“Is the Order a Rabbit?” Quick Thoughts

It’s been a long time since I enjoyed a purebred, dyed in the wool cute girls doing cute things show as much as I have while watching Is the Order a Rabbit? recently. Gochiusa is pretty formulaic, but it has enough charm points, including beautiful art, likeable characters, and absorbing atmosphere, that I had a ton of fun watching it.

The show follows a standard cast of five girls, who live in a town that looks Central European despite being also sort of Japanese, and all work at coffee shops. Chino is an expressionless loli whose father owns Rabbit House and employs the ditzy Cocoa (who also lives with them in their house above the shop) and Rize, a military otaku whose father is super rich and an old buddy of Chino’s father. Chiya is the offbeat scion of Rabbit House’s former rival, a Japanese tea and sweet shop called Ama Usa An, and her childhood friend, the serious and ladylike Syaro, works at Fleur de Lapin, a cafe that specializes in herbal teas. Supporting characters include a novelist named Aoyama Blue Mountain, Cocoa’s older sister Mocha, and Chino’s middle school friends, the tomboyish Maya, and Megu, who takes ballet. There are a few random supernatural elements to the world, mostly revolving around Chino’s grandfather