This week gave me just what I wanted from Horimiya: more clownish behavior from an absentee father whose daughter clearly resents him! The episode was bookended by dad scenes, which you’d think would provide the opportunity for at least one honest family conversation, but most of his dialogue led to punchlines instead. Complaining about being a stranger in his own home, failing to recognize Miyamura after his makeover, interrupting his daughter and her boyfriend just as they were about to kiss… These sorts of gags are typical of feel-good romcoms, but Kyousuke is far from a feel-good dad, so they feel out of place to me. This series has already shown us the scars resulting from Hori’s lack of attachment to her mom, so why is her father’s neglect being played for laughs? As a matter of fact, why is he still hanging around the house that he so rarely visits?
The obvious answer is ‘to check out his daughter’s new boyfriend,’ which I can accept as a short term goal. He even sleeps in the guest room with Miyamura (as opposed to his wife, which speaks volumes about their relationship), though that overnight stay has disastrous consequences at school the next day. It’s a little weird that Miyamura, who has so much experience being judged by others, didn’t think to stagger the time of his exit with Hori’s. It did push the story forward quite a bit for them to be discovered right away, and this is a one cour adaptation, so I get it. Miyamura responded quickly to the ensuing gossip, as well, but this is something I’m less sure about. His long hair served to disguise his piercings, which his middle school flashbacks framed as signs of alienation and rebellion, so cutting his hair should represent a turning point in his outlook on life. He doesn’t do it for himself, though – he does it for Hori, so that people will stop associating her with his gloomy appearance. I’d expect some amount of regret to surface in the wake of this decision, since it wasn’t internally driven, but I don’t know whether the show will have time to delve into that, or whether the source material explored it in the first place.
This leap forward in Horimiya’s central relationship constituted the first half of the episode, so the second shifted its attentions to Honoka Sawada, a second year girl who seemed to have a crush on Miyamura. Gotta be honest – I fell for this bit of misdirection hook, line and sinker, since it happened just minutes after Miyamura’s transformation caused his female classmates to come flocking. Honoka was actually jealous of his closeness with Hori, though, a dynamic that would be a lot more interesting without all the accompanying ambiguity. Honoka seems to prefer girls because she’s “nervous around guys,” which we learned in an embarrassingly bad scene where Miyamura glared away a trio of wannabe pickup artists who had targeted her. And that nervousness is implied to stem from her older brother’s death – we don’t have the details about his passing yet, but I can’t understand how one would lead to the other. It all feels very tenuous. Can’t she just have a crush on Hori because she’s, you know, gay?
The show will have many more chances to flesh out Honoka’s character, since she’s neighbors with Miyamura, but one thing it’s already failed at is compiling decent backgrounds. I use the word “compiling” intentionally, rather than “creating” or “designing,” because there’s so little care put into them to start with. All you can hope for at that point is for the show’s various digital elements to form believable environments – but they don’t. The interior of Hori’s place has the artificial layout of a house you might see in The Sims, but I’ve been telling myself that it’s not a big deal because the show frequently cuts to screen tone backgrounds anyway. Miyamura’s apartment, on the other hand, is the straw that broke the blogger’s back. The computerized decor and sterile hallways on display here lack any sort of human touch. What’s worse is that they’re being produced in-house at CloverWorks, indicating a serious weakness in their art department – maybe this is just their D-team? Let’s hope that Horimiya is the only high-profile series that has to suffer this way, for the studio’s sake.
