The new season of Haikyuu!! started early.
What They Say:
“Kaguya Wants to Handle It / Miyuki Shirogane Wants to Show Off / Kaguya Wants to Be Covered”
When it comes to studiousness, Shirogane is second to none, but as for athletics, he’s hopeless, which is why he’s training hard for volleyball in the gym after school. However, no matter what he does, Shirogane isn’t showing any signs of progress. Playing volleyball for P.E. is only a week away, and at this rate, his image as the perfect president of Student Council will be crushed. Just as Shirogane gives in to despair, Fujiwara shows up. Swallowing his pride, he begs her to coach him, and so Shirogane’s days of training under the enthusiastic tutelage of Fujiwara begin. Will he be able to deliver an average serve in time?
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
This episode doesn’t have the continuous sense of interconnectedness of the last, but it does start out with a very specific follow-up to a story from a previous episode, arguably the first event to make an episode a prerequisite for viewing another one. Just as Shirogane got to give solo romantic advice to a male student who looked up to him at the time, Kaguya is now in the same position with the very girl Shirogane’s pupil in love was able to start dating due to his mostly off-base advice. The only difference is that… this girl wants to break it off. At least that’s the initial joke, but it’s soon revealed that this girl is actually just unsure of her feelings, prompting Kaguya to suggest a “pros and cons” list. In her attempt to explain how to come up with pros, she ends up just thinking about all the things she loves about Shirogane, almost blowing her cover in the process. As has been the trend in each episode since her legendary ED, Chika steals the show, this time as Love Detective Chika, and essentially tricks Kaguya into realizing that her feelings for Shirogane might be a little deeper than she wants to admit. As Kaguya attempts to recover and reclaim her position as the wise advisor, though, Chika quickly snatches away the spotlight once more, delivering possibly some of the funniest material of the episode in her fashion of dropping dark truths with her adorable face. Ultimately it’s a fairly heartwarming resolution, and it’s satisfying to see several minor plot threads tied together.
Since Kaguya got the first part almost entirely to herself, Shirogane gets the second part with a similar degree of exclusivity, but in both cases, Chika takes the role of costar, resulting in her receiving more screen time in the first two thirds of the episode than either of the actual protagonists. If this sounds like a complaint, allow me to correct the misconception: this is gratitude to the anime gods. There are plenty of anime girls like Chika who are just cute, and the “comedy” is built around the fact that the viewer has this inherent attachment to them, but Chika is such a strong asset to this series because she’s often at the center of some of the most hilariously written comedy it has to offer. Shirogane is quite entertaining here as well, his incredible lack of athletic coordination played up to almost impossible extremes. This gag lands very successfully at the beginning, preventing the climax of what was set up as a Haikyuu!!-style volleyball scene, but after enough repetition, it starts to be less impactful. Still, the dynamic between Shirogane and Chika in the ridiculous training montage that follows is delightful enough without building any relationship between that beyond that of a coach and a student. Once again, Chika gets the funniest moment in a punch line that makes up for the some of the comedic shortcomings of the segment.
Back to three vignettes, this episode’s final offering centers on the “ai-ai gasa” trope and extends Kaguya and Shirogane’s usual battle of forcing the other to confess into its natural position for that trope. After all, someone has to be the one to offer the umbrella, and in keeping with these characters’ misplaced pride, neither can show the perceived weakness that could come from being the initiator. There are a few strong back-and-forth strikes in this squabble, but ultimately Chika interrupts as usual, albeit in a much more reduced capacity than many of her other recent appearances. For the most part, this is Kaguya and Shirogane’s chance to actually spend some time together this episode and it ends up turning into more of a cute romantic sequence than one that continues the comedy focus, which isn’t unprecedented for the final piece of an episode in this series.
Oh, and who could that mysterious character be that they walk past? It almost feels like we’ve seen him in the OP and ED or something…
In Summary:
It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that Chika is in this episode more than any other character, which is more than welcome as long as she continues to be an unpredictable but consistently comedic goldmine. The protagonists will always be the heart of the show, and there’s no questioning that there’s still a great deal of humor to be had from their interactions and even their respective scenes alone, but the biggest trend of this episode’s segments is that throwing Chika into the mix almost always elevates the comedy to the next level.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
LG Electronics OLED65C7P 65-Inch 4K Ultra HD Smart OLED TV, Amazon Fire TV Stick
