Kanojo ga Flag wo Oraretara 10-11
The current fashion is apparently big bows on your butt.
I had to check to see if Gaworare was going to be a 12 or 13 episode series. If it was 12, I was going to wait until next week to finish it up, but it’s 13, so this week gets a two-episode post instead! Unfortunately, Fosh is still feeling a little under the weather, so I’m going it alone.
Standard Harem Hijinks
You had one job, Nanami
I’ve talked before about how this series seems to have two different faces, one that is trying to be a standard harem with far too many girls, and the other that’s trying to be some super mysterious plot that has far too much story to fit in the time they give it. Well, episode 11 was almost entirely given over to the harem hijinks, and I have to say that it was one of my least favorite harem trope events: the outright contest for the lead.
And this isn’t all the girls… Harem way too big
Yes, it was the standard school popularity contest for the girls in the harem. I guess it was a little different that every girl in it was ‘sponsored’ by Souta, but I felt that both the setup for the whole festival and the execution of the pageant that was the first event of the festival were, as usual, overly rushed and not very helpful. It’s really to the point where there’s Nanami and then all the rest of the girls (and Megumu) are just a big mashup, probably because the show’s overreached with the number of girl characters it’s tried to stuff in. But the other reason is that all the girls, for whatever reason, are pushing Nanami out there at Souta. It’s a really odd way to run a harem. As for the contest itself, there was the suggestive wet t-shirt swimsuit contest, which was pretty pathetic as far as fanservice goes, and then “make Nanami kinda confess” where she just gives him a pick-me-up speech, and wins the contest somehow.
Can’t Leave Well Enough Alone
Everyone’s preparing for a dance that he’s not going to. And why does Megu seem to have such a big rack?
So what do you do when your show is so full of a harem that nobody gets any time on screen? Throw in another girl, of course, and make it an idol. And then they manage to waste half the episode on Serican, including a reveal about Souta encountering her six months earlier and giving her hope for her future. I’m sure they’re trying to position Serican as another of the characters mentioned in the lore (hence Souta’s musings about her name, which is close to the word for troubador or minstrel). And they’re all having fun at the concert, until Souta turns into Neo.
“Whoa…” (damn this show for making me do that)
So the show turns into the matrix or something, and now the world is all virtual space, and the whole of the universe is really simulations running on computers, and he can see it all. So now he’s supposed to be the savior of this virtual world, or even the whole system that’s running all these parallel worlds. I really can’t fathom how he gets from being told he’s the savior to being all gloomy about his fate of certain death, or even how he figures that’s his fate. But because he’s too powerful now, he has to erase his existence or he’ll crash the system. And he does that, except Nanami still knows about him.
Why? Why does this show have to be so all over the place? I mean, The Matrix? Even down to the monochrome and streaming numbers? It just feels like everything about it has gotten kind of disappointing. I was actually looking forward to some Nanami and Souta time, you know, let them have a chance to really interact with each other, maybe actually fall in some sort of love, but it can’t even do that because it has to introduce another new character. Of course it does. We’ll see how the show goes about trying to wrap all this up, bringing Souta back into the world, and making some sort of finish, but I’m not hopeful of it being in any way satisfying.
About Highway
Proving that you don't have to be young to love anime, I enjoy all genres and styles of shows. If it's not hurting anyone else, you should never be ashamed of what you like!
POWUH: and LOLi Defender with 10998 comments
acchi kocchi acchi kocchi
POWUH: 900-999 with 915 comments
I’m so lost… =.=’
And dat Megu with racks… Weird…
This thing about a simulation running on computer with the time running much faster than the real life sounded just like the 4 last volumes of Sword Art Online, except that it sounds way less realistic.
POWUH: Meta Team and Spammy Tamer with 7115 comments
I’m not as lost, although I can sympathize with being totally lost. They’ve picked up and dropped so many threads of plot, and zoomed past every other one, so that there’s no way anyone could keep track of the show, even if they were taking notes (which I don’t do for blogging, btw). “Everyone’s in a simulation, maaaaan” just feels like a ‘that way we can write off everything!” device.