Minami-ke Okaeri - Episode 13 (Completed)

So, the third season of Minami-ke comes to a close, and quite really uses this opportunity to focus on the Minami sisters themselves.

Also in keeping with this choice of focus, much of the content of this episode is saccharine sweet rather than downright funny, although it did prove to be mildly amusing in places. The episode starts out with Haruka seemingly worried about something, which in turn makes Chiaki and Kana worry about her. This then makes Haruka worry about Chiaki and Kana, and... well, you get the idea. In true Minami-ke style, this cycle is broken by everyone pulling faces at one another. No, really.


Following on from this is perhaps the most adorable segment of Minami-ke to date - Chiaki has a nightmare where Kana leaves and never returns, which leaves her being enormously clingy towards her sister from that point onwards. This cycle also completes itself with Kana later dreaming of a world where Haruka disappears, leaving her clinging to her big sister while Chiaki still holds on to her. Daft though it may be, it still got a big, fat "Awwwwww" from me, and upset Kana is unbearably cute somehow.

Finally, Chiaki's dream looks, for a brief time, as though it may be about to come true, with Kana seemingly leaving a suicide note after claiming that's she's going out to buy some bread and milk. Naturally, this turns out to be perhaps the most enormous Japanese wordplay joke I've ever seen, as it turns out that her scrawling is missing a couple of kanji (which slipped onto another piece of paper), which turns this supposed suicide note into a wish to give up chocolate for Tanabata. I'm always one for a bit of good wordplay, so I got a kick out of this particular one.

After that the reall rather good first series, followed by the largely disatrously dull second, Minami-ke Okaeri ended up straddling these two levels of quality. It never quite regained the joys and humour of the original series, but it did provide far more in the way of laugh out loud moments than the second to make for a far more entertaining prospect, which overall marks it as worthy of the Minami-ke name in my book. While Okawari failed in almost every respect, Okaeri gets a lot right, from rebalancing the relationship between Kana and Chiaki to feel more natural (while retaining its humour) to relying on more than Touma and Mako's gender confusion antics. After this, who would bet against a fourth series - Minami-ke Tadaima perhaps?