His and Her Circumstances – 7/8 [Their Estrangement/Her Day/In a Grove of Blossoming Cherry Trees] – Throwback Thursday

Welcome everyone, to another week of His and Her Circumstances! I really need to stop putting off writing these until the night before, I’m gonna be late some day. Is that day today? I’ll find out when I post this. At least I spent it watching Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, that was a good time. Now onto the episodes!

Before we get into the episodes proper I want to take a moment to talk a bit about Circumstances production. You see, it occurred to me that some might find my handling of Circumstances unfair. That I constantly critique it’s more limited animation, yet always follow up by saying it’s fine. There’s a reason for that, and it’s rather simple: There is a difference between being “poorly” animated and “sparsely” animated. In the first, such as say… this seasons RWBY, the show moves but it does so poorly. Meanwhile in the second, Circumstances may not move much but it does a lot with the limited movement it has. Things happen on screen, characters express themselves, the editing and transition between stills do just as much to communicate with the audience as the pictures themselves. It’s using it’s limitations intelligently, rather than running headfirst into them. And that’s worthy of praise.

With that lets get into the episodes, starting with episode 7, “Their Estrangement”. This one is all about the first major hurdle of their relationship. And wouldn’t you know it? I was right! Just like I guessed, and hoped, their other responsibilities outside of their relationship would spring up as the honey moon phase ends. I actually really like this, both that I could predict it and what it is. Being predictable doesn’t mean bad. To me, it means that you’ve laid the proper groundwork and hints along the way and you trust your audience is smart enough to figure out where the show is going. So rather than throwing twists at us we, the audience, are able to look forward not to what happens but to how the leads overcome it. It’s something I think Circumstances does rather well.

As for the romantic challenges themselves, this was both interesting and came from an unexpected source. I like it because this is just… normal. It’s real life stuff. Life goes on even while you are in love, responsibilities don’t go away, and you have to learn how to manage the two. That includes grades, which they deprioritized and thus they fell. What’s unexpected about it though is where it came from. Neither of them seemed particularly perturbed by the score drops, Miyazawa was more annoyed by how high Arima stayed than the drop itself. Rather, it came from their teachers. And this kind of weirded me out. Do teachers actually have this much authority and influence over their students lives that they can tell them to break up? It feels completely out of line to me, and not acceptable for faculty at all. Luckily though, Circumstances handles it well anyways.

Arima and Miyazawa’s steadfast refusal was great. I was actually really concerned that this would end up driving them apart. That Circumstances would take the obvious route of having one be overly concerned with scores and suggest they break up themselves. Instead, by having it come from an outside source it becomes a moment of unity rather than division. They come together, growing closer, against their teachers. Resolving to help each other keep their scores high rather than attempting to go it solo. I really like this! There’s no artificial rift, just Circumstances using it as an opportunity to deepen their relationship and show them together even more often. I’m so happy there’s no bullshit drama that could easily be resolved by communication. It’s going to make their legitimate, personality clashing drama so much more impactful since it won’t be watered down by crap like this.

I also really liked how Circumstances handled the parents here. They could very easily have become stringent, cracking down on them. Not Miyazawa’s, they seem very carefree regardless and I fully expected them to support her, though not as diplomatically as they did. But Arima’s parents could easily have caused a rift between the two families by pushing grades first, before inevitably coming around on the idea of course. Instead the both supported the kids in their own way. Miyazawa’s father was outspoken about letting his children choose their lives, and just how important these years are to them. Meanwhile Arima’s were more silently supportive, fitting their colder image. All in all, the families seem to have hit it off and I’m looking forward to them interacting with each other more. It goes a long way to really legitimizing and supporting the leads relationship, acting as further points of reinforcement.

My only complaint with the episode is that I don’t like what it does with the teacher by the end. Circumstances tries really hard to make his actions seem… legitimate. And maybe his motivation for them was. Maybe he really does just care about his students and thought it was for the best. But, and this is coming from an American mindset, he went way over the line. Not just by pushing them to break up in the first place but by calling their parents for an after school meeting when they said no. The guy tried to go over their heads with it, and that’s just a dick move no matter how you frame it. Like Asaba, I don’t know if I’ll ever end up liking this guy because of it. Guess we will see what Circumstances does with him moving forward.

Next up we have episode 8, which like last week is split into two parts. First up, Part 1, “Her Day”. I’m going to say this about both halves, but this one especially almost felt like a filler episode. It’s just a day in Miyazawa’s life, starting with her waking up in the morning and ending with her going to bed. At it’s core, I think that’s fine. It’s a half episode and it gives us a peek into her life that wouldn’t deserve the full episode treatment. Showing us how hard she works to balance school work and her relationship with Arima, as well as all of her general work around the house. Not satisfied with “just fine” though, Circumstances took it another step further. It finally asked the question of intimacy.

I was really wondering when Circumstances would get around to this. Intimacy is an important question in a relationship, both in how much someone wants and how far someone is willing to go. Would Circumstances ever explore it beyond that first, chaste kiss? Apparently yes. And it even goes so far as to have the female lead, Miyazawa, be the one to broach the subject. So many times in anime the women are shown to be chaste love objects, without sex drives of their own. But here we see Miyazawa actively thinking of and initiating it. Going so far as to tell Arima she wants more and giving us what I would call a steam god damn kiss. Way more than the first one. This went a long way to selling me on these two actually being truly attracted to each other rather than just forced together by the narrative.

This brings me to Part 2, “In a Grove of Blossoming Cherry Trees”. And just like part 1, this feels like filler. But also like part 1, its filler with a purpose. Because now we get to see episode 1 from Arima’s perspective. Originally it was all Miyazawa, she was our lens. We never really saw or cared about Arima until his confession and arrival at her house. But here Circumstances shows us just how he got to that point in the first place. And once again, I liked it! I like that it was totally accidental. That he stumbled upon her while dealing with all of these other unfulfilling, surface level relationships, and in doing so realized she was the only confession he would say “yes” to. It’s like that old advice, flip a coin and you’ll know what you want before it lands. This was his coin.

My only major complaint with these two half episodes is with just how flashback heavy they were. Because of their nature as revisiting, and slightly recapping us on, what has happened they relied a bunch on flashbacks. It’s because of this that I called them “filler-like”. Filler episodes often rely on flashbacks, recon textualizing past events since they can’t meaningfully change current ones. Luckily however, Circumstances wasn’t bound by the same limitations. It wasn’t much progress sure, but progress was still made, especially in part 1. So long as this increased intimacy and knowledge of Arima’s relationship struggles continues to be relevant moving forward, I think it will be time well spent. That’s kind of the thing with these kinds of romances for me. I need them to end in a more conclusive place than anime is generally want to do. Hopefully that won’t be the case here.

So yeah, all in all I think these two episodes were a decent success. Not my favorites, but Circumstances continues to make me feel like there’s meaningful progress every week. Part of this is no doubt due to watching two episodes at a time, everything just feels faster. But even without that, I rarely find myself disappointed when an episode ends. I have ideas on how to make it better, things I want to happen. But usually those things happen in the next episode, or soon after, giving me this sense that the show knows what I wants and is delivering on it. Hopefully this keeps up! I’ve heard a lot of concerning things about the 2nd half. So far though, all I can think is that Circumstances would have to try really hard to blow the lead it’s already built up.