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| I agree. |
Finally, an episode to reignite my flame for Hanasaku. It has been quite some time since I found an episode enjoyable. Maybe it's because they finally decided to add some drama to the story, moving back to Toyo (and staying for at least the next episode).
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| HorribleSubs, indeed. Har, har, har. |
This episode hit the spot with an injection of the drama element back into the anime. I personally like Yuina's character more but I think it would make for an even worse anime. She is a bit too carefree about things and acts more "normal" than Ohana. If you remove Ohana's insanity, then the anime would be even worse off. At least she makes for a good side character; if only she had a little more lines or an episode revolving around her.
I guess the first main drama point was finding out that the one that wrote the article was her mother. An absolute WTF coincidence aside, it was much needed to push towards some kind of conflict within the anime. As the mother sat there explaining herself, it was painfully obvious that they were cut from the same cloth; Ohana was just an immature version. We could slowly see the effect of her ideals from working at the inn surfacing and affecting her. It was a nice touch to see the mother and daughter arguing.
This relationship made things fall into place, though. Ko was conflicted about this new girl wanting him and went to visit Ohana to try to come up with a decision to respond to her properly. So, it wasn't just arbitrarily him doing things for no reason. It's too bad he turned around before meeting Ohana earlier, which still makes him a pretty shitty character, but he's slightly better than before.
Another nice thing with this episode was seeing Ohana's naive thinking. Seeing that in 6 months, everything had changed so fast with her gone, as she was left behind. It was the feeling of expecting everything to be the same when you got back, only to find the world had moved on without you. I think something like this was extremely well done, considering it is rare for the world to NOT revolve around the main character. Such insanity.
The mixture of many different elements really brought this anime back for me. It's definitely now way up there for me. I eagerly await next week's episode. I think, since episode one, this is the first time I've been so excited to watch another episode of Hanasaku, though I am probably just getting my hopes up. The conclusions of all the plot points have been done poorly so far, so to expect otherwise is insanity. Here is to hoping for a bit more insanity.
~Pearz
