Friday 12 April 2013

My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU - Episode 2

Yui might have made herself a friend (well, kinda) in Yukino thanks to her place as the the first "customer" of the Volunteers Club, but it seems that she's still looking for acceptance from others - a stark contrast to Hikigaya's detached observation of the world around him.

The trouble is, it seems like Yui is looking for friendship in all the wrong places, falling in with a vacuous beauty of a classmate who is clearly using her as a kind of servant while refusing to countenance the fact that she might actually have friends other than her.  With Yui placed into an awkward situation which even Hikki can't find the right moment to interrupt, it's time for some of Yukinoshita to delever some of that sharp-tongued and acerbic commentary of which she is so fond to diffuse the situation.


With that out of the way, the second half of this week's episode sees the Volunteers Club visited by another customer - a delusional fellow who seems to have taken a shine to Hikigaya after warming up with him during gym class, and who wants to have his light novel critiqued by the group.  You can probably see where this is heading, with his "work of art" being ripped to shreds before Hikki somehow resolves the situation by deflecting the fact that this light novel is actually worse than Sword Art Online.  Or something.

Even though this episode seems better thought-out in its deployment of Yukino's biting commentary and tries to deliver some more meaningful character-based plot progression, My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU remains... well, pretty dull.  It doesn't have enough humour to be a comedy nor does it do enough with its drama and emotional content to produce anything notable, leaving it floating in a miasma of mediocrity that it seems to have little interest in escaping from.  I'll give it another episode I suppose, but this series certainly feels like one for the "subpar light novel adaptation" pile - an amusing prospect given how it riffs on light novel authorship in this particular installment.

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