It’s a wonder that Hotaru still has any teeth left after all the sweets she downs and the minor mouth malady she has here comes as hardly a surprise. That doesn’t stop her from eating and talking about candy as usual.
What They Say:
Episode 9: “Wata-pachi, Lucky Choco-droppings, and…/ Sakura Daikon, Egg Ice Cream, and…”
Despite suffering from a mouth ulcer, Hotaru ignores Saya’s protestations and eats a dagashi that packs a punch. Later on, Hotaru lets Kokonotsu in on the secret of her origins.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
After a somewhat lackluster episode, Dagashi Kashi is back to its core appeal: watching Hotaru act nuts with a straight-man foil to help things along. In this case, it’s Saya who provides the disbelieving reactions through the first half to Hotaru’s behavior and she excels in that role. Saya was trying to find Kokonotsu, but no one was home at Shikada Dagashi. Of course Hotaru comes along and expounds upon the joys of various snacks even though she really should not be eating anything hard at the moment since she has a mouth ulcer. Saya’s attempts to dissuade Hotaru from having any Wata-pachi, a candy that crackles in your mouth, end in futility as even the pain does not stop Hotaru from indulging.
Hotaru’s outlandish behavior merely takes another step into the deep end of silliness when Saya notices some cute packaging that has a very not-cute name: Lucky Choco-droppings. With an opening at the rear of little boxes shaped liked animals, the candies come out of said rear and remind one very much of what the word “droppings” brings to mind. When Saya tries to point out the…unseemliness of girls their age thinking and saying such things (the snack itself is popular with the elementary school crowd; it appears to be a universal trait that anything dealing with excrement will draw a laugh from first-graders), Hotaru accepts her criticism and tries to raise the level of affairs by reimagining their consumption of Lucky Choco-droppings as a high class tea party, of the sort you might find in Maria-sama ga Miteru (including some deliberate tweaks to the character designs making the faces more angular as you find in shoujo works set in such places). But no matter how well you dress it up, you’re still making reference to shit.
The second half returns to the standard pairing of Kokonotsu the Straight-Man to Hotaru’s nutty candy freak. In addition to all the candy antics, Hotaru tells us that she’s originally from Osaka, as an explanation for why she suddenly (for no apparent reason) slips into kansai-ben (the regional dialect of Western Japan) at times…only to walk back the comment not too much later. All of this serves largely to annoy Kokonotsu in between the usual lecturing about dagashi (this time, we learn a bit about regional variation in the availability of certain snacks). But before things get too deep or revealing, we are brought back to the central appeal of this show as Hotaru makes another rather low-brow reference for a snack, this time for Egg Ice Cream which she calls “Boobs Ice Cream” because from a package that looks like a small round balloon that has been filled with ice cream you normally eat it by sucking on it…in a way familiar to the earliest days of feeding for any person. Kokonotsu, on the other hand, calls it Bomb Ice Cream as it often winds up exploding in your hand if you let the ice cream melt too much and the balloon suddenly bursts apart.
This is basically where Dagashi Kashi hits all of its strong points: broad gags founded upon Hotaru’s single-minded obsession with dagashi and the strategic deployment of foils (Saya, Kokonotsu) who are best suited for magnifying the not-normalness of Hotaru. The mixture of high and lowbrow comedy is all part of the package, in some ways being like dagashi itself, a mass-market, mass-appeal product sector that seems to give rise to some fanatical connoisseurs like Hotaru and Kokonotsu’s father Yo as well. There are various nods and winks and fanservice as well, all meant to increase the appeal with certain groups, but the central strength of the show really is just letting Hotaru be Hotaru, a manic-depressive candy-loving nutcase. Comparisons have been made with the other screwball comedy of this season, RPG fantasy farce Konosuba, and it’s correct to differentiate how they aim for their comedy, though one should be just as aware how they are similar in their comedic appeal: both are at their best when they are least in touch with cultural norms. Hotaru went on some more of her manic candy trips this episode and so the results were much funnier.
In Summary:
Hotaru comes by Shikada Dagashi while Kokonotsu is out to find Saya there. Though suffering from a mouth ulcer, Hotaru merrily continues in her usual mode: eating candy and talking about it, even if there is as much pain as pleasure to be had from her favorite food groups (snacks) at this time. Later, Kokonotsu is back and the two go a bit into Hotaru’s origins (not seriously) and debate the finer points of how one refers to a snack that can have either a naughty or an explosive nickname. Hotaru the loon and the disbelieving reactions of her more normal acquaintances forms the bedrock to the show’s comedy and is on full display again in this episode.
Grade: A-
Streamed By: FUNimation
Review Equipment:
Apple iMac with 12GB RAM, Mac OS 10.10 Yosemite
