Anne Happy – 05

She just won’t give up

Getting to school can be pretty tough.

Catch Up Character Development Day

Can’t see the person for the sign…

Sometimes a show just turns into a road picture. Sometimes that’s what happens when someone just can’t get off the road. In this case, it’s Hibiki’s turn to take the spotlight, since we got her bigger introduction last week. I note that she’s pretty much moved ahead of Botan as far as importance to the show at this point, given that we only know a cursory amount about Botan (she’s rich and fragile). Hibiki is prideful to a fault, but there’s definitely more to her.

“Over there.” “Right! Over here!” “What? No!”

This episode also gives us more of an insight in everyone’s normal day, something that the show has glossed over a lot to show us special occasions thus far. And it does this through the conceit of Hibiki’s interactions, but after they’ve all met doing homework (and the ill-fated game). And of course it starts out 3 hours before school starts, because that’s when Hibiki feels like she has to leave. And I think that it becomes really clear that Hibiki is not just bad with directions. It’s almost that she cannot connect directions to where her feet go. We’ve seen multiple times where people tell her exactly where to go, pointing her in the right direction, and she takes off in a completely different direction. Such is what caused her initial grudge with Hibari, on the day of their entrance exam. Again leaving three hours early, she ends up blaming Hibari for sending her the wrong direction, but as the show has done before with Hanako, it shows us exactly what the issue is, without leaving it up to interpretation. When Hibari points one way and Hibiki takes off 90 degrees from that direction. I mean, we could guess earlier that it wasn’t really Hibari’s fault that Hibiki was late, but this made it crystal clear.

Bow before me!

Taking Her Revenge

Hibiki wasn’t the confident girl we know today

That doesn’t stop Hibiki from holding a grudge against Hibari, tho, since if she’d missed the test she wouldn’t be in school with Ren (although I think it’s pretty clear that given the way Class 7 works, Hibiki would have ended up at this school anyway, missed test or not). And when she finds Hibari’s pass case on the ground at the construction site, she thinks she has her ticket for Hibari’s debasement. She’d actually have to get to school to use it, tho, and that takes more than she can actually do. But what she does do is end up at her pre-school, where she first got to know Ren, and now rendezvous with her, as it’s their designated meetup spot. We do get a couple flashbacks of Hibiki’s past with Ren, including their first meeting and I think that it’s instructive as to why Ren and Hibiki are such good friends. Again not by what was said or done, but rather by how Hibiki is different from all the other girls. As Hibiki explains to Hibari, Ren is extremely attractive to other females: Not just people, but all sorts of animals. But I think the show is good about showing that even if Hibiki is in love with Ren, she’s not the kind of person to show it.

Ren has just accepted this is normal

As such, Hibiki ends up acting much more relaxed towards Ren than other girls, which I think is a significant key to their friendship. Ren doesn’t seem interested at all in the people who make googly eyes at her, and I would proffer that she probably likes having a close friend who is not that way (and I think she may have noticed that Botan, Hanako, and Hibari are not smitten with her either). And Ren also is a bit of a moral compass for Hibiki, making her examine whether shaming Hibari over her pass case is the right thing to do, and verifying that it isn’t. But in the end, maybe Hibiki is getting a little better when she realizes she should just wait for Ren to help her, rather than making Ren find her later.

In the end, without much fanfare…

So it seems that Hibiki realizes the importance of Hibari’s portrait of the construction sign in her case, as evidenced by her thoughts to herself and at the end by her insistence that she just picked it up and didn’t have time to look at it. I think that eventually it’ll be clear that Hibiki realizes Hibari’s not-so-shameful secret, but as Hibiki says, she’d hate it if someone trampled on the thing that’s most important to her. And while it’s not the same message as Hanako and Botan saying that they’d never blab about the person their friend likes, it’s equally good, in that Hibiki is able to empathize with Hibari. While that’s not quite as much of a safeguard against her blabbing it to the class, it is a pretty powerful statement that she realizes what goes around comes around. And this is right after she’s said the same thing, that Hibari will get what she deserves for her role in almost making Hibiki late to the entrance exam, which is to say ‘nothing bad’.