My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU Episode 13
What They Say:
So exactly what’s going to happen when Hachiman Hikigaya, an isolated high school student with no friends, no interest in making any and a belief that everyone else’s supposedly great high school experiences are either delusions or outright lies, is coerced by a well meaning faculty member into joining the one member “Services Club” run by Yukino Yukinoshita, who’s smart, attractive and generally considers everyone in her school to be her complete inferior?
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
As the series draws to a close, we shift towards something similar to the culture festival but different enough that it has its own dynamic. With the sports festival coming into play, we get the logic used by Hachiman at the start that speaks to the hearts of many about how they feel about events like this that basically become forced participating in things that they flat out don’t want to deal with. As a student, I was completely on his side as I absolutely hated so many of these things. Yet as a parent, I find myself making sure my own kids participate as often as possible since I was never truly forced to, and missed out on a great many things. The paradox of ones own life versus trying to better the lives of others, especially ones own children, continues.
With the festival here, the club is drawn into helping out in figuring out things like what the featured events should be for the boys and girls side and in general, which is an amusing student leadership meeting when you get down to it. There’s some basic logic being missed at times, which the teacher advisor at least helps out in pointing out the flaws in them, but it’s also useful because the club members generally come up with some awful ideas. The show provides some cute montage moments with all of this as the events are worked on and we see the students going through the motions here. But it’s a welcome contrast to what we saw in the culture festival storyline where groups and people were taken advantage of in order for others to have a better time and take all the glory.
Being the way the show works, it gets into the various activities pretty well as we get Hachiman with a pretty disaffected sense of interest in it all, even when it has the girls doing some solid and non-fanservice style cosplay event material as well. Yui and Yukino come across well as they participate and there’s just something fun about the events they’re involved in while all dressed up. The series also wants to end with a bit of a good challenge between Hayama and Hachiman since the two have sparred in the past and there’s something to be said for doing that once again, especially since Hayama gets all dressed up in a great way for it. It gets all stupidly goofy as it goes on with the trick play that Hachiman organizes and you have to admire the crafty nature of the man as he sets up his team to win with the least real effort on his part.
In Summary:
My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU ends on a simple and noncommittal note as the trio has fun with the athletic festival and simply does what it does here. There’s nothing that really goes into who the characters are, though we get yet another solid monologue from Hachiman on the state of forced participation, but there’s no further exploration of the characters and what’s going on with them in regards to each other. It instead wants to end on a fun note and it does just that in a pretty good way. I definitely like the series a whole lot more in its first few episodes as we saw the distance that Hachiman had created and the eventual discovery of why, but everything softened as it went on and became more the usual kind of material rather than what made it interesting, which is unfortunate. I definitely liked the series overall but there’s more than enough closure here for me to be content if there are no further episodes made.
Grade: B-
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
