When illness brings down Hotaru, Kokonotsu and Saya visit her at home to see what is wrong. More is wrong than they expected.
What They Say:
Episode 10: “That’s Dagashi!”
When Hotaru doesn’t show up at Shikada Dagashi for two days, a concerned Kokonotsu and Saya visit her house to investigate. It appears Hotaru has come down with a cold so powerful that she doesn’t even want to eat dagashi.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
When Hotaru doesn’t come by the shop for a while, Kokonotsu gets concerned. Naturally, since Hotaru has been hanging out there just about every day for the past several months at least. When he talks to Saya about it, the two decide to head over to Hotaru’s house in town to check in on her. Of course, we get the fairly standard joke about rich people and how scary they are, here in the “they built this gigantic house just for her?!” joke that is part of the regular stable of rich people jokes.
It appears that Hotaru has a cold, with the whole usual face mask and staying in bed routine. Kokonotsu’s appearance seems to frighten Hotaru as well, for reasons we cannot grasp at first. Thus begins the long, rambling story of how things turned out like this, eventually tying back into the prologue at the start of the episode where we see To at a drink vending machine late at night where he encounters Hotaru. She doesn’t have a cold at all. The reality is that her mouth ulcer has gotten worse, but she really wants to try the new Baby Star Ramen snack on its debut day. To advises her to swear off dagashi until her ulcer gets better and so she’s been holed up in her house, trying to stay away from Kokonotsu and dagashi.
Even in the face of Kokonotsu’s onslaught of snacks that should be nutritious and help Hotaru with her illness, she manages to retain an amount of self-control. Even when it seemingly breaks down, as Hotaru goes into an almost subconscious mode driven by instinct, her cuckoo clock (no subtextual message there, no, certainly no) comes to her rescue. But all of this long, long run of narrative is, in the end, nothing more than setup for a single punchline joke at the end.
And that’s why this episode doesn’t quite match up to the greater fun of last week. We do get to see Hotaru acting nuts as usual and there is good interaction with Saya and Kokonotsu, but there is also something deliberately lame about having a lengthy involved story that ends rather flatly on a simple joke. And this was deliberate on all sides, even Kokonotsu and Saya are deflated by the end of the episode in reaction to their discovery of just how well Hotaru has been staying away from dagashi.
In Summary:
When Hotaru goes missing in action, Kokonotsu and Saya go to her house to check up on her and find her seemingly under the weather. What’s strangest of all is that the snacks Kokonotsu brough along to make her feel better seem to be making her afraid. When it’s revealed that she’s trying to stay away from dagashi in order to heal her mouth ulcer, which has not gotten better, the two visitors are sympathetic. But the upshot of it all shows that this entire episode was largely setup for a single punchline at the end.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: FUNimation
Review Equipment:
Apple iMac with 12GB RAM, Mac OS 10.10 Yosemite