Sakurako-san no Ashimoto ni wa Shitai ga Umatteiru – 06
“Sakurako-san, what do you see?” “I see a dumbass who doesn’t know how personal space works, that’s what”
Well, it’s getting to be a busy time of year now. School assignments, master’s thesis labwork, dragonboat training sessions, sleepovers with friends…wait, okay, that last one isn’t work, but it still takes up time, okay?! (Good luck to all of you with exams, I’m sure you’ll do fine.)
Let be frank: I almost couldn’t watch this to the end. It was a real struggle for me to finish it because I just could not get into the story in the slightest. I wanted nothing more than to switch to another show or just give up on anime for the night and replay Undertale. It was that boring. It turns out that when you remove Sakurako from most of the proceedings, the show loses everything it has going for it. Now I’ve come to the hard-to-swallow conclusion that everyone in the show aside from Sakurako is as boring as watching paint dry in slow motion.
When people-watching becomes harmful for your health
At first, I was looking forward to having Yuriko as the main character. I previously criticized the episode where we learned about her grandmother’s death, complaining that we didn’t know her well enough yet to become emotionally invested. Having her get some quality screentime now might have been a good way to sort of counteract that by fleshing her out after the fact and giving her opportunities to be an important character in the future as well. I was all for it. Any event that could make me re-evaluate an episode I previously said was bad and change my mind would be worth it. Unfortunately, Yuriko managed to be even more of a milquetoast lead than Shoutarou…and he didn’t even do anything in the last arc.
Yuriko is hopelessly dull. Everything she says is overly dramatic and she jumps to such outrageous conclusions that I can’t figure out why her teacher didn’t try harder to shut her down. Within seconds, my conclusion about the lady in the black kimono was that she had moved on from her dead husband to be with another man. That was my actual first guess. For Yuriko to interpret it as a suicide note was so bizarre that I thought I must have missed something completely. It just made no sense for anyone to assume something from those actions. It turns out that I was right and Yuriko was being absolutely insane in her baseless convictions, driven with fear from her past experience of being told her grandmother committed suicide. It was all a big eye-roll inducing mess that seemed to have no purpose and no satisfactory ending. There was no reason for me to care about some rando lady as much as Yuriko did, and the whole wild goose chase was wholly unpleasant to behold.
I did not enjoy seeing her argue with her teacher so much when she was the one being unreasonable in the first place. Did she really think she would find one person wearing black, at night, in a huge crowd, when she could be anywhere? Even worse, Utsumi and Isozaki indulged her and wasted all that time wandering around. It was incredibly grating to see Yuriko and Isozaki interact, as Yuriko would start raising her voice angrily at what Isozaki was just presenting as a fact. She didn’t even try to see things from his point of view. It seemed to me like he had a bad experience in the past with death, which is why he chooses to have such an aloof view of the subject. Perhaps someone close to him committed suicide and he doesn’t want to feel guilty about it for the rest of his life. Whatever the case, the endless rudeness was unbearable. I wish Isozaki just went home instead of letting Yuriko drag him around, because the chemistry between those two was atrocious.
This was honestly just a really bad mystery featuring the least empathetic of characters. It only picked up when Sakurako made her brief appearance, which really shows how much this series relied on her presence to function. Even the directing this week felt uninspired. One shot of Yuriko was upside down…for no reason. Then there was a ton of the most stereotypical matsuri shots ever, complete with sparkly river lights in the background and fireworks.
Well, I say better off alone than getting stuck with sloppy seconds.
The matsuri setting was probably just a bad idea, and having her friends tag along was also – you can guess my opinion by now – annoying. I hated the way her friends (minus one girl) were all such sleazeballs while Yuriko was uninterested. I didn’t like how relationships in this episode were either depicted as skeezy or “oh, I’m too pure for this, I just want everyone to pick flowers together and sing songs teehee”. The friend cheating with her other friend’s boyfriend made me want to gag. Can’t anyone just have a normal relationship? I mean, there’s a middle ground where you can have a decent boyfriend and protect your friends. It’s not too hard to figure out those two at once.
Welp, guess I’ll go watch Perfect Insider instead for now…
Let’s hope she doesn’t start lusting after her teacher too!
About Overcooled
A neuroscience graduate, black belt, and all-around nerd. You'll either find me in my lab or curled up in my rilakkuma kigurumi watching anime.
POWUH: and Vampire Lover with 11746 comments
Out of the box for about 80% of the run but I kind of can say I was able to endure this episode because of the nice scenery the animation provided and that Sakurako was there at the last moment to keep this from being completely dull.
It would’ve been better were it not for Yuriko’s over-the-top reasoning. Her overreactions and eye-rolling idealism, especially when basing them on hypothetical situations with nothing to prove them, were grating. Honestly, I agreed with everything the teacher told her and wished he’d been more assertive about it.
POWUH: Meta Team and The Mad Scientist with 5525 comments
No derp animation here, I will say that much.
While I don’t agree with everything the teacher was saying, I do think she should have given up sooner. She was on a wild goose chase and I think reporting it to Utsumi would have been enough.
POWUH: Meta Team and Spammy Tamer with 7115 comments
I didn’t have the same reaction at all. I enjoyed the episode, even if it wasn’t the best one of the series. And I didn’t pick up on the malleable relationships between the girls and boys, as I didn’t think their relationships were at the point of boyfriend / girlfriend. It seemed like they were pairing up for the first time.
I also think it’s not farfetched *at all* for a 16 year old girl to be idealistic and obsessive about that. That’s kind of the point of adolescence. The fact that it took Sakurako to point out what it really was means that it’s not a very obvious conclusion.
And while I agree that everyone should have agency over their own life, it’s also an *incontrovertible* fact that many people who attempt suicide do not actually want to commit suicide. Many of them are hoping that someone will intervene, that something or someone will stop them. That’s why they are putting up anti-suicide netting at the Golden Gate Bridge: because it works. So there is a point to trying to help someone who you feel might be at that point. Even if it’s someone you don’t know, even if it’s someone you’ve never met. They might want – need – someone to stop them. Looking the other way while saying “that’s what they wanted to do” is not helping them, it’s assuaging one’s own felt guilt.
POWUH: Meta Team and The Mad Scientist with 5525 comments
Ah, like a couples mixer sort of thing. I forgot those existed! That’s probably what the meet-up was then. It makes the “cheating” a liiittle less creepy then.
It’s not farfetched but it’s not the kind of thing I find exciting to watch.
Stopping people trying to commit suicide is a good thing, I agree with that. If you are given the chance to try and stop someone from killing themselves, you should. But in that situation, Yuriko had no idea what the lady was doing. She could have just reported it and stopped her incredibly unfruitful search of this lady in a huge crowd.
I mean, damn, that was crazy nice of her! I wish I was that nice! But again, do I want to watch this girl stumble around looking for a victim who is probably isn’t even thinking of suicide? Not really. It wasn’t a compelling story for me to watch her go out of her way to try and help a stranger who we hardly even saw.
POWUH: Meta Resident with 1692 comments
I’m hoping the point of this episode was to flesh Yuriko out as a character more. Okay, she’s someone with an overactive imagination and overly emotional as seen with her reaction to her teacher’s reasonable statements (which probably does go back to how she felt when she thought at first that her grandmother had committed suicide). But they’re trying to add some depth to her and maybe she’ll be less emotional and unreasonable going forward.
So why do I want her fleshed out as a character? Because she’s shown up enough that I assume she’ll continue to figure as a character in the show. And because she and Shoutarou may start to become a couple. Remember how her friends had expected her to invite him to join them at the festival. If she’s going to keep showing up it’d be nice if there’s more to her as a character than we’ve seen so far.