10 Second Anime - Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Comedy wa Machigatteiru Zoku - Episode 13 [END]



As Yui and Yukino struggle with their personal feelings toward Hachiman, they all decide to struggle together. Season Finale.

Heh.

Mothers are intrusive and embarrassing no matter their personalities. Yukino's mom thought she needed adult supervision because she stayed out too late and made Haruno move in with her. Yui's mom was all sorts of excited to see this guy that her daughter kept talking about.

 

At the end of the episode, Hachiman admitted to himself that Yui's nice girl exterior made him filter all her actions through that perception and he did the same with Yukino's strong aloof character. Neither was exactly right, but I think Yui is being too hard on herself in feeling that having her own selfish wishes means she's a bad girl.

 

I'm always amazed when Yukino shows off her terrified face. It looks exactly like Komachi's face when she's worried about something. That could be a hint to how emotionally mature Yukino really is.

 

Speaking of Komachi - still the best imouto.

I'm glad our three main characters got another episode just to themselves. They haven't had a chance to hang out together since Episode 2.

 

Yes, Yui. Penguins are birds.

I quite enjoyed the inserted song which was from the first season. It was a nice way to show how far things have come since then. Also interesting that this different animation house has to re-animate those flashback scenes.

Hmm.

Sometimes the characters were so vague about what they were talking about, I couldn't tell what was happening. There was a reason for the vagueness, though. Just like their first task of the season, making an explicit confession of feelings would permanently change the group dynamic and there was no duplicate Hachiman to swoop in to make a false confession either.

 

Going forward, we know that Hachiman wants real relationships without the polite fakeness necessary to keep a group together. He wants a real group. Yukino needs to decide on her own life direction without just going with the flow or following someone else's directions. This is why even her preference of becoming student council president wouldn't have been best for her, which is why Yui also ran. And Yui made some cookies. Okay, she made some cookies by herself because she wanted to show affection, not for any other transactional circumstances. She also wants to confess her feelings to Hachiman, but she doesn't want to do it before Yukino admits to herself her own attraction.

 

So, there was some movement this season. We only knew that because the characters used the aquarium exhibits as occasions to think about and talk about them. A bit heavy-handed, but I actually welcomed that since we haven't had that much time to spend in our main characters' heads this season. They're all still together, but their group's direction will also factor into whatever decisions they make as they enter their last year of high school. Hopefully, Hachiman will have the help of Yui and Yukino in solving tasks where he won't have to sacrifice his reputation and social standing anymore.

Final Thoughts.

I really looked forward to the continuation of the story of our anti-hero Hachiman and I was not disappointed. I appreciated how reckless he was becoming with his ideas and how his friends were not willing to go along with them. That introduced a new tension, which at times was excruciating to watch. In the first season, his approach was novel, but Yukino and Yui were not at the point where they cared what other people thought of him. As they developed their own feelings toward him, seeing him socially hurt also hurt their own feelings.

 

The climax of the season for me was when Hachiman's solution to preserving the Service Club was to ignore the request of Iroha to lose the presidential election. He decided to make her president, first by convincing her to want it, by a ruse of course, but then he made it a reality with the conclusion of the Christmas event arc. Iroha no longer needed him to carry her heavy bags. He had chosen a solution that ultimately did not preserve a status quo, but made something greater. Not only that, the true reconciliation between Hachiman, Yui and Yukino happened right beforehand. John Donne wrote that "No man is an island," and Hachiman's story is his own meditation on what that means.