For this post to make any sense, I’ll have to give you guys the basic gist behind the episode. Erika’s birthday is coming up, and she wants Kyouya to give her… love. B-b-but what does that mean?! Well, that’s for our Black Prince to figure out.
The Good
There’s only one true answer:
The Whatever
— Nozomi and Takeru have somehow become friends. That’s good, I guess. We should make more friends.
— Nozomi suggests that Kyouya takes Erika to a French restaurant. That sounds romantic on paper, but I think your results may vary. Some French places can serve really heavy food (e.g. risotto, foie gras, dishes cooked in lots of butter), and having a gut bomb go off in your stomach isn’t really a good idea if you want to be amorous.
— What does Erika really want, though? Well, she really just wants to hear him say that he loves her. It’s that simple, I guess. It’s also not love. I mean, love isn’t just a statement; love is an action. Even her best friend is like, “Is that really love?”
— Kyouya tries to tell Erika those three magic words, but he finds it so difficult, he has to excuse himself from the table.
I know I’ve been saying this a lot lately, but if you honestly can’t even tell someone you love that you love them, you should really, really get some help. That’s not even a joke. But it’s okay. The power of anime will eventually heal our Black Prince.
— Even though his two other friends are hanging out with each other elsewhere, they can’t help but spend their entire time talking about Kyouya. Man, everyone’s just obsessed with this guy.
— Hilariously enough, our two love birds end up watching a movie about a guy who can’t say “I love you” to his lover, so the latter calls him a “cowardly, weak-willed, gutless weasel.” I guess even fictional relationships in this universe are screwed up.
— We’re eventually subjected to a boring montage of the two lovebirds on a date. Pretty generic stuff. Instead of showing their characters in all sorts of different locales, why won’t these romance shows just sit their characters sit down and have them share an intimate conversation?
The Bad
— Guess what? Kyouya doesn’t even know his girlfriend’s birthday is coming up. You can’t really blame him for this one, though. After all, she’s never told him when her birthday is. Nevertheless, Erika stupidly wonders, “Wouldn’t it be exciting if you secretly knew without me telling you?” I’m sure Edward knew Bella’s birthday without her having to tell him.
— There’s one thing you can blame Kyouya for, though! He flat out tells her that he doesn’t want to celebrate Erika’s birthday. He’s just going to do so anyway because he doesn’t want her to annoy him by pouting. Awwwwww.
— Man, our Black Prince will certainly have a day full of fun in store for his girlfriend, huh? Well, not exactly: “Let me warn you, don’t say ‘Anything’s fine.’ Thinking about it is a pain for me.” Why even bother being in a relationship? ‘Cause honestly, when you’re in love with someone, thinking about them becomes effortless.
— Erika’s answer? She wants love. Depending on the culture that you come from, this is either incredibly vague or incredibly specific.
— Nozomi gives Kyouya surprisingly good advice: “You just need to do something that’ll make her happy.” Seriously, I’m actually surprised.
— Kyouya can’t remember if Erika has ever made his heart melt. Wrap it up, boys…
— Don’t worry, you guys. Erika has taken enough punishment to know that she should never have any actual expectations: “As long as Kyouya does something for my sake, I’m okay.” That’s why even though it’s going to be her birthday, she’s planning the entire day out for herself. I mean, you don’t honestly expect Kyouya to step up on this front, do you?
— The girl is so beaten down, she can’t even recognize a present when she sees one. Dude literally has to spell it out to her.
— She then asks him for permission to open it! It’s your fucking present! What else would you do with it?!
— Dude makes his girlfriend buy the movie tickets for the two of them. C’mon.
— On his own, this is all that the guy could manage to choke out. Nevertheless, the girl is thankful to have spent the entire day with him. So she ends up saying “I love you” first. It’s only after this that Kyouya could summon up the encourage to say it back to her. But for some reason, the anime doesn’t want us to hear him actually say it. Y’see, a truck drives by and prevents us from hearing anything. Erika heard it, though… so I guess there’s that.
The Ugly
— Kyouya tries to practice saying “I love you” to himself, but he literally can’t. In fact, he finds it so difficult that he ends up punching the bathroom mirror. Um, that’s pretty fucked up.
— Anime usually doesn’t have a problem drawing cute kids, but this show dropped the ball pretty hard on this front. Pretty. Damn. Hard.
— And now, everything else:
Moe Sucks 
KareKano had a very similar plot : a bishonen playboy starts to bother our beloved couple in order to recruit the hero for his harem plan. In that case everything was solved in just one chapter in a much more interesting way and Asaba actually really became the couple’s best friend and a important character to the history. And the best: he didn’t saw the light and decide to become a monogamist for have the magic relationship of the main couple, he stayed true to himself and was not an asshole to his girlfriends. But Nozomi in other hand seems to me to have become just a boring and no important supporting character. That’s disappointing since all the screen time on the previous two episodes.
But it doesn’t matter! All that matters is our dog eerrr wolf girl and her drama love. One thing is be embarrassed of saying “I love you”, another is having a pathological problem in saying it. What a lame plot…
I think the best moment of this episode is Kyouya giving a Falcon Punch in the mirror because that’s what boys do when they are embarrassed, I guess.
I don’t think that kid was intended to be cute.
>She then asks him for permission to open it! It’s your fucking present! What else would you do with it?!
That’s cultural. Where I live we also ask for permission to open a present if we want to open it right away, and even then only once you’re seated / comfortable. It’s considered impolite/childish to jump straight on the present.
This episode was pretty good imho compared to the last ones. At least we can finally see that Kyouya is actually in love, and not just indifferent. I also like how they dropped most of his nastier habits.
It’s odd, but there is something thrilling in watching a show about an asshole gradually turning into a lovable guy (*). Like, it’s a guilty pleasure for many girls to fantasize about dating some asshole and having that asshole turn into a Mr Perfect under their loving care. It sounds stupid, but I’ve actually seen it happen and turn out okay IRL, but most of the time this is a dangerous and stupid fantasy so shows and books like this let you live it out without actually living it out. I’m embarrassing to even write this out.
Please don’t take this badly, it’s not actually a critique to your post, just something I felt like I needed to say.
(*)he’s not there yet.
I would think that if someone is directly handing you a present, the permission to open it is implicit. It’s not like the present was just laying around, and she wanted to open it without letting him know first.
I know it’s a thing… in every culture, in fact. I greatly disagree with it, which is why I’m even writing on this show. I think it creates dangerous expectations of what a relationship should be.
About the present, it’s just ingrained. You ask, they reply “of course”. Nothing more to it.
I agree that it might create dangerous expectations, and that it actually does for really popular works, but I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s also the other way around – because you experience it through the manga, you don’t go and do it.
A can of worms, but you probably know that women write a lot of more or less anonymous rape porn online (so-called “kinkmemes” are full of this). You could argue that this is dangerous in a lot of ways, but it’s also a safe way for women to live out fantasies that are both socially unacceptable and not something they (we) actually want happening to them (us).
Similarly, women don’t want to be in an abusive relationship. Reality (as opposed to fiction) shows how dangerous it can get, but a shoujo manga is safe. You know it will turn out well, that the heroine will have her happy ending and the guy is actually good. There is also josei manga where this sort of premise turns out really badly, but those have a different audience.
(That said, I’m not excusing the entire genre, I still hate HATE hate certain shoujo manga like Please Save My Earth and it’s ilk.)
(*in that manga, the heroine actually gets raped by the hero. It was terrible.)
It’s not that simple, though. We’re comparing apples to oranges, really. Rape is obviously bad, so few people are going to sit there and think, “Gee, this rape fantasy turns me on. I should go out there and get raped.” That’s why these rape stories rarely get adapted to the mainstream. It takes something like Fifty Shades of Grey to finally gain traction. On the other hand, this show advocates something far less dramatic than rape, and thus something that can actually be insidious.
It may seem obvious to us that Kyouya is an abusive asshole, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some people are naive enough to watch this and think that this is what relationships should be like. That you’re supposed to find yourself a bad boy, and fix him up, because by golly, your love will win him over. And this happens all the time. Both girls and guys think they can just save a bad person with good feels. Fiction crosses over into the real world a lot.
There are plenty of people who watch romantic comedies and instill the values that they find in those movies into their own lives. As a result, they think that love should always be 100% passionate, they think that couples should fight a lot because it shows that they care, so on and so forth. And likewise, people watch porn and think girls should be able to fuck like porn stars. So again, while I think fiction can be used to explore extreme subjects like rape, I’m actually wary when something “tamer” gets adapted to the mainstream. It seems counterintuitive, but that’s how I see it. This isn’t about a personal kink like a rape fantasy. When it gets adapted, it becomes mainstream and thus potentially accepted.
Good points. I generally agree with what you say – maybe my opinion is coloured by the fact that I don’t think these anime adaptations are anywhere close to mainstream. In the end, I guess I also dislike mainstream romantic comedies and drek like Twilight for the values they instil.
“I’m sure Edward knew Bella’s birthday without her having to tell him.”
Well, Edward is a stalker AND he can read minds, so, actually, yeah, I’m sure he did know.
Yeah, that was the joke.
This show keeps getting wo- ALL HAIL HYPNO SHOUJO