Category: Finished Series: Romance

Oh boy, this series just keeps delivering. This time, it’s the time for Noe to get some major development. You don’t often anime where people date each other, even though one of them is in love with somebody else (except when said person wants to manipulate the other, or the anime is called Saiunkoku Monogatari, of course), and here in True Tears, we’ve got two of these couples now.

Shinichiro is still in love with Hiromi, but now that the two are possible siblings, there’s no way that they’ll ever become a couple. And to try and forget this, he finally asks Noe to start dating him. It’s here where he finds out that Noe has really been in love with him. Then, when he tells this to Aiko, she finally loses it. I guess that she was fine while Shinichiro had no official girlfriend yet, as she could lie to herself a bit. But now that he’s actually dating someone, it’s much harder to just try and ignore this.

This was also a major episode for Shinichiro himself, as with that kiss, he must have figured out that Aiko likes him too. In one episode, he was forced to see that there are more sheep in the ocean than just Hiromi (I think I got that proverb wrong, but I don’t care at the moment). What would really be interesting for this series is to see it break away from its harem roots, and have Hiromi seriously fall in love with Noe’s brother. That would be quite interesting.

Haha! This was most definitely the best episode of True Tears yet! Episode six may have been a bit too early for such a deep drama to already start, but at least this episode turned out excellent. It’s interesting how well te creators have managed to build up the atmosphere, in such a relative short time, considering that most series need at least thirteen episodes to achieve the same thing.

Noe’s brother got a pretty large role in the end. This episode, he ends up dating Hiromi, just to get her attention away from Shinichiro so that he can start dating Noe. I assume that he intends to break up with her as soon as Noe and Shinichiro are a true couple. It turns out that the reason why he’s so close with his sister is that they’ve spent almost all of their time together since their grandmother died (I couldn’t pick up what happened to their parents), and now he wants someone else to take care of Noe so that he can go his own ways. It was also pretty fun to see Noe steal Shinichiro’s belt. It must have been pretty tough for the guy to spend the rest of the day. 😛

Aiko also finally gets her much-needed development, and we finally know why she started dating Miyokichi in the first place. It seems that she already had a crush on Shinichiro for a long time, but never had the guts to confess to him. Then Miyokichi came around, and fell in love at first sight. He did have the guts to confess to her, and she ended up agreeing, just because Shinichiro encouraged her. With this episode, their relationship also starts to fall apart, when Aiko finally gives enough hints to Miyokichi to make him see that she still fancies Shinichiro.

The really important part of this episode was about Hiromi, though. Shinichiro overhears one of the bad discussions between his mother and Hiromi, and he picks up how Hiromi refers to something that happened in the past between the two. Obviously, he wants to find out about it, and goes after Hiromi. As it turns out, according to Shinichiro’s mother, Hiromi is Shinichiro’s half-sister. Their father committed adultery on Hiromi’s mother, indeed confirming what many people have already speculated. This is why Shinichiro’s mother hates Hiromi’s mother so much: she basically took away her loved one, and she still can’t forgive Hiromi for that, even if this is subconscious.

Is it really that uncommon for Japanese boys and girls to have lunch together at school? Now that this series has mentioned it, the only time when I recall that characters, apart from lovers had a school casual school lunch with the opposite sex was in xxxHolic.

In any case, this was a rather quiet episode. The less amazing animation seems to back up my view. At least we now know that Noe is jealous too, though at least she tries to relief it in quite a different way from usual: by having lunch with Hiromi. Shinichiro also makes a rather stupid move towards Harumi, when he basically mentions how Noe’s brother said that she was cute. Aiko, meanwhile, finally takes action and prevents Shinichiro from answering to Miyokichi, in order to spend more time together. Seriously, that girl is diging her own grave.

And that’s basically all that happened. Like I said, it was a pretty quiet episode. I liked how the creators showed one scene two times, from the perspective of different characters, like Tokyo Marble Chocolate did before, and Seraphim Call took to the extreme.

