Perpetual Bewilderment with Haruka Nogizaka
I am still unable to pin down what about Haruka Nogizaka and her secret that made it what it was. I think while the general consensus is relatively accurate–a comfortable romantic comedy about sensitivity, trust, and blossoming into who you are; but of little else–it doesn’t quite capture everything remarkable.
I’m feeling a bit of the same for Kannagi. The obvious thing about Kannagi is that it is very well produced, and things look…very nice. The acting is fun and the whole setup is amusing enough. It’s entertaining yet so fully dripping in cliche that it becomes comfortable rather than irritating been-done.
Perhaps that line is where Haruka’s Secret straddles. For the most part, both shows are nothing really to write home about. There are trace amounts of suspense, of slapstick comedy, and a variable amount of drama. Romance seems like a carrot-on-a-stick but both boys and girls of the era of late-night anime fandom expect it. How can we complain about romantic side plots in Hollywood blockbusters; or worse, are we bottom feeding mimicry of our mainstream shadows? Does that explain why there’s so much crap about anime on tvtropes?
But none of that is truly bad, and none of that is desirable (obviously). It’s like a good stir-fry of leftovers that somehow produces a dish that you would like to eat again once in a while? If moe-blobs are a type of flavored soft drink, then the Nogizaka brand is probably a blend of healing properties with familiar flavors. Which is why it wasn’t so hard to stomach the same taste day in and day out in a blend that isn’t so soothing. Kannagi would just be a premium brand of the same, minus some of that tenderness.
At the same time it’s easy to understand those who protest exactly those flavors. What I don’t understand is how suddenly these protesters could turn around choose the same flavors, but perhaps packaged slightly differently. Maybe that just means I don’t quite understand myself.
I’ll give up for now.
I think it just falls into preferences in the flavors per person. Even though I feel like I got a basic idea of what Nogizaka Haruka was, the execution near the end bugged me because it had been “better than that” for the first half. And by that, meaning doing the cliches that usually appear in works like that. Though they were expected, they just weren’t done well to make me feel good about them. :/
Another way to phrase my question for this post, as a reply to you, is what made Haruka’s Secret “better than that”?
Because that’s truly what I should’ve addressed, in retrospect. What was exactly the bait and switch that wasn’t?
I can’t really quite put it to words on the time, but I had felt like the show acknowledged that it has cliches and used them, but it didn’t really rely on them. It wasn’t quite as obvious, or we had the whole aspect of being an otaku and what that means distracting us.
Pictures from Rie’s collection are up.
I posted them on moy’s blog. I also posted them on yours but for some reason it’s not showing up.
It’s a little funny how both those series cross too heavily into cliche territory for me to really like them. But I like your left-over stir-fry example — it explains why, despite not feeling engaged by Nogizaka Haruka, I kept watching it (and the same may well happen with Kannagi).
For me Nogizaka Haruka started out “better than that” because the relationship between the two central characters progressed fairly quickly, then stalled about the time Haruka made her public admission that the otaku magazine was hers.
Benson: thank you!
dm: yeah, something like that.