Seitokai no Ichizon - Episode 12 (Completed)

Given the shocking cliff-hanger (if you can call it that) which closed out the previous episode of Seitokai no Ichizon, you'd be forgiven for expecting Mafuyu's confession to take up at least a reasonably hefty chunk of the show's final instalment. Well, you'd be wrong - Mafuyu doesn't want to date Ken or anything, she was just letting him know. Oh... okay then, thanks for that Mafuyu.


From here, normal service is pretty much resumed to close out the series, starting with a discussion of future dreams and careers for the student council members. Predictably, Mafuyu wants to get into something to do with gaming (or, less predictably, boxing), Minatsu dreams of becoming a bride, and Chizuru is looking to earn lots of money in a probably far from legal fashion. As for Ken, aside from this usual dreams of harems and the like, he comes up with the idea of creating a new eroge company, which he decides to name after his own nickname, Key. Err, wait, that won't work... how about Leaf? Nope, maybe not. I have to confess, that was probably the most amusing part of the episode for me.

As we enter the second half of the episode, so does a real, living, breathing Nakameguro - A transfer student who supposedly lives near Ken and needs someone to walk him home every day. Of course, this all but causes Mafuyu to explode into a frenzy of Boys Love-related excitement (also pretty funny in its own right), but in the wider scheme of things it seems that Nakameguro's appearance only serves as a segue for Ken to explain why he feels so close to the other council members and why he worked so hard to join the student council in the first place. And they all lived happily ever after, or something.... although not before discussing the possibility of a second season via knowing glances at Natsu no Arashi and Sora no Otoshimono.

In fairness, at least this being the final episode of Seitokai no Ichizon meant that the sentimental stuff felt like it had a rightful place here, which certainly hasn't been the case pretty frequently on past occasions with this series. That aside, it was another hit and miss instalment that did just about enough to entertain without ever managing to move its characters in particularly new directions or to bring any consistency to the value of its humour. While the latter of those two points is the nature of the beast for any show of this type, the weakness of the characters involved here was perhaps Seitokai no Ichizon's biggest failure - They all felt far too two-dimensional (with every pun intended) for you to care about like you do the major characters of a Hidamari Sketch or Lucky Star. Once you stop caring about the characters, their dilemmas and scenarios become far less interesting, ergo so do their jokes, which pushes Seitokai no Ichizon well and truly into the realms of mediocrity.