So last episode on Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai, the members of the Rinjinbu sat around playing videogames. Sounds like a good time to me, but in terms of accomplishing their stated goals of making more friends, I’m not sure it’s the best play. Basically as I see it, the problem is that the club has three members, all of whom hate one another. It would be like if the SOS-Dan consisted of Haruhi, Kyon, and Asakura Ryouko. Yozora needs to recruit some less prickly people, some smiling Itsukis, some easily cowed Mikurus (no Sena does not count no matter how much you think she resembles a cow), or some docile Yukis. Maybe those sorts of people already have friends and are already in clubs, but Haruhi never let that stop her. And now there’s three of them, that’s probably enough to start launching raids on some of the weaker clubs. You just have to conquer the weakest club, then they can help you conquer the second weakest, and so on inductively until you rule the whole school. Then everyone will have to be your friend! Let’s conquer the world in episode 3 of Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai.
…thirty minutes pass…
Can videogames truly be considered art? Here's my perspective! *posts a hundred-page-long forum thread*
Poor Sena. Some people just don’t understand the rich and compelling stories that many pornographic visual novels have! You can take a seventy-hour long masterpiece of modern literature like Fate/Stay Night, and people will disregard it because of a few scenes where the characters express their love for one another physically. It’s super hypocritical when you consider works like “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” and “Lolita” that are now considered classics, but in their time were called obscene and attempts were made to ban them. And I mean, due to Japan’s censorship laws, you don’t even get a detailed picture of the characters’ genitals! Who could possibly object? The argument gets harder to make when you want to play a porno game for its deep, engaging gameplay elements. Literature, at least, has a sacred status in society, which can counteract the profane status of depiction of the act of love. Nobody appreciates the rare transcendent value of a well-designed strategy RPG.
So maybe I was reading the second part of the episode wrong, but did it seem to anyone else like Sena already knew how to swim, and was just pretending not to to get Kodaka to come to the pool with her? Swimming is not actually that easy, even if you have big ol’ flotation devices permanently attached to your chest. It would be just like her to pretend to be an amazingly quick learner, because she always has to be the best at everything. I was pretty confident that this was going to be the punchline until the scene ended and the next-episode preview had her talking about how she had just learned to swim. Surely the next episode preview is a sacred bond, nobody would say anything less than honest during it.
So apparently Yozora and Kodaka are long lost childhood friends? I guess that sinks Sena’s chances with him. His mother may have told him “It’s more important to have one friend you can count on forever than one hundred friends you can’t”, but that’s one of those things that sounds profound in re: friendship but isn’t actually true. In fact, Kodaka and Yozora are perfect examples of why. Sometimes the one friend you could count on forever leaves Japan, or stays in Japan while you leave it! And then you are about 99 friendship-makings behind in your friendship-making practice, and you end up all alone except for your imaginary friend made of air.
The less said about Kodaka’s little sister the better, but I at least have to mention that heterochromia as a moe trait is actively repulsive to me.
suntzuanime 