Horimiya – 07 [You’re Here, I’m Here]

One of the cool things about anime OPs is that they sometimes change as a show progresses. New characters may be added to foreshadow their appearance in the story, and scenes may be swapped in or out to indicate a change in tone. I tend to watch OPs all the way through each week to spot these changes – a habit that paid dividends in this episode, which traded shadowy, isolated shots of Horimiya’s cast for summery group scenes. Images of chalkboards and record players were brightened to match this sunnier outlook, and the penultimate shot of Miyamura walking away from his reflection was edited to depict his acceptance of himself. The overall message is clear: the characters have found friends who love and support them, which has made their world a bit brighter. I like a lot of these changes, but I’m saddened by the loss of this cut, which was my favorite from the original OP. If any manga readers know the context for Miyamura’s mistreatment of those sunflowers, let me know!

Now to talk about the other 22 minutes, which I’m feeling mixed about (despite some major highlights, which I’ll get to in a bit). To put it bluntly, the love triangle that Horimiya is trying to form between its secondary characters ate way too much of this episode. Ishikawa’s dismay at Hori’s romantic unavailability is sad and all, but throwing him into the mix with two other girls isn’t going to fix the issue. In fact, all this plot is doing is limiting Yuki and Sakura’s characters by requiring that everything they do has an underlying connection to their mutual crush. Yuki’s dual scenes in the bookstore this week are a good example of what I’m talking about – her attempt to snap Ishikawa out of his funk in the first one wasn’t bad, but the second was weak by comparison. She let a stranger take a book they had both reached for, and somehow that minor display of selflessness was supposed to sync with her tendency to bottle up her feelings (for Ishikawa) when they might inconvenience others (Sakura).

Sakura’s role this week was similarly lacking – all the baking and blushing when Ishikawa expressed a preference for her pink (“sakura”) cookies had me rolling my eyes. I did appreciate that she quizzed Sengoku about his feelings for Remi, though, because her desire for a male perspective said a lot about her personal insecurities. Since she has such a negative self-image (something we learned from her dialogue with Remi in episode 5), she’s unwilling to consider whether Ishikawa could ever have feelings for her, so she went into information gathering mode to see what boys even like about girls in the first place. Another plus: that conversation with Sengoku felt totally of a piece with the rest of her scenes, since the jacket she wore provided a link to her plot with Ishikawa. The bulk of the episode was lacking that connectedness, however. A couple of Horimiya’s earlier installments had that disjointed quality, too – like a series of snapshots from a month in the characters’ lives.

That snapshot technique is tricky to pull off, but a cohesive visual style can often lend unity to a fractured script, and that’s precisely what happened this week. A third of this episode was bathed in twilight, as though the days in Horimiya’s universe are only eight hours long. As a result, there was a lot of dusky light placed behind the characters, throwing their expressions into sharp relief. Pair that use of shadows with the dozens of close-ups we got, which often omitted either the kids’ eyes or mouths, and you’ve got a recipe for an emotional half hour. I don’t mean to say that things looked great 100% of the time – the linework suffered from ugly aliasing issues in places – but this episode certainly put its looks to good use during the Hori/Miyamura scenes. Their separation during the latter’s trip to Hokaido had us jumping between their perspectives every 30 seconds, but their shared sensation of anxiety never wavered thanks to consistent visual direction. And once they finally reunited, the catharsis was palpable.

Of course, merely sharing the same general space wasn’t sufficient for two love-starved teenagers, so Hori decided to share her bed, as well. I was a big fan of this decision, because Miyamura had taken more initiative in their relationship until this point, so Hori kicking things off by pressing her body against his was a fine equalizer. Telling him he “couldn’t go home” due to the rain, pulling him down for a kiss by the back of his neck, and that sensual voiceover line during the fade to white? This show just took the ‘virginal romcom heroine’ trope and chopped its balls off. At the risk of sounding like a voyeur, I would have preferred to linger a while longer on their coupling rather than moving on to that final scene with Souta, which felt like it was transplanted from next Saturday’s episode. It was a touching moment, but the link between Miyamura’s love for Hori and his relationship with her family deserves its own episode, rather than an isolated scene at the tail end of something so different in tone.

That’s just a small mark against a great second half of this week’s Horimiya, though. Passing such a major milestone, and doing it with both delicacy and passion, is a much more notable accomplishment. If only the material given to the secondary characters weren’t so thin by comparison, I’d have complete confidence in the rest of the season. As things stand, though, I’m hoping for less of them and more of the show’s namesakes.