I don’t fucking understand this. 

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Impression

What the fuck? I know this feeling. It feels like I’ve just watched another episode of Glasslip.

Haruchika 8 Img001I’m getting tired of this bullshit. I was so happy to actually be able to write this post out relatively on time, and the episode turned out to be absolute shit. I should have watched Konosuba instead. Haruchika has retained my patronage this entire time purely because of Chika and the fact that I want to sleep with the twins, but it’s really, really testing my patience now. At least Glasslip had nice animation, right? What even was this episode?

It was already looking like a sub-par episode when they introduced that slimeball ‘first love sommelier’ who made me think of Ted Cruz for some reason. Serizawa made me hopeful that it’d be interesting, but then it distorted into some weird extended metaphor story about her aunt and how her first love was with a guy named Benjant who was depicted as a massive bear. Like in Goldilocks. Benjant was a member of the ‘Children of the Forest’ and he made onigiri with Serizawa’s aunt every day but slowly poisoned the rest of the forest children in order to get revenge for something which is never confirmed. The aunt ends up eating one of the poisoned onigiri by mistake one day and Benjant assaults her and starts strangling her. I’m not sure if that was supposed to be him trying to get her to throw up the onigiri, but it’s not very convincing when she’s on her back. Benjant poisons himself too for some reason, and the story just ends there.

Haruchika 8 Img003So what was this, exactly? A cult? A care home, given that there were kids there too? A radical activist group? Why was this even a thing in this show? Who thought it was a good idea to create an episode trying to make itself super deep and metaphorical with nothing explained in the end? Note that that last sentence was a description of every episode of Glasslip ever. My first thought was that the onigiri were all drugged, and that Benjant and the rest of the ‘forest children’ were all drug addicts and he didn’t want the aunt and kids to end up addicted too, so he had their non-drugged onigiri made separately. That would explain how they all died too – either of an overdose, or cancer or whatever that drug did to their bodies. You know, I’d have loved Haruta to have explained everything to us. This is exactly what the first half of a Haruchika episode is like – nothing makes sense, and you don’t know how to solve whatever mystery is at hand. Then Haruta pulls out some obscure trivia and saves the day by connecting non-existent dots and coming up with a flawless answer. I wanted him to do that. This is how bad it’s become – I wanted him to asspull his way to the finish line. Because without him, we’re left with this weird mess that makes zero sense. And the show itself has made no efforts to try to address that at all. Did whoever wrote this episode genuinely think that, when viewers were done with the episode they’d go ‘oh okay, I understood that, it was cool’? Did they? From their heart of hearts?

At least Serizawa was cute.

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Bath Chika is cute too.

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This Post Has 6 Comments

  1. Moonlight

    When an anime is rolling into Glasslip territory, you know its gonna be alarming. Still wasn’t prepared to read what had happened in this episode lol.

    1. Vantage

      It’s been two years since then and I’m still getting naively burned by P.A. Works dud shows. Thankfully, I don’t think it’ll get worse than this episode (although that’s what I said 75% of the way through Glasslip).

      If you have any idea what the episode meant, please do let me know. I genuinely don’t understand.

  2. I.D. nameless

    I want to do… things. To Chika. Ahem.
    You know, I always thought Glasslip is a show about life.
    Just how an average person’s life is uneventful compared to that of an anime action hero, so was Glasslip.
    Just how you hear about many things but get involved in little of them, so did Glasslip leave many things hanging.
    Unlike a standard shounen where the MC is involved in everything.
    And those fragments of the future? Delusions that teenagers (and children) have, dreams of grandeur that amount to nothing in the end.
    That’s why they disappear when you grow up.

    1. Vantage

      Only to Chika? What about Serizawa, Narushima or the twins? Or the class president of this week’s episode? Cough.

      Glasslip was a hot mess of stupidity and redundancy. I hope you’re not being unironic there, because just thinking about it makes me grimace. I know some people have bravely tried to justify it, but a little bit of me dies inside whenever I remember things like the alternate dimension LSD trip, the Kakeru clones and people shouting about how they want to stay attractive while riding bicycles, And Glasslip was by Nishimura as well, that’s as incredulous as the fact that DEEN actually found a way this season.

      1. I.D. nameless

        I tend to choose 1 girl per show/manga/vn and stick with her. Sure, the others are nice, but Chika is my sweetheart. I don’t want to cheat on her. (I feel kinda embarrassed writing such things).
        About Glassip, I am not ironic. That does not mean that I liked the show or that I’m trying to defend it, my mind just found a little something that made sense to me and I choose to focus on that while watching. It made the show somewhat tolerable.

        1. Vantage

          Don’t worry, I know that feel. You’ve got good taste.

          So long as it kept you afloat while watching, then sure thing. For me, it was probably the art and animation. That’s the sole thing I can’t fault about Glasslip, because other than the dodgy scene transitions (where they just end by freezing into stills) the entire thing is drawn in the style and quality you’d expect from P.A. Works. It’s what they’ve used in basically everything in the last few years except Uchouten Kazoku and now Haruchika. I wasn’t fond of it in Haruchika at first (because it was like a giant neon sign saying this project was tossed to their C-team while they focused on their Spring 2016 show) but it’s grown on me. Especially the Chaika character designs.

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