Oresuki – 12 – The Problem is Ongoing

A week after involving Hose, Cherry, and Tsukimi, the library has been saved. But while the more bustling atmosphere doesn’t bother Pansy, continuing to deal with Hose does. Joro hasn’t figured out a way to help her in this matter, so reaches out to Tampopo.

He’s learned through Asunaro that she’s in love with Hose, and thus worked hard to get Pansy a boyfriend so she’d be off the board. She’s too busy with baseball to visit the library after school, so advises Joro to ask Pansy out immediately.

Joro still isn’t emotionally equipped to do that, and so the problem lingers and becomes more complicated. We learn that Sun-chan’s exchange with Pansy last week was to ask her to be his girlfriend if his team made it to Koushien. In the library, when Joro asks to talk to Pansy she tells him she’s accepted Sun’s offer, to the shock of both Hose and Joro. She also tells Joro to stay away from her…”for a while.”

When Joro meets with Sun-chan, his best friend confirms what Pansy said, adding that he’s been a good best friend thus far, and now it’s Joro’s turn to return the favor and “do what he’s supposed to do.” Tsubaki overhears this and grasps the situation, but Joro is still lost in the weeds.

He stays away from the library, working at Tsubaki’s family’s restaurant, he still gets to interact with her, Himawari, Cosmos, Asunaro, and yes, even Sasanqua (who works up yet more courage to offer support to him, but just can’t quite help herself from going Full Tsundere whilst around him).

Joro rightly considers this to still be a pretty sweet deal, and resigns himself to a Pansy-less life. The thing is, Joro read Pansy wrong in this case, and the ever-reliable Tsubaki is there to set him straight. Pansy may have called him a useless nuisance, but she said that and agreed to Sun’s offer to protect him from getting caught up in her problem.

It’s Joro’s choice whether to get caught up, and the “for a while” (rather than “forever”) was a small SOS to invite Joro to choose to help her despite the trouble. And he does just that, strolling into the library as the arrogant jerk Pansy fell in love with in the first place, just as Hose asks her out in the even Sun’s team doesn’t make the cut.

As expected, the unflincingly loyal Cherry and Tsukimi run interference for Hose, but Joro powers through, and Pansy lets him speak. Joro devises a challenge to Hose, giving each girl one of the excess barrettes Tampopo acquired while trying to win his heart. The barrettes represent votes: the girls should give the barrette to the guy they think should be with Pansy.

Predictably, this backfires for Joro, and he’s the only one who didn’t see it coming. Cosmos, Himawari, and Asunaro give their barrettes to Hose, not Joro, and take the opportunity to profess their love for Joro. Since he gave them the choice, none of them are willing to be runner-up. Cherry and Tsukimi actually inspired them to strive for love and friendship.

Hose also rescinds his friendship with Joro, as he cannot be friends with anyone who would keep him from Pansy. That’s kind of false equivalence, however, as it’s Pansy who doesn’t want to be with Hose, and has made it pretty clear! If Pansy and Joro love each other and want to be a couple the two of them need to break some hearts, full stop.

Hose, Cosmos, Himawari, and Asunaro need to be rejected in no uncertain terms. Sadly, so does Sasanqua, while Joro and Pansy need to clearly define their relationship going forward as one of a boyfriend and girlfriend. There can be no more half-measures creating hope for the others.

Will they take those difficult steps in the series-concluding OVA? One can hope. Joro wants to “leave all rom-coms in the dust.” One surefire way for Oresuki to stand out from a crowd is to have an unambiguous final couple.

Oresuki – 11 – Stifled by Righteousness

After Joro dispatches Tampopo for running another kooky op—this time on him with Pansy’s cooperation—Cosmos rushes in to tell them the bad news: the school is shutting down the library. I won’t go into how bizarre and random a development this is…but it’s as bizarre and random as Tampopo’s ops!

Turns out there IS a way to save Pansy’s haven, but it might be a case of the cure being worse than the disease. It’s nice if her friends all tell their friends to start packing into the library, but isn’t the whole point for Pansy that it’s a place of peace, tranquility, and (present company excepted) relative solitude?

Oddly, this quandary isn’t really addressed, and it suffices that the end of the library remaining open will justify whatever means are used. It could also mean that having been warmly welcomed into Joro’s circle of friends, Pansy is ready to graduate to larger social networks.

Instead of exploring whether the rescued library will still be a place for Pansy, the episode instead ruminates on who is helping with the rescue, and why. Enter Hazuki “Hose” Yasuo, the seemingly perfect buddy who helped Joro out in a previous episode. Joro lacks a large group to call upon to help with filling the library, but he does have Hose.

