Kimi to Boku is a nice, friendly show, in contrast to the murderous scheming of Fate/Zero. Sometimes you just want to relax and worry less about who is trying to kill whom, and more about who was maybe kind of a dick to whom. There’s more strife in Kimi to Boku than in some shows, I guess. In a female-populated slice-of-life show, they wouldn’t even be dicks to each other, they would be good friends instead! They would share their strawberry shortcake, because it tastes better when you eat it with other people. The guys in Kimi to Boku could eat strawberry shortcake together, but they would have to be tsundere about it. “It’s not like I’m eating this strawberry shortcake with you because we are good friends, I am just eating it because I felt like eating something, and you just happen to be here too”. Heaven forbid that a guy should value friendship! Let’s watch the guys pretend not to care in episode 2 of Kimi to Boku.
…thirty minutes pass…
Clap your hands if you believe in the placebo effect.
I dunno that I can handle how slow this show is. The first episode was kind of slow, but it had an A plot and a B plot that both developed during the episode. This episode just had the one plot, the girl who got a crush on Shun, and there really wasn’t that much to it. It’s the sort of plot that would take half an episode in SKET Dance and a third of an episode in School Rumble, but here it was expected to hold my attention for the full thirty minutes. Beyond just the slow pacing, it was also blatantly padded: at the end of the episode they just showed clips from earlier in the episode while playing a song over them. Yes, I remember when that happened! That was ten minutes ago! Nothing strange or shocking has happened since then that would cause me to forget, very little has happened at all, in fact. It’s like they’re desperately trying to conserve budget, but this is only the second episode so they can’t have run out already. And it’s not like there is going to be some big mecha-battle climax that they’re saving up for. Probably. We can always hope.
I wonder if that girl is going to become a regular addition to the cast and start dating Shun. I know shows like this will often pretend that these sorts of romantic entanglements never happened so that they can maintain focus on the core cast. Then again, if we think of this as a genderswapped 4girl-slice-of-life, it’s already anomalous to even mention a girl. Shows like Lucky★Star, K-On, or Hidamari Sketch basically pretend men don’t exist. To the extent that men show up, they are as tertiary characters like a school principal or some such. One supposes guys have less of a need in the audience’s mind to preserve their purity, so we are more likely to see some actual romance plot show up. If I were them I’d worry about upsetting fans who might be shipping the guys with one another, though.
suntzuanime 