What They Say:
So exactly what’s going to happen when Hachiman Hikigaya, an isolated high school student with no friends, no interest in making any and a belief that everyone else’s supposedly great high school experiences are either delusions or outright lies, is coerced by a well meaning faculty member into joining the one member “Services Club” run by Yukino Yukinoshita, who’s smart, attractive and generally considers everyone in her school to be her complete inferior?
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With summer vacation coming up, Yukino is trying to get in touch with Hachiman about setting things up for the club and its activities. But Hachiman is the kind of person who, while at home, wants little to do with anyone else. His time is his own and his general distaste for others at this point is pretty well earned, so he just wants to play his games and do his thing. Hence trying to ignore Yukino’s repeated attempts at getting in touch with him, which leads to some comical messages from her about what she thinks he’s up to and really doing. There’s a good and natural kind of flow to what she says but also how he reads and interprets things that does give it something of a realistic feeling to it. So many shows have such plastic or hard to believe aspects of its dialogue that you just write them off easily. But they do a good job here once again.
While Hachiman would prefer a summer break that involves him just doing his thing, it’s the last thing he’ll get as Yukino has set a trip for everyone, which brings in several other characters as well, including his younger sister. There’s something scary about a trip with all of these people together, which initially is just Hachiman as the only go, but it slowly adds in other guys as well, such as Hayato and Saika. Of course, the real trick here is that while everyone thinks they’re going on a trip of some sort that involves Chiba, it’s really to a countryside community center of sorts with young kids where their teacher has volunteered all of them for some good educational experiences. They get to mentor and work with young kids to help them do all sorts of fun and neat things in the outdoors, which isn’t exactly what some of them are looking for, be it the teenagers or the grade school kids.
The show works through a fair bit of material early on as it has them dealing with the younger kids, many of which are just excited to be where they are and experiencing the things they are. But there are always those that are less interested in it and it’s not a surprise that the Service Club ends up finding one of them and doing what they can to make her feel like she belongs a bit, which fits with this club since none of them feel like they belong in general. The show deals with this nicely enough and lets the core trio work together, which is always fun when they just talk and connect with people. But it also just goes and has some fun along the way elsewhere with the high school students in general since there are those that really don’t like the Service Club – such as Yumiko – and that provides for some tension that should be light in some ways but gets more serious as it goes on. Which is welcome to see as well since these are teenagers with all sorts of points of views that need to get expressed.
In Summary:
My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU has another decent episode that once more shows us characters that often don’t act like your usual leads. The off nature of the show in a lot of ways is what does draw me to it, even if they don’t seem to be able to really move forward in significant ways with the story. But it’s seeing the way these characters cope with themselves and what they’re facing that makes it engaging for me since they’re not the norm and they’re all difficult personalities because of their beliefs and how they view themselves. I continue to particularly like the way we get Hachiman’s internal dialogue which is pretty self deprecating as that makes his outward personality all the more realistic. The bonding of the group works a bit better here, piecemeal as it is, and that’s definitely fun to see as is the way all the kids handle this new experience. Good fun, but still falling short of its potential.
Grade: B-
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