Hose comes to Joro’s school with Sakurabara “Cherry” Momo and Kusami “Tsukimi” Luna, his StuCo president and childhood friend. It’s like “Bizarro” version of Oresuki, with Hose as Joro, Cherry as Cosmos, and Tsukimi as Himawari. They’ve come to help with the library problem in any way they can.

Joro could have probably predicted the resulting interactions would threaten to supplant him as MC. What Joro doesn’t know until it’s a problem is that Hose, Cherry, and Tsukimi all went to middle school with Pansy. Hose is the boy everyone in class wanted her to date, eventually leading her to disguise herself for high school.

At the end of the day, after Joro orders Asunaro to take Pansy to her house to talk newspaper story on the library (so that a visibly uncomfortable Pansy doesn’t have to walk home with Hose), Cherry and Tsukimi meet with Joro, Cosmos and Himawari. They come right out and say it: they’re both in love with Hose, but are putting their friendship with him and each other before those feelings.

They also know he loves Pansy, so they’re dedicated to getting them together. As the wheels turn in Joro’s head, he can’t help but conclude that there’s nothing inherently wrong or malicious about the two girls’ positions. Tsukimi even directly asked Joro if he liked Pansy. When he reflexively responds in the negative, she takes it as the truth.

That truth is all she needs to know that even if Pansy loves him, she’ll eventually have her heart broken, thus their nudging her towards someone who actually has feelings for her. But there’s a piece of this seemingly even-steven puzzle Joro feels is missing.

That piece is revealed and confirmed when he speaks with Pansy about it: Hose “doesn’t understand the other side of people’s feelings,” and his good intentions unintentionally hurt people. He’s hurting the two girls who love him, but he’s so good and kind and righteous that they feel compelled to put his feelings before their own. And he hurt Pansy too, even if he never meant to.

Pansy likens him to a demon. Even when he resisted his own feelings for her in order to protect her from others in middle school, he was only tackling the surface of her feelings. Joro has seen how conveniently things always seem to work out for Hose, but that’s only because, unlike him, Hose simply isn’t seeing the whole picture. His Bizarro counterpart is a cautionary tale: paths of least resistance can still cause great harm and even suffering.

Joro vows to make sure Pansy won’t be hurt or made uncomfortable any more, but while he’s off doing so, Pansy is confronted by Sun-chan, who for some reason thinks his “chance has finally come around,” following that up with an uncouth smirk. I knew they should have excommunicated this dirtbag when he threatened her back then!

Oresuki – 10 – Mission Creep

This week, Joro ends up back on the Bench from Hell, this time sharing it with a new girl. Well, not entirely new, as we caught a glimpse of her when she refused to participate in the Flower Dance. She’s baseball coach Kamata “Tampopo” Kimie, and right off the bat (pun intended), she exudes arrogance and egotism to match any New York Yankee (or Yomiuri Giant).

Joro at least knows full well by now that no good can come from whatever Tampopo wants during their bench chat. Turns out she wants him to help her hook up Sun-chan and Pansy, so Sun-chan will play better baseball, so their school will Win It All and increase Tampopo’s own notoriety.

Tampopo is so confident of her cuteness, she offers Joro a racy picture of her as payment for his services, which he accepts. But Asunaro happened to spot Joro being pulled into the science lab with Tampopo, and so inserts herself into this little venture. In exchange for being able to observe and write about their progress, she’ll also write a glowing article on Tampopo.

Asunaro loves a good story, but she’s also rooting for Pansy to get hooked up with someone other than Joro, which will increase her chances with him. Of course, that still leaves Cosmos, Tsubaki, and Himawari in the way. And while the episode almost forgets about poor sidelined Sasanqua, I won’t—though her brave attempt to ask Joro out to an amusement park while her clique watches…doesn’t go so well. The frikkin’ Queen Bee of his class wants to date him, and he doesn’t see it!

After a very ill-conceived quasi-military operation crashes and burns (earning Tampopo the deserved moniker “Commander Crazypants”) Joro offers a counter-scheme. To serve as the romantic rival Tampopo believes is needed to bring Pansy and Sun together, Joro will come right out and confess to Pansy behind the school. But that’s just what Joro says will take place.

At first I was worried that Joro was again playing games with people rather than being honest and confronting conflicts when they exist (as he’s done thus far in his happy little library group), thus inviting further ire from Pansy. However, that’s not the case! He actually brings Pansy in on this, with the new information that Tampopo and Pansy went to the same middle school.

Back then, before she disguised herself, Pansy was often pressured into getting a boyfriend by her peers. With this scheme, Tampopo hoped to get her a boyfriend by using Joro as an indirect catalyst rather than repeating the direct pressure of the past. She was thinking of Pansy. Tampopo’s baseball connection with Sun was just a happy coincidence.

Pansy then tells Tampopo that she’s already in love with Joro (AKA “Slipper Man”). When asks why she went through so much subterfuge when telling the truth from the start would have been fine, Tampopo hesitates then runs off before telling “the truth.” Is that truth that she actually likes Joro, and was getting Pansy out of the way?

Regardless, this was a mostly self-contained episode designed to introduce yet another girl to Joro’s already sizable cadre, but at the unfortunate cost of marginalizing another (Sasanqua), not to mention stop Himawari’s recent developments in their tracks. It didn’t really feel necessary.

Then there’s Cosmos, whose pained looks this week might be less about being neglected of late, and more because she’s the only one who knows the school is planning to close the library—Pansy’s sanctuary and their sacred meeting place—and not even she as StuCo President can do anything about it. I’m just hoping that on a show now brimming with relationships, a non-relationship plot development won’t get in the way in the last two episodes.

I also hope there’s a second season!

Programming Note: Just as there was no Oresuki episode last week, there’s no Cautious Hero episode this week.

Oresuki – 09 – Not Just a Background Character

Joro has gotten the hang of his new gig at Tsubaki’s family’s restaurant, and even Sasanqua comes by to have the guy in which she suddenly has interest server her and her gal friends. But when Tsubaki’s praise of his performance starts to sound like too much, Joro reveals his inferiority complex: he feels he’s just doing what he can as a background character while his more impressive friends accomplish greater things.

Since Joro’s job eats into his library time with Pansy, lunches are tense, especially with Himawari not there to lighten the mood (she’s prepping for a tennis tournament). Then, one night, Joro messes up at work, gets yelled at by an angry customer, and has to be bailed out by Tsubaki.

Pansy is already on record in her opposition of him working solely to repay his debt to her, since it’s nothing more than saving face. When she meets him after work, she says as much, and tries to assure him he’s okay and he’s already a good person. This isn’t a good time for him to hear this, so he snaps at her, something he immediately regrets.

This naturally makes things even more awkward in the library, but a chance meeting with a young lad named Hazuki Yasuo raises his spirits by reinforcing what Sun-chan tried to tell him. Basically, he can’t be afraid of “swinging and missing” or getting hurt, but has to “go all out” his own way.

The next day Joro apologizes to Pansy, but also tells her he’s going to keep working—not to repay a perceived debt to her, but because he simply wants to buy her a new book, something she not only accepts, but supports. But when he finally gets enough money, the book has already been sold—to Himawari.

All this time, she’s been putting off practice and saving up to buy him a book. What we have here is basically a “penance triangle”, with Himawari working to pay back Joro, who was working to pay back Pansy. At first, Joro is angry at her for risking everything, but as Himawari tells him, he matters to her as much if not more than tennis.

Himawari ends up winning her tournament anyway, reinforcing how awesome she is. Before her first match, she shocks Joro, Pansy, Cosmos and Tsubaki by stealing a kiss from him, not-so-cryptically telling him there’s “someone she likes” now, complicating matters for the others.

Tsubaki also manages to subvert expectations by not having any dark ulterior motive to getting Joro to work at her restaurant. Turns out she wanted the job to help him build confidence in himself as someone other than “second banana”, but the main character which some truly awesome and amazing friends.

That brings us to the situation at episode’s end, in which Joro is back on that damnable bench, being asked by Himawari Tampopo to hook Pansy up with Sun-chan…here we go again…

Oresuki – 08 – Deep-Fried Joro-on-a-Stick

“What new devilry is this?”, Joro must be thinking when Yoki Chiharu, a classmate for all of thirty seconds, approaches him, bends the knee, kisses his hand and pledges fealty like he’s some nobleman.

Even if there’s no damnable bench in sight this week, it doesn’t change the fact that not a single woman in his life has ever been what he initially assumed her to be, nor are her intentions ever clear from the get-go.

Sasanqua, recently interested in his desk neighbor to the point of dying her hair, doesn’t like this one bit. Chiharu, AKA Tsubaki, claims to be paying Joro back for showing her (yes, during that baseball game a year ago) that it’s worth working your tail off for someone, as he was by buying consolatory skewers for Sun-chan. At no point does she drop the kind, dutiful, angelic act to anyone.

And yet Joro can’t help but think something smells rotten in Denmark. In a hilarious half-chuuni, half-rakugo inner monologue that belies his cheerful exterior, he warns himself again and again not to fall for this act, even as her act proves so goddamn effective, he doesn’t even care if he’s being deceived. At one point he asks the fourth wall why this angel wasn’t in the first episode!

