All hail the new King, the First of Her Name. (Don’t worry, this is still Rabbit).
What They Say:
Bunnisode 12: “I Can Take That Step Forward Because You Are Watching”
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Final episodes are a time usually to wrap up story plot-lines and either put a full stop to things or provide a good ending point (well, if the production team knows what they’re doing; there are many cases where ongoing source works don’t really provide a good stopping point for animated adaptations and we get rather unfulfilling final episodes for seasons as the action just peters out). As Rabbit has no real “plot” to worry about, it is not hard to furnish a nice “goodbye (for now, we hope)” installment.
And we have that here. There is a little bit of new information to impart to anime viewers: one segment invites us to see what is going on back at the Hot Bakery, where Cocoa’s mother and her ever accomplished elder sister Mocha are hard at work serving customers. (NOTE: I have not seen the OVAs). Though we now learn a little secret: Mocha is not quite the stellar presence we had been introduced to before. She messes up quite a bit. That does not matter though, since she always works very hard to overcome her limits and improve, so that she can continue to be an exemplary big sister to Cocoa. In a regular season episode, we finally get to met the Hot…ahem…Hoto mother, who seems to have quite a bit of the troll in her, as she likes to tease her daughter.
Back in Rabbitville, the group are celebrating the end of the year with a little game. Chiya baked a seasonal pie of some sort and hid a ring in one of the slices. Whoever got the ring is King for the day (so, just a food variation on the King Game). It turns out Chino gets it, but being indecisive by nature she has no idea what to order, so the other girls go off shopping for a while. As she interacts with all the others, we have what is meant to be a bit of roll call of plans for the future. This is how you can tell it’s a final episode for the season. While this show does not have a complex set of subplots to wrap up, we are getting a quick rundown of where things stand. It all ends with Chino deciding that she wants to order everyone to go with her to the big city, as she has never been there (Rabbitville, I forget what its real name is, is a nice town, but probably not too big at all). But everyone doesn’t accept this as an order, since they like the idea anyway. A marker is laid down for the future (if we get another season).
Yeah, they reveal a “secret” in this episode that’s not so very hard to have guessed beforehand.
Season Retrospective:
I am saving most of my comments for here, though I will be brief. Is the Order a Rabbit? BLOOM has not brought anything new to the table, but then this is not the kind of show that really needs to. While I cannot judge from any knowledge of the source, not having read it, the basic goal, so it seems to me, is to provide a lot of comfort and large doses of “Dawwwwwwwww.” On that front, the show continues to be very successful. It is not without its humorous element, with a quirky sense of humor that might not be for everyone, but hits well enough with me. This show is basically the model for Cute Girls Doing Cute Things (or Doing Nothing, if that’s your feeling about this kind of work).
What this season has done is advance the timeline a little bit. The passage of time has not really mattered too much for this story, as there are no grand goals: just the normal rites of passage as the girls are now at transition points. Depending on circumstances, there could be changes afoot, as Rize going to university could well see her off to the big city—Rabbitville doesn’t seem to house an institution of higher learning, at least as far as we have seen. We may witness the breakup of Chimame-tai, in school at least, if Megu or Maya decide to go on a different path from Chino. It could be that change would not be a bad thing. As much as the Rabbit Girls are fun to see together, there are likely only so many times we can see them do the same things they have done before.
Change was a theme of this season, especially for Chino. The end of this episode was particularly focused upon how Chino has changed from who she was at the beginning. The influence (mostly chaotic) of Cocoa has broken through Chino’s shell and allowed her to begin showing a bit more emotion on the surface. She’s not in any way the trippy extrovert that Cocoa is (and we’re not sure what her mother Saki was truly like, other than that she was more free-spirited than her daughter), bu Chino is starting to break out of her cocoon. And it’s a nice thing to see.
In Summary:
During the brief break between terms for school, the girls hang out and think about plans for after all the big events to come are over (Rize is graduating from high school and Chimame-tai will be graduating into it). Chino becomes their leader for the day and decides that an adventure in future would be good. A warm ending for a fluffy sweet show, the balm for what has been a horrible year for us all.
Episode Grade: A
Season Grade: A
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Apple iMac with 12GB RAM, Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra