RIKEI GA KOI NI OCHITA NO DE SHOUMEI SHITEMITA. R=1-SINΘ (HEART)

DESCRIPTION

CAST

MANGA ComedyRikei ga Koi ni Ochita no de Shoumei shitemita.
ONA ComedyRikei ga Koi ni Ochita no de Shoumei shitemita.

REVIEWS

• 

  YTPizzer

  40/100
  what the hell was that

  It was kinda whatever up until around the halfway point where the plot took a complete nosedive, culminating in a trainwreck of a final episode. Spoilers from here on out, but you probably shouldn't watch this season anyways.

  I'll start with everything except for the plot. I didn't notice much of a difference in art/animation quality, the music seemed equally unremarkable, nothing besides the plot had any remarkable change in quality. Now, about the plot..

  Their first major error was effectively concluding the entire story up until that point only halfway through the season. It immediately sucked all the momentum out of the show and made me low-key want to stop watching. This is kind of my first gripe with a lot of anime that is especially bad here:

  • Manga cannot be guaranteed to work within the structure of standard anime seasons.

  This issue is pervasive throughout the industry. As an overwhelming amount of anime are adaptations, rather than bespoke stories crafted for their medium, they more often than not cram their source material into the structure of anime seasons, and almost always do not fit naturally. This shows up most often in the tendency for most anime to have terrible pacing and rushed final episodes. That's the writers trying to force a bow onto a narrative that wasn't written to end where the anime needs it to. This isn't always true: I personally felt as though Your Lie in April didn't suffer from the shortcommings of being an adaptation at all, and in fact was better of as an anime than it would've been in a non-audiovisual medium. (Side note, Your Lie in April was a 22 episode season. In my opinion, it wouldn't have worked in 12-13, nor split across 2 standard seasons.) Unfortunately, in this case, this show was not part of the exception. It was long from it.

  This show made 0 attempt to adapt the source material into the medium (and if they did, they did a horrible job). Consequently, the season basically ended halfway through, and then the writers had to hobble together some semblance of a progressing plot by cramming 3 simultaneous arcs into the story. These new arcs meander for much longer than they need to, interrupt each other before it can feel like anything is changing, and are a tonal departure from what the show had been up until that point.

  It only starts getting truly bad once Kanade's arc kicks into gear.

  Kanade was always the audience insert up until this point. Her role was to be the straight-man to the main couple, Yukimura and Himuro, and now that their arc was essentially over, there was room for Kanade to grow. This isn't bad, I am on board. I started finding it a little frustrating with how long she was holding onto this "I have to be normal!" point, but they were going ahead with it, so I was listening. This could be a nice little arc about the plain, normal, audience insert learning to embrace what makes her unique, and become an interesting character in her own right.

  Then it turns out that the guy she was seeing was a complete nutjob, and the entire arc was instantly invalidated.

  • In feeling the need to make the driving force of Kanade's "I have to be normal" belief a completely crazy person, they cheapen their story to a ridiculous degree.

  They've effectively done an appeal to ridicule, which is a fallacy that doesn't actually make a sound argument. Now, instead of being about Kanade learning to be true to herself, and stop repressing her feelings, they effectively force her to change her mind by making "normal" look absolutely insane. It went from being a lesson that might actually ring true to some in the audience to completely detatched from reality, and obnoxiously comical.

  To suddenly spring those disgusting traumatic things onto the audience of a show like this is also a baffling choice. This is not what your audience is here for.

  • A lot of writers will mistake shock value for emotional depth because it lingers, but it's a cheap trick. You haven't actually written a good scene. You just shocked the audience.

  It can be effective, but only when it's actually justified in the plot. It's like raw fish: if prepared right, it can be great. If you don't do it properly or use the wrong kind, you're gonna get food poisoning. And I wouldn't use raw fish in my breakfast cereal.

  • This tone was not appropriate for this kind of show. At all.

