Last time, I talked a lot about how Hibike! Euphonium had all this great, deep, subtle characterization and how it avoided using cheap overwrought melodramatic climaxes with the characters yelling and crying and resolving all the teenage angst and silly misunderstandings that had led to this regrettable situation, substituting real emotional buildup and understated drama that sprang naturally from the characters’ personalities.
Then I started watching Series II. Boy, did I feel stupid.
I didn’t hate Series II. It didn’t do a Batman and Robin on Series I. But jeez, those first few episodes were a dark time. I watched Kumiko, the snide, apathetic heroine I’d come to love, become just the sort of yelling, crying, meddling in others’ lives kind of character that every single school life light novel protagonist has been since the Haruhi Suzumiya series began. I understand the writers were trying to show her evolve and realize she loves the euphonium and her friends, but man, did they screw up the landing. Series I had already introduced this interesting, complex idea that Kumiko could love her friends and the euphonium while still remaining her distant self by giving herself over to pride and ambition, like Reina, but instead of continuing with that, they just made her yell and cry a lot. I mean a lot. Kumiko has like eight crying scenes in Series II, two of them in the final episode alone. When Haruka, the club president, cries, I accept it because it’s part of her character. She’s an emotional person. But who knew Kumiko had such an emotional glass jaw?
The first few episodes are definitely the worst in the series (counting both Series I and Series II), because they have another problem: they center on a couple of characters that were just introduced and that I didn’t care about. Mizore, the soft-spoken oboe player, and Nozomi, a mysterious flute player who begs Asuka to let her back in the club after she quit during the apocalyptic event alluded to back in Series I, are the center of the first story arc. This poses a major narrative challenge, because Kumiko doesn’t know either of them until they’re introduced in this story arc and has no solid reason to care about or get involved in their personal lives, but the perspective won’t leave her (presumably because the novels were narrated by her in the first person like most school life light novels), so we can only move Mizore and Nozomi’s plot forward by getting Kumiko involved in their personal lives, which the show does by shoving her into random chance meetings with them and suddenly having her be interested in other people’s personal lives. Where’s the Kumiko who imagined a love triangle between herself, Shuichi, and Hazuki and thought “What a pain”? Who’s this new meddlesome Kumiko who won’t rest until she finds out why Asuka is unfairly withholding her completely unneeded permission for Nozomi to rejoin the club?
Of course, it turns out that Mizore and Nozomi were subtextual yuri lovers and Mizore was hurt when Nozomi left the club without consulting her. Yuko, the girl who tried to delegitimize Reina’s right to play the trumpet solo so her own subtextual yuri lover Kaori-sempai could play it, has been acting as Mizore’s substitute subtextual yuri lover while Nozomi was out. There’s a big finale where Mizore info-dumps her backstory to Kumiko, who screams and cries, then gives way to Yuko, who also screams and cries and, for extra drama and subtextual yuri, gets on top of Mizore. Then Nozomi comes in, and they both cry and admit how wrong they were, and live happily ever after in subtextual yuri love.
The only thing the Mizore / Nozomi plot contributes to the actual ongoing story about the characters I cared about is the escalating little flashes of Asuka’s cynicism that lead into Asuka’s story arc in the following few episodes. Things pick up in the Asuka story arc. There’s still a lot more yelling and crying, particularly on Kumiko’s part, than I would have liked, but the Asuka arc also brings back some of the things I liked about the first series, like the subtlety, and the complexity, and the characters I cared about. In a tense scene, Asuka’s mother comes in to demand that Taki-sensei eject Asuka from the club so she can focus on her studies, and slaps Asuka when she resists. That’s fairly standard dramatic stuff, although KyouAni’s superb animation really gives us a sense of the force that Asuka gets hit with. But then, Asuka’s mother breaks down into tears and starts begging Asuka for forgiveness. Asuka impassively takes her mother’s arm and escorts her out, apologizing to Taki-sensei. It’s a great scene. In this one scene, we get everything we need to know about Asuka’s mother and their relationship: that she’s emotionally unstable, manipulative, codependent, and borderline abusive, and that Asuka has developed her cynicism and disinterest as a defensive response to allow her to keep loving the only family she has even in the face of such outbursts. Best of all, no one ever tells us this. There’s no narration that explains it all. There is an info dump later when Asuka invites Kumiko over to help her study so they can talk, but she only lightly touches on her relationship with her mother. However, when we hear that Asuka’s mother refused to let her have any contact with her father, a famous euphonium player, and that the only thing she has of him is the euphonium, book, and CD that he sent her when she was young, it all makes sense based on what we know. And even though we can see that Asuka wants to play her euphonium for her father and get his approval, the indirect way she goes about it—wanting to reach the nationals, where he’s a judge, and play for him in public without actually meeting him one-on-one—also feels characteristic to Asuka.