I like how this show is progressing so far. There’s been quite a bit of drama, but it knows exactly when to lighten the mood a bit with a few good jokes, in order to prevent the atmosphere from becoming like Kannadzuki no Miko or Kyoushiro to Towa to Sora. There’s also hardly any random fluff that feels like filler, like you see in nearly every romantic comedy, and so far, the creators have really shown that they make use of every scene to build up.

The weak link for this series so far is Aiko. She really needs some background information. I want to know why she fell in love with Miyokichi in the first place, and why the heck she became so sick of him that she started going after Shinichiro. Her relationship wit the guy feels nowhere near as interesting as with Noe and Hiromi.

I really like how this series portrays the two of Noe and Hiromi against each other. This episode develops Shinichiro’s relationship with Noe into a more friendship-like one: the two of them just hang out and talk like friends. On the other side we see Shinichiro and Hiromi having both trouble to express their feelings for each other, and they both react differently for lacking the ability to do so. Now it’s going to get interesting when no-one else than Noe’s brother asks Shinichiro to start dating Noe, at the end of the episode. The guy definitely has an interesting sister-complex, which was probably caused by the death of his grandmother.

One thing that also puzzles me is how Shinichiro’s mother treats Hiromi. The two of them aren’t exactly the friendliest towards each other. If that’s the case, then how the heck did the two of them end up in the same house, I wonder…

I must say that this episode was pretty amusing. Okay, we now know that the third girl likes Shinichiro as well, but that was of course to be expected. Noe’s antics proved to be quite interesting for this series to work with. We also learn that Noe has a brother (whom Shinichiro mistakes for her boyfriend), and she also forces the guy to give her a piggy-back ride by faking an injury. I especially liked how everyone reacted when the two entered the gymnastics-room in that way.

It seems that in terms of romance, Shinichiro and Hiromi both like each other, though Hiromi doesn’t want to admit it. At the end of this episode, we see Shinichiro overhear Hiromi say this, which leads to the cliff-hanger. I can see where Noe fits into the picture, but I’m not sure what Aiko can add to the scene. It would be interesting for her to go after Miyokichi in the later episodes, though. I really must praise the guy. Most “best friends” in similar series make me want to punch their eyes out, though Miyokichi has been really enjoyable up till now.

We also see a small flashback. It turns out that Hiromi has been living with Shinichiro’s family for quite a few years now, and it seems that she once got lost during a festival, and got helped by the younger Shinichiro. We indeed seem to be dealing with yet another childhood crush, though this one is so much better than the standard protagonist who meets a bunch of random girls in his past, and these girls end up still loving the guy even ten years afterwards.

And the time has come for me to choose which shows to blog. In case you’re wondering: no, I’m not going to blog Hatenkou Yuugi. Basically, the only thing that stands out for that series are the characters and the complicated dialogue, and I didn’t like how the second episode placed Rahzel and her companions “above the system”. It’s an interesting series, but I’m going to wait for the subs to come.

As for True Tears, it’s looking quite solid so far, and it’s definitely something different from the series I usually watch. There are a few stereotypes here and there, but so far the writers have made something interesting out of the first two episodes, not to mention that the series is being directed by the guy from Simoun. I often dislike high-school romances for their shallow characters or just boring plot, but the creators are showing signs that they’re building up with the slow pacing of the past few episodes. The show also only has 13 episodes, so it’ll be nice and short. It’s a good replacement for Shugo Chara with its fifty-one scheduled episodes.

This episode mostly developed the three main characters a bit. If I understood things correctly, Shinichiro lives together with Hiromi, after her parents died or something. Shinichiro likes Hiromi, but they hardly talk to each other. In the previous episode, he ran into Noe and started hanging out with her, and it seems that Noe has come to like Shinichiro, though Shinichiro has problems getting used to Noe’s strange character. Hiromi, meanwhile, also isn’t ignorant about Shinichiro either, and in this episode she tries to find out why the guy spends so much time with Noe. Really, it sounds like a bad soap-opera when I write it down like that, though the episode was quite decent. This isn’t the first time where I liked a series with a flawed storyline.