  The psycho Kanade was seeing was not properly set up in this way either. You may argue that he was hanging out with the sketchy crowd to begin with, but the crowd he was with was just some goofballs used for lighthearted jokes once or twice, and it never got nearly as serious as it suddenly did in the final bit. It's forced, inappropriate, and something no one in the audience wanted to see. Kanade didn't deserve that, and neither did we.

  Not only was it tonally inappropriate in the context of the show, it was tonally inappropriate within the context of the scene itself. This almost doesn't need to be said, but the pacing of that final scene was so bad that it was actively distracting. It was so removed from reality that it was absolutely impossible to connect with any of the emotions trying to be conveyed. While Kanade was having her (honestly, really grating on the ears) outburst to all the sketchy guys that had literally just kidnapped her, we're seeing all these scenes and flashbacks on top of her rambling, which superficially disguise the level of fantasy playing out in the moment. If the camera were instead fixed on what's actually happening in that room, you'd have 4 dangerous creeps patiently waiting for the girl they just kidnapped to finish having an emotional breakdown like some kid.

  When Kanade's knight in shining armour, Yukimura, bursts into the room, he not only behaves like a complete moron, but also starts behaving out of character. Behaving like morons for comedic effect is common in this show, and usually fine. It's not fine when we've just seen a guy get clobbered and tazed and threats of sexual assault. Yukimura then proceeds to completely fail to make a decent rebutal towards Kanade's wishes to be normal, effectively telling her that she is her and because she is her she should not be other people. That's not what Kanade was hung up about, but since she's tied up and being threatened by the word "normal" zip tied to a serial killer, she suddenly agrees. If anything, she's more moved by Yukimura going this far than by any point he made; even the writers struggled to believe Yukimura's argument would've been effective here. It's so disappointing because there's been multiple moments throughout the series that Yukimura has had that I enjoyed. I thought the part with him on his laptop breaking down all the reasons he liked Himuro, giving massive points to her, rattling off a tonne of things he really admired, to be really cute. The moment at the end of the first season where the mood index or whatever was perfect was also some nice reincorporation, and they managed to smoothly slide into it. They just really didn't have a good concept here.

  That's ignoring all the other small nitpicks, like him taking a beating with a bunch of glass bottles in his vest, him and Himuro happening to overhear the professor tipping him off that the guy was bad news, Yukimura's complete lack of self preservation and gravity to realise the kind of situation they were in, it's all these small things that don't line up that make a bad narrative bad.

  I'm really tearing into this one scene here, but it just goes to show that this sort of thing was out of the show's depth. You can't put a scene like this in this sort of show or else it exposes all the flaws in its writing.

  • As always, we have now run out of time, and need to hastly wrap things up.

  The ending now has to be crammed into literally the last 2 minutes of the final episode. It's not like Kanade falling for Yukimura was unjustified after all he had just done for her, and it's not like Himuro being sorta chill with it was unjustified given the rapport the two had built with each other, but personally, none of that is enough to justify jumpscaring the audience with a love triangle, especially in a wholesome show that hadn't tried to do pull any romantic drama thus far. And the writers know this, because they don't do anything dramatic with it! The seriousness was tantamount to back when Yukimura was confronting a bunch of kidnappers, like, 8 minutes earlier. It wasn't what I would've done, but it wasn't nearly as bad as the (literal) crimes of earlier that same episode.

  To be honest, I think the only reason Himuro was so chill with it was because the writers think they have to always end a narrative by bringing it back to the very beginning, and they had to find a way to reincorporate her line from the very beginning of the narrative. Which I don't always mind, but it is a bit forced in this case. If you had told me that they had rushed through the source material's story just so that they could end at this point and Himuro could say her line again, I don't think I'd have trouble believing you.

  I don't understand how the scores for these animes are always the same. This was clearly poorly executed, and it doesn't seem like many people disagree. If you enjoyed the first season, but actually cared about the plot, maybe avoid this season. It'll leave a foul taste in your mouth.

  PS. If you liked Yukimura as a character maybe check out Stein's Gate 1 and 0 instead. They're not really that similar, the show's not exclusively a romance and the first half of the first season is a drag but I'll always love Kyouma, and it's just a way better show. Maybe I'll go rewatch that now.

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