The final two stories concern Kumiko’s older sister choosing to leave college and go her own way in life, and the club’s final performance at the nationals and the graduation of the third years. These were both good stories overall, but they could have had more impact if Kumiko hadn’t wasted all her yelling and crying on Mizore and Nozomi’s subtextual yuri love reunion, or on Asuka coming back to the club (which was a foregone conclusion at that point, though Kumiko didn’t know it. Asuka even mocks her for yelling and crying about it so much). The story about Kumiko’s sister was actually handled perfectly: there’s no crying and very little yelling, and what yelling there is comes from Kumiko’s parents fighting with her older sister over her decision, which is natural. Over the course of this story, Kumiko realizes that she started playing the euphonium because of her sister, and that she loves it partially because it reminds her of their time together. She manages to persuade her sister to come to her performance at the nationals, and the emotional climax of this plot thread comes after the nationals when Kumiko catches up with her sister and finally makes up with her, telling her that she loves her. Like all the other emotional climaxes in Series II, this could have just as well been played subtly and still had impact because of the emotional backdrop, but like all the other emotional climaxes in Series II, they go the yelling and crying route. Still, it was a good story.
The final storyline is also decent. Much of it is expected, but it throws some nice curveballs while also giving us closure on Asuka’s story. Yuko and Natsuki becoming the president and vice president was kind of lame, though. Neither of them seemed suited for the job; it came off more like they were the only two second years who had appeared (Riko and Goto only appeared like twice in Series II), so they became president and vice president by default. Kumiko’s final scene with Asuka is the one scene where I think a little crying was warranted. If it hadn’t been used like six times in the series before this, it could have been a really effective way to show how important Asuka had become to Kumiko, and offered a final contrast between Kumiko, who has been trying this whole time to get closer to her friends, and Asuka, who seems to make friends easily but value them little. But since by this point Kumiko seems to cry over basically anything, what should be an impactful parting loses some of its strength. If we ignore all the bad stuff from earlier in Series II, though, this conclusion is kind of perfect. It doesn’t neatly wrap up all the plot threads with a nice little bow, but it does give us closure on the story that started back in Series I, and we get to see how Kumiko, Reina, and Asuka have grown in the meantime. (Hazuki and Midori are, sadly, completely forgotten, as they are through the majority of Series II.)
As disappointed as I was with certain aspects of Series II, it does wrap up very nicely from an emotional standpoint. Yes, Midori and Hazuki both disappeared towards the end, but they both got a decent amount of screentime in Series I, so I still felt like I got a good taste of their stories. Certain threads are dangling, which lends the conclusion a certain realism, but it also feels satisfying: everyone has changed or advanced over the course of the story, and we’re left to assume that the characters go on, having their share of victories and defeats, achieving some dreams and outgrowing others, as in real life. If it kept going, it would just shoot itself in the foot as it already started to do by focusing on pointless side characters like Mizore and Nozomi. Since Hibike! Euphonium is based on a light novel series, I never even questioned that the story continued, and almost certainly degraded, in the novels, but to light novel author Ayano Takeda’s further credit, the novels end exactly where the anime does.
Kumiko’s sudden conversion into the kind of yelling, crying protagonist who usually populates emotional school life tales like this illustrates a problem I’ve been noticing in anime storytelling for a while. The first time I noticed it was probably in the mediocre Haruhi knock-off Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko, known in English as Ground Control to Psychoelectric Girl, because the Japanese title translates to Electric Wave Woman and Adolescent Boy, which is a stupid title, because there is no possible way to create a good title containing the phrase “and adolescent boy”. No matter how awesome the rest of your title is, that phrase ruins it. The Empire and Adolescent Boy Strikes Back? Ugh. The Dark and Adolescent Boy Knight Returns? Yeech. Soul and Adolescent Boy Eater? Unless it’s a hentai series about a shotacon succubus, no way.
Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko sets up a potentially interesting story about main character Makoto’s relationship to his cousin, Erio Touwa, who disappeared several months before the story began. She reappeared floating in the sea, crazy from some sort of trauma, and started behaving oddly and raving about aliens. If the show had been willing to go extremely dark with this, there was a wealth of material here to explore, but it didn’t want to do that; it wanted to be a lighthearted pseudo-clever quasi-harem show like Haruhi. Even under that constraint, there was still a ton of potential in this concept. Giving the bothersome yet cute girl who depends on the main character an actual mental illness adds such an interesting dimension to the usual story where he goes along with her crazy schemes just because she’s cute and he’s got nothing better to do. How should he respond to her when she wants to drag him across town after some alien signal that he knows she’s just imagining? Does he go along with her, or try to argue with her that it’s all in her head? Does he ever feel bad for yelling at her when he knows she’s sick and can’t really help it? The show could have done the same kind of slice of life stories it did, but added a whole extra layer to it by showing what it’s like to care for a mentally ill relative and get them through various day-to-day activities that are normally simple. It could have slipped in subtle hints about the trauma she suffered when she disappeared. Since Erio’s mother, Makoto’s aunt, is set up as flighty and unreliable from the beginning, it could have deconstructed the anime trope of wacky, irresponsible parents who leave their kids alone all the time.
Instead, Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko “cures” Erio in an early episode by having Makoto stick her on the front of his bicycle and drive off a cliff. No years of psychotherapy. No slowly confronting the trauma she faced. No realistic depiction of the day-to-day challenges of caring for a mentally ill relative. Instead, Erio gets “cured” (via a method that makes absolutely no sense) and becomes just slightly eccentric, and then we get a bunch of episodes of wacky alien-themed fun and Makoto drooling over two other boring characters who both have secret crushes on him.
What I’m getting at is that Denpa Onna created a situation fertile with storytelling possibilities, a Nile Delta of potentially interesting plot threads and character arcs, but the writers didn’t realize what they had, and they threw it away by using their scenario to tell a safe, conventional sort of story. And that’s something I see in anime far too often: the writers create unique, interesting characters and scenarios, but they don’t quite understand what they have and it gets shoehorned into one of the many conventional narratives of anime. Maybe it’s not even the writers’ fault; maybe it’s editorial mandate. I think a full incest ending of Ore Imo would have been just as stupid as what we got, but it was Tsukasa Fushimi’s vision for the series, if you believe the rumors, and it was destroyed by the editors. Maybe the author of the Denpa Onna light novels actually wanted to take the story in one of those myriad more interesting dimensions, but the editors were afraid it wouldn’t sell and forced it to be Haruhi knock-off #14538. Doesn’t matter in the end; what we get is wasted potential.
Hibike! Euphonium falls into the same trap. It creates the interesting, unique worldviews and personalities of Asuka, Reina, and Kumiko in the first series, but in the second series it shoehorns them into a conventional narrative about trying to confess your love to your teacher or losing Sempai after graduation. It’s a school life / school drama / cute girl show, and it does a pretty good job at that, so it didn’t have to be something completely different, but it would have been nice if, having made these unique characters, it let them conduct their school life drama in a way that suited their unique personalities instead of restraining them to a template. This still happens often enough that I feel this was all intentional, and the writers did know what they had in these characters, and had created it on purpose, unlike other shows where the writers seemed to be blind to the potential they had. But including the generic, conventional Mizore / Nozomi storyline was a huge misstep. It focused on a bunch of characters like Mizore, Nozomi, Yuko, and Natsuki who had never been properly developed to be able to withstand the limelight, which forced the writers to fall back on convention and cliché. But that’s something I could only see in hindsight; as I was watching, for several episodes, I questioned whether I might not just be reading too much into bad and inconsistent writing. It wouldn’t be the first time an anime had done it to me.
However, unlike Denpa Onna, Ore Imo, and some other anime I could mention, Hibike! Euphonium manages to escape from the trap with only minor injuries. Kumiko herself is the main casualty, but even she isn’t completely ruined. She still comports herself well in the story with her sister, and if she becomes a boring sounding board for Asuka’s monologue during the pivotal scene of Asuka’s story, it’s harder to notice because Asuka is shining so brightly. But I was sorely disappointed that it had to turn out this way. Kumiko was such an interesting variation of the “disinterested outsider who learns to become involved with others” that serves as the hero of so many of these more mature light novel-derived school life shows. The part is usually given to a male character, so Kumiko stood out by being a female example, but she also, in Series I, had found her own way to stop being a disinterested outsider, uniting with other people over a passion for music instead of romantic attraction or a generic desire for companionship. In Series II, she takes on a more typically feminine style, with all the yelling and crying, instead of continuing to play the role of a male character as she did in Series I. And she starts meddling in other people’s lives, completely against her previous inclination, on the thinnest of pretenses. True, she finally goes over the edge in supporting Nozomi when she finds out that Nozomi loves the flute so much that she went out and bought one for herself when her middle school didn’t have any. But she only got to this point because she wouldn’t stop inserting herself into the situation, which was completely out of character given how she was.
I don’t know what it is about anime, manga, and light novels that makes for poorly realized executions of an interesting vision. Other media seem to more consistently fail as clichéd garbage or succeed on the strength of ideas, but anime, while definitely replete with clichéd garbage, seems to also have a strangely high number of series with good ideas that fail on execution because the writers are clueless about what to do with those ideas. It’s clearly not impossible to fully realize a vision in these media: Death Note, the Monogatari series, Madoka, and many others start with interesting visions and then do manage to explore those visions enough to bring out the potential. Hibike! Euphonium comes admirably close to doing so. But Denpa Onna, Ore Imo, and so many others miss the mark, and it’s frustrating, because the concepts have such creative possibility and that possibility is squandered. If they were purely by the numbers, their failure wouldn’t vex me so much, but they do have original, interesting ideas, and I hate to see those wasted.
At the end of the day, if you liked Hibike! Euphonium, you’ll probably enjoy Hibike! Euphonium 2. I did enjoy parts of it very much, especially once we were done with the tedious Nozomi / Mizore story. It offers satisfying conclusions for most of the characters we’ve come to love (Hazuki is a notable exception). I just wish they could’ve dumped the filler and stuck to their guns more with the characterization.
