Category: True Tears

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.