Itazura na Kiss - Episode 24

Itazurs na Kiss has been a long and winding road to watch, and unfortunately most of that road has been on a steep downward incline, filling me with more hate and bile then I imagined possible from any anime series.

Given those twenty-three episodes of anguish, it's actually quite amazing that this series has finally, finally managed to get it right with the very last episode of the main story (with episode twenty-five looking like some kind of bonus episode - Gee, thanks guys!) - All of the main characters behaved like normal, decent human beings, made largely the right decisions or at least wrong decisions that felt like the sort of natural thing a lot of people would do, and above all it had a really rather adorably happy ending. Despite my concerns that Naoki was abducted by aliens a few episodes ago and replaced with a more consciencious model, it was all rather sweet and actually left me smiling rather than frowning (and even got a laugh out of me at one point, how's that for progress), which was surely the whole point of this series in the first place?


That aside, you can't help but wonder if this episode thought it was an instalment of Holby City, as it seemed to focus almost entirely upon medical matters between Kotoko's pregnancy and a bit of a scare regarding that, and Matsumoto being rushed in for emergency surgery. Still, it was all quite well done and threw up dilemmas that didn't involve Naoki being a miserable git, so that's fine by me.

Relatively good though this episode was, it still isn't enough for me to forgive the tone and generally icky feeling that everything that went before gave me, but seeing as there's still one more episode to go I suppose I'll leave my final complaints until that airs and I can finally say, with more than a little sense of relief, that Itazura na Kiss is over.