Tuesday 27 March 2012

Daily Lives of High School Boys - Episode 12 (Completed)

Everything goes a little bit backwards as Daily Lives of High School Boys comes to an end, leaving us with a funky girl sandwich (complete with a wonderful brief K-ON movie parody to end the series) and our opening and ending titles switched.

That aside, it's business as usual for the first half of the episode - after answering some all-important trivia questions (such as "What is Twitter?", a question which is surely beyond me), it's off to the arcade where Tadakuni's sister shows how to defeat the crane game while Hidenori is left feeling rather ashamed by his desperation to win a Madoka Magica figure right in front of one of the arcade's employees.


After pondering how easily and frequently young Ringo gets hit on by guys, and witnessing the devastation and destruction that can be caused by an errant sausage on a cocktail stick, we take on a rather more thoughtful tone for the remainder of the episode as graduation time rolls around - a time to take stock of all you've learned and the friends you've made, and perhaps also the time to have the occasional nightmare about a terrifying experience from your past if you happen to be Tadakuni.

Thus ends a series that set out to break the mould of high school girl comedy series by revolving around high school boys, and actually working for the most part.  Compared to the disastrous Kimi to Boku, Daily Lives of High School Boys was largely a success - not the funniest comedy series ever, and it did fall flat from time to time, but overall it generated more laughs than it did frowns and put its unique spin on the slice of life comedy genre to good effect in terms of the humour it deployed.  I'm not sure it has enough legs for a second season (although God knows if YuruYuri can get one...) but I appreciate this series for daring to be different, and it was a decidedly entertaining proposition that leaves behind some fun memories of its efforts as a result.

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