Hibike! Euphonium 2 – 04

Despite Kumiko’s questions, I think Asuka is opening up her real self to her

Character arcs have to conclude sometime and this episode brought the end of the Mizore – Nozomi arc. But how it ended gave me a couple of mixed feelings watching it different times. Why? Well, let’s find out.

Back to the Grind

Kumiko’s surprised face

Not that “Ten Times in a Row” isn’t a grind, but training camps are a special case, and have a special feel to them. Now everyone’s back home, and the final drive to prepare for the Kansai Regional competition is on. And the side news that the band is interested in is their position in the play order for the competition. Nobody can be too upset with 16^th out of 23. In a competition of good performers, going first is pretty much a death sentence, because judges always hold back good scores at the beginning, and recency bias makes the competitors you heard later be thought of better. Hashimoto-sensei makes the good point when the worry about following Myoujou arises: All the teams are good, they all had to win difficult competitions to even get there. Play the way you usually do, and just let things fall where they will.

An apology and pep talk

The main thrust of the episode quickly goes back to the continuing worries about Mizore and Nozomi. There are all sorts of good aspects happening here. First Niiyama-sensei actually apologizes to Mizore for not speaking up to her before Hashimoto-sensei gave her a hard time at the camp. Nobody argues that Hashimoto was wrong, but Niiyama makes the excuse that she had just accepted that Mizore’s solo part was ‘good enough’ for a high school student, even if she felt it was lacking musically. Perhaps the key things she says are that the playing makes her feel “heavy”, and that Mizore is allowed to have more fun while playing. But Mizore doesn’t really seem to understand what playing “with emotion” is, something that makes me think later.

The Crashing Wave

The newer friend correcting the older friend

Maybe Kumiko isn’t able to go to Nozomi with what Asuka said, but she still feels a responsibility to the band to try to minimize any drama. So when Nozomi says she’s going to go find Mizore and ask her what’s wrong, Kumiko takes a second and realizes that that would be bad. But that second is likely because Kumiko is surprised at what Nozomi says about Mizore: She plays with a lot of passion, and “is like an explosion of emotion.” This is so far from Kumiko’s experience with Mizore that it’s not surprising she can’t react quickly. Haruka and Kaori interrupt that current crisis, but that doesn’t stop Nozomi for long, as she sneaks up to the band hallway and finally approaches Mizore, who reacts about like we’d expect, running away. So the search is on for the girl who ran away, including Kumiko.

Yuuko is just a little frustrated with Mizore

And of course, it’s Kumiko who eventually finds Mizore, hiding in an unused classroom, and this gives the show an opportunity to explain the real circumstances: Mizore doesn’t hate Nozomi, and it’s not Nozomi’s fault. It’s Mizore who has pulled back from her, stemming from the situation when Nozomi quit. We heard that she didn’t even talk to Mizore about it, and what that ended up doing was make Mizore doubt whether Nozomi was really her friend. This was a classic situation where a ‘best friend’ one way was just ‘a friend’ the other way, as the reticent Mizore has been worried for the past year whether Nozomi cared about her at all.

Having The Wrong Idea

Mizore finally hears the truth from Nozomi

But rather than find out definitively, Mizore has held onto the hope by not talking to Nozomi, while fearing the “truth” that she knows would come from asking. And that fear and hesitation has crept into her playing, via that “straightforward personality” that Nozomi describes. She “doesn’t know” why she is still in the band, but knows that it’s her only connection and memory of her friend. That it all comes out now is troublesome, but maybe not so bad, because the truth isn’t that Nozomi wanted to abandon Mizore. It’s that Mizore didn’t seem disaffected with band, and Nozomi felt like she couldn’t ask her to quit.

Yuuko can deadpan with the best

The person who ends up put in kind of a bad place, although she’s probably known it for a while, is Yuuko, whose reality is that she wasn’t really Mizore’s best friend, just ‘the best friend who’s here right now.” I think Yuuko’s justified a bit in a little shouting at Mizore, being shoved down the friend totem pole by someone who’s not even been around. And Mizore’s feeling that Yuuko is only friendly to her out of pity does discount Yuuko far more than she deserves. But that’s probably not really the case, if Mizore were to step back and really think about it. Yuuko continually gets to be the voice of the opposing viewpoint, and it kind of makes her the ‘villain’ of the show, but that’s really only because she’s the one standing up on the other side. And I think that the show has done a great job in making it clear that Yuuko is not a villain, she just kinda seems like one on TV.

A throw-in scene that’ll mean a lot more later, I’m sure

Inappropriate Context Theater

This always happens in the unused classroom

The first time watching the show this week it kind of felt a little too coincidental, a little too pat, that the real problem between Mizore and Nozomi would be Mizore, and that it would all work out and that now Mizore would be able to play a beautiful solo. It kind of left me feeling like this episode had been just kind of set up from the beginning. But on the second viewing, I felt like there was more to it, and that there was one key thing from the previous episode that I realized might have really colored my opinion. In the conversation between Asuka and Kumiko, the translation said “she can’t stand that girl”, but listening to it, that’s maybe a little bit too negatively connotative with the translating. Asuka says “Nozomi-chan no koto dame na no”. Yeah, that could be ‘can’t stand’, but I think it’s a lot more like “is no good with” or “can’t deal with.” This episode, Kumiko asks, outright, “Nozomi-senpai no koto kirai”, which is definitely ‘hate’, and I think that difference makes a big distinction. Getting that understanding of hate out of the way before Mizore’s fleeing this episode puts her reconciliation with Nozomi in a much more acceptable space, narratively. And Nozomi’s description of Mizore as ‘straightforward’ helps to understand why her playing could go from flat and rote to joyous and expressive.

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!