Andou receives some unwanted attention after he deliberately twists words around.
What they Say:
Episode 2 – “Misconception.” A group of five boys and girls suddenly acquire supernatural powers. Ready to fight in galactic battles to defend human cause… they are struck by the realization that there are no wars, no conspiracies, no evils empires, no nothing in their high school life. They instead decide to idly have fun by wasting their powers away.
The Review
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers).
Andou leads the rest of the literature club in coming up with proper nicknames for themselves. As wielders of special power, it’s his opinion that they should all have intensely confusing power names derived from archaic and unused readings of kanji. This becomes confusing as the very meanings of the names they’ve chosen become completely muddled. The situation becomes even more dire when Kudou arrives, mistaking Andou’s letter of admiration and his bestowing of a nickname upon her for an expression of his love for her. She won’t hear any explanation to the contrary, and thus Andou awkwardly and unwillingly becomes her “darling.”
The ruse lasts for a couple of days and the other young ladies of the literature club soon grown irritated with Andou’s behavior. Faced with the prospect of being shunned from the club, he chooses the road of truthfulness and explains the misunderstanding to Kudou. The reality is difficult and Andou has a lot of trouble hurting Kudou’s feelings. As he explains to Tomoyo afterwards, the misunderstanding arose from the readings he chose for each person’s power. In order to maintain unity with the group, he chose readings that used the same number of Katakana characters. He admits that some restraint may have been in order, but Kudou emails later to tell him that she’s taken a liking to his naming system and adopts the nickname he wrote to her in his letter (albeit with the incorrect meaning she originally misinterpreted).
Last week’s episode introduced the characters by featuring the powers they’d developed. This week’s episode puts those mysterious abilities on the back-burner to tell a tale that is familiar to anyone who’s watched a romantic comedy in recent memory. As Andou lets his imagination run wild again, indulging in his chuunibyou fantasies while pulling the others into them, he’s taught a vivid lesson about how his escapism has the potential to affect others.
The episode is maybe half-successful at what it’s trying to accomplish, and I’m a bit torn in my reaction to it. On the one hand I want to congratulate it for subverting a lot of the expected cliches – as annoying as it is to see one character mindlessly fawning over another for what we can only accurately say is no good reason (neither character has been developed enough at this point to indicate any realistic romantic tension and thus the situation feels completely arbitrary), it seems to have avoided the trap of maintaining the deception for too long, as Andou becomes straightforward when pressed and things are defused within a half an episode. As tired as I am of jokes about breast size (one of my many pet peeves), it’s nice to hear a character say to another that she shouldn’t judge her self-worth on how she measures up against her female peers (a snidely-delivered line to be sure, but also good advice). And as typical as it is to have one character be a monotone loli, I find her just so gosh-darned cute that I really can’t be too mad about it. The juxtaposition of these many pros and cons has left me feeling ambivalent in the aftermath; I want to enjoy the episode for what it is, but its flaws are just a bit too apparent for me to overlook.
Another thing I realized after the episode was finished was how interested I was after last week to see how the reality of having super powers played into the everyday lives of the characters. This episode was a let-down in that respect since it dealt quite a bit with the characters’ daily lives but their powers in this situation were a complete non-issue. It’s not so much that I’m looking for flashy animation or huge battles between the characters, since I think that misses the point of what the story has set out to tell. But at the same time, these kids have abilities that most people could only dream of, and almost every human being on the planet would instantly find some way to use their abilities to some sort of self advantage. I find it difficult to believe that a group of high school students could be so restrained in the use of their abilities, especially in a TV anime that is supposedly built around their existence.
I think one of the continuing questions that will crop up from week-to-week has to do with the visual quality of the series. Does it hold to some (probably imagined) standard we’ve already come to demand from Studio Trigger? I think expecting the type of visual flair we were dealt every week from Kill la Kill is unrealistic; an original production comes with all sorts of freedoms that an adaptation can’t hope to match, and Hiroyuki Imaishi is a director with a particular sense of style to boot. But this episode was pleasant to look at and there were plenty of opportunities for the animators to pencil in some fun little visual embellishments in many of the characters’ reaction shots. Compared to similar anime series that deal with teenage interactions as a primary subject, this show is more interesting to look at. As other reviewers have stated elsewhere, there’s a lot of characterization that occurs just via the way the characters are drawn and animated, which is not something that can be said about many anime.
In Summary:
Even tired tropes can find new life when used in new ways. The type of “love misunderstanding” featured in this episode is possibly one of the more annoying of those that haunt anime that take place in high school settings, but the fact that the resolution of the situation was focused so much on the straightforward resolution of the situation and the implicit fact of Andou’s sometimes inconvenient chuuni tendencies turned a really obnoxious episode into one with some redeeming qualities. The humor featured in this series thus far has been very standard and unremarkable, but it’s that edge of sweetness and the fact that the characters are often so much themselves that makes it more fun than it normally would be. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, to learn more about that guy hanging upside-down from the tree in episode 1, but I’m also not unwilling to have fun with the characters as they work out their relationships with one-another, powers or not.
Episode Grade: C
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment: Acer P235H 1080p LCD Monitor connected via DVI input, Logitech S220 2.1 Speakers, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560
