When this week’s episode opened with Chihaya staring dazedly into space, Arata’s voice looping in her brain, I thought we might be in for a slightly more romantic affair than the one we ultimately received. Chihayafuru has never dwelled for too long on that part of its story, but having crossed a major threshold just recently, there was no way to know for certain whether the formula might change. Now we’ve seen the karuta-heavy aftermath that had been in store all along, and any hopes or fears that the show might undergo some metamorphosis have been put to rest. Chihaya is still a lovable nerd, Arata is back in Fukui, and the secondary members of the karuta club are nearly irrelevant, as they have been practically all season.
Yes, it’s finally time to complain about Chihayafuru’s neglect of the non-Chihaya, non-Taichi members of Mizusawa’s karuta team. I’ve been happy to praise new supporting characters or comment on tournament developments over the last few months, because the show has managed to retain much of its momentum from week to week. But after a string of episodes where Nishida has only functioned as the clueless friend, and Tsutomu has failed even to fulfill his role as data gatherer, “Autumn Leaves” was the tipping point for me. It’s not as though those characters were absent here – we heard from all of them, even Sumire and Tsukuba. Some of the material was pretty good, especially Sumire’s conflicted feelings on Taichi’s emotional situation. Most of it was dismal, though. Tsukuba’s miniscule contribution wasn’t even about himself, but about his Santa-doubting brothers, who aren’t much less important to the story than he is at this point. Tsutomu’s crush on Kana-chan seems to have been raised only as a way to remind us of his presence at the table. But you know, there’s a decent chance that we’ll get a series of omakes next week (it’s a Chihayafuru tradition to structure episode 16 that way) so maybe that will be our chance to catch up with the Mizusawa crew.
In place of focusing on the high school supporting cast or recent title match qualifiers, the show continued down the Meijin rabbit hole by arranging his promised match with Chihaya. There was a lot of potential for a psychological game here, since earlier this season she thoroughly studied Suou’s playstyle in order to assist Harada-sensei. I still remember some cute moments where Chihaya did a bit of method acting by assuming his mannerisms of soft speech and snack gifting. The actual match lacked any such depth or humor, though. We learned that the Meijin likes to bait people into committing faults, and… that was about it? Even when he recognizes that dead cards are being read, he’ll move as though he’s going to take one, tricking his opponents into making a mistake. That’s a nasty bit of gamesmanship, which is kind of an awesome trait to give to the future opponent of a fan-favorite underdog like Harada. It would have been awesome, anyway, if the show had done something more than move that information straight from speech bubble to voiceover. The match itself was mostly glossed over, and the backgrounds during Chihaya’s moments of frustration were simple gradients. It was terribly unimpressive on all levels.
Really, that’s my feeling about the whole episode. I talked a couple paragraphs up about momentum, and I feel like “Autumn Leaves” lost a lot of it. The romance element was tabled, Harada and Inokuma were absent despite their impending title matches, Shinobu’s appearance at the end of the previous episode got no follow-up, and Chihaya’s encounter with the show’s strongest figure was a dud. We went from two milestone moments last week to something severely lacking in impact here. Honestly, it was a struggle for me to write this much – I would have folded this material into a double post next week, but we’re supposed to get two episodes on the 28th, and I didn’t want to overload myself. Next week will be better, though. Probably!
