Thursday 14 February 2013

Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai NEXT - Episode 6


Thanks to Kodaka's "dream" in last week's episode, it seems that the cat is threatening to escape its confinement with regards to his childhood friendship with Yozora - surprisingly, Yozora herself is actually quite happy to simply spill the beans to the rest of the club members, which causes some awkward moments...

...until the next day that is, at which point everything seems to have been forgotten.  Helping this sense of collective amnesia is the fact that the school festival is coming around, and the suggestion that perhaps the Neighbours Club should do something for the event gets the group's thinking caps on.  Of course, it doesn't take long for the idea of a maid cafe to be mooted, bringing us half an episode of most of the cast dressing in a maid outfit, with varying degrees of success.


Once this idea has been written off, the next suggestion is that of a fortune telling booth - an idea which serves as a perfect opportunity for Yozora to bully Sena some more by filling her head (and let's face it, it's easily filled) with nonsense which gets her into yet more trouble with her father.  It seems as if this incident might be a final boiling over point in the relationship between the two girls, but all is soon forgotten once Kobato enters the fray.

I'm not really sure what else there is to say about Haganai - for all of its ever-more occasional fun moments, it's a brazen example of otaku pandering as it fills its time with hooks to keep them coming back for more (even if those hooks are largely pretty joyless) while ignoring the fact that it treats most of its characters like trash, particularly Sena who is now effectively animated as a walking pair of breasts whenever she's on-screen.  Trashy anime can be fun sometimes (see: Strike Witches), but Haganai is increasingly feeling uncomfortable to watch in its attempts to lure a crowd - a problem exacerbated by the feeling that it ran out of ideas long ago.

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