It makes sense that Horimiya would follow a heavy episode (like the one we got two weeks ago) with a lighter affair, so I was prepared for “The Truth Deception Reveals” to be a fluffy side character piece. What I wasn’t prepared for was how much I’d enjoy it – we’re talking ‘make the squeaky-voiced twintailed girl likeable’ levels of enjoyability here. The girl in question is Remi, and though she’s had a mostly benign impact on the show thus far, anime girls who sound like they’ve inhaled helium tend not to be my favorites. The flashbacks to her first few conversations with Sengoku, however, were pretty charming. Her interest in him stemmed from both his equal treatment of others and his obsession with reading, two things that an average teen girl might be attracted to. Not every teenager would provide such a gracious window for their crush to confess their feelings, though. “What would you do if the world were ending tomorrow?” practically begs a romantic answer when asked in an intimate setting, so good on Remi for snagging her man with such a foolproof trap.
Episode 8 also played host to Ishikawa’s best role to date, that being the role of Yuki’s fake boyfriend, recruited as a prop for her rejection of another guy. Horimiya seems not to have a clear road map for Ishikawa’s character – he’s been a sad sack, a ladies’ man, and the comic relief guy at various points throughout the series so far. Personally, I prefer him in the last of those three modes, and that’s precisely what we got as he reckoned with his inferiority to Yuki’s handsome suitor Akane. The combination of his voice actor’s pained delivery and the localized subs (“Stop, I’m already dead!”) slayed me. This story generated another noteworthy gag in Hori’s blatant curiosity about Akane’s identity, which was literally written on her face. There was another comedic subplot in this half hour, though, which was more baffling than humorous. It even carried over to today’s episode, perhaps indicating that it will continue to recur for the remainder of the show’s run. I’m referring, of course, to Horimiya’s masochistic streak.
I knew about this development ahead of time due to manga readers, but that advance notice wasn’t enough to prepare me for the oddity of it. The joke (I say “joke” because it’s mostly been presented with comedic intent) is that Hori likes getting slapped and being verbally degraded, but Miyamura hates playing the sadist. The humor is derived from their mismatched sexual preferences, so it’s not necessarily at anyone’s expense. That’s fair enough – though I do wonder about the moment where Miyamura solemnly told a classmate, “You could never be with Hori if you couldn’t hit her,” as we got a shot of a plane flying through the clouds. If the subject warrants this kind of earnest audiovisual pairing, why play it for laughs in every other scene? As a matter of fact, why introduce it at all? I assume it was done to create a new obstacle in Hori and Miyamura’s relationship, since they’ve already had sex, but I would have liked to see something more emotionally oriented. The sense of dependency that comes from losing your virginity, perhaps – that’s got the bonus of a huge physical component.
There’s just the last of this doubleheader’s story beats to cover, which involved Miyamura’s middle school bully coming to regret his past behavior. These types of subplots are tricky – for me, the gold standard was set by 3-gatsu no Lion’s second season, but even that one failed to properly refute its tormentor’s antisocial point of view. Horimiya skirted that issue by keeping things superficial, relying on the tried and true ‘guilty conscience’ method to bring the bully around to Miyamura’s part time job (not sure why it took this long to mention his employment). Simple but effective, though the mixed metaphors of lockers and rabbit hutches in the guy’s dreams weren’t especially clear. Since his guilt stemmed from an incident where he blamed Miyamura for the death of their rabbits, cutting the locker imagery out would have made the scene more readable and allowed us to focus on the dialogue. That criticism aside, the show did leave their relationship in an interesting place – still fractured, but with hope for repair. I hope Mr. Bully appears at least once more, so Miyamura’s optimism can be justified and we can head toward feel good territory again.
