUN!" "SENSEI!" than have seen either of those poor attempts at drama.

Still, it was a pretty fun show all around. I’d say that the first season was probably a bit stronger since it focused a lot more on humor and playing up the comedic character traits while this season felt a lot more sedate. Aside from the first episode with its creepy balloon breasts, very few of the episodes were particularly memorable, and while forgettability isn’t really a sin, it’s definitely not a virtue either. It just felt like this season was trying a lot harder to be a more calm and relaxing show instead of trying to make the audience laugh, so take that as you will.