Chronicles Of The Going Home Club Episode 2
What They Say:
Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu each have a poem to describe their personalities that begins “If the Cuckoo won’t sing…”. The Going Home Club members each try to compose a version of the poem to describe themselves. Although assumed to be a “serene blockhead” type, Karin brings in cookies that she made herself. She reveals a level of Home Ec Club-cultivated “Girl Power” that astounds her fellow members. Karin tells a story about a peer from middle school attending a social mixer. Sakura decides to have the club assume the role of boys and girls and practice so they’ll know what to do if they’re ever get caught up in a social mixer.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The opening episode of Chronicles of the Going Home Club didn’t exactly strike much laughter into me or get me interested in the characters in any particular way, mostly because it’s simply guilty of being mediocre. At best. The show introduced us to the gaggle of girls who don’t participate in after school clubs and therefore just go home, though they end up dealing with other things along the way as a group, forming their own particular little clique and club. What hindered the show more in some ways than the bland personalities of the cast was the simple animation and character designs, since at least you could latch onto that if it was better or more pleasing.
With this episode, we get three different stories told throughout it that are a bit more defined, and they’re once again given their own story numbers. The first story deals initially with some social studies material and the way they cope with it, but it just kind of devolves from there into hypothetical situations related to the saying that they’re working on. Some of the views on it are amusing, and how one person reacts is not the way someone else interprets it, but it does basically boil down to another segment where the girls are all just sitting around a club room at school talking. And because of the lack of engaging personalities, even as they try and tie themselves to the personalities of famous generals, it’s just kind of… well, there.
The second story has the girls going on a bit about the things that make them appealing as girls, with an amusing gag where one of them has the power reader that we see from Dragon Ball Z, as one of them has Feminine Appeal well over 40,000. The girls all have different things that they’re good at, but it’s only superficial with what it delves into, so we don’t really get to know the traits of the girls in the end. The last story takes up most of the second half as the girls get into working on how to deal with being invited to a social mixer with boys. Since they’re so clueless as some don’t even know what a mixer is, the show once again feels more like an educational device more than anything else. The girls get on about the various roles and the social aspects of it all, but it again just takes odd turns in supposedly comical ways as they act out and get frustrated and silly with each other.
In Summary:
I had wanted to give the show to the second episode to see what it would do, but I find myself completely disinterested in the actual work. The idea of the going home club could be fun if they actually left school and did things, but what we get instead of a show that’s like so many of the other girls sitting around talking shows that are out there, but without the style, budget or sharp writing to make it work. If we had a show with them going places after school and having adventures together, it’d be a heck of a lot more interesting than this. While there are some shows I really don’t like that I continue to watch, there are some like this where it’s just so empty that I can’t bring myself to really bother with it as it truly does feel like a waste of time.
Grade: C
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.