Tsubaki joining the group causes almost immediate tension, as she makes and presents to Joro a lunch the same day Cosmos made him one. He accepts both, even though it’s too much food. Later, Pansy calls him out for trying to maintain the status quo. By accepting Tsubaki’s gratitude-fueled behavior, he can “dodge” Pansy and Cosmos’ love-fueled affection. “That’s not kindness, it’s running away,” she says.

When Pansy lends Joro a very valuable hand-written novel to read so they can talk about it later, he quickly loses it after Himawari tackles him in the street. That night he searches for it, and Ram and Rem from Re:Zero recover it for him under extremely suspicious circumstances, but it is totally ruined.

Joro vows to get a job so he can make enough money to replace the extremely expensive book, which not only means spacing out at lunch with the others, but cancelling all future library visits while he works…at Tsubaki’s family’s fried skewer restaurant. Again, Tsubaki has exactly what he needs when he needs it. Pansy states unequivocally that she’d rather he kept visiting her than get a job to replace her book.

But Joro is obstinate; he’s going to replace it, which means he has to work when he’d usually visit her, and which also means he’ll be spending a lot more time with Tsubaki, who finally potentially betrays to no one but us that she has some kind of “payback” plan in motion.

Whether that’s sinister or not remains to be seen; her expression is inscrutable. One thing is certain: maintaining the status quo, as Pansy is sure he’s so eager to do, is no longer tenable—not as long as Tsubaki has him all to himself. Closing note: Tsubaki could, in fact, be the girl Sun mentioned to Pansy a few eps back, whom Sun liked in middle school but who chose Joro. Perhaps Joro’s full memory of her hasn’t quite surfaced. We’ll see.

Oresuki – 07 – An Unexpected Side

This week is, as Pansy calls it while breaking the fourth wall, a “totally original swimsuit episode.” Having already befriended his “forever 17” mom Laurier, Joro finds her in his living room, ready for a day of fun at the pool with the others. The episode checks all the boxes when it comes to vertically panning swimsuits, but while boobs come up often, they’re never compared, either by Joro or among the girls, a refreshing departure from the norm.

While in line for drinks, Joro encounters the queen bee from his school, but for whatever reason, doesn’t recognize her (I guess he has anime-vision, so the fact her hair is up is enough). In a very roundabout rhetorical way, she asks how “a friend” (really she) can properly make it up to “someone” (really him) for what was done to them (as a result of the false article).

At first she’s unsatisfied with his “flip” answer that a simple apology will do, but when she directly asks what he would ask of such a girl, he maintains an sincere apology would be enough. If she feels bad enough that it bothers her that an apology is enough, the sincerity will shine through.

Once Joro rejoins his friends, the girls all try to claim Joro for themselves for an activity, then decide to turn it into a competition to determine with whom he’ll have the most fun. Dark Joro can’t help but revel at the present scenario—three girls are competing to make him happy!—but in each instance he gets more than he bargained for.

First, Himawari clutches him closely on the water slide, but it is his trunks (not her swimsuit) that slips off upon splashdown. Sun-chan valiantly swoops in to shield him from her eyes. Second, Cosmos prepares to jump on a pink dolphin with him, but gets distracted by misunderstanding his call to “hurry up” to mean “accelerate your plans for marriage to me.” Sun-chan boards the dolphin instead, so Joro doens’t have to suffer the indignity alone.

Finally, while soaking in the hot tub with Pansy, they exchange thanks for what they’ve done for each other (she’s hanging out with friends, he was able to make up with said friends). But she also brings up all manner of unpleasant information about him he’d really rather no one knew about, such as his reliance on fortune telling, or the location of his porn collection.

Once more, it’s Sun-chan to the rescue, kindly asking Pansy to lay off before Joro comes apart. As such, when it comes time to decide with whom he had the most fun, he picks Sun, leaving the three girls blindsided (though Himawari congratulates Sun, not officially being “after” Joro as Pansy and Cosmos are.)

The next day at school, the It Girl Coalition surrounds Joro menacingly, only to offer heartfelt apologies, and all are impressed by how kindly he accepts them. He learns that the black-haired beauty sitting beside him in Sasanqua’s desk is, in fact, Sasanqua, who took out her hair dye in order to more sincerely apologize. Thus, Joro’s horoscope about seeing “an unexpected side” of someone wasn’t about any of his friends, but the girl he sits beside.

Strangely, this is not the last twist of the episode, nor is it even the last unexpected black-haired beauty Joro encounters in class. That honor goes to a Touyama Nao-voiced transfer student who claims to know Joro gong way back, is hurt he doesn’t remember her, and drops to one knee to kiss his hand as if he were a princess.

I know not what oddness this is, or why his ultimate ideal—”a kind woman who’d do her best for him without conditions”—but I do know that with things now going so swimmingly with his friends and the rumors about him debunked, Joro is in need of a new conflict, and this girl looks to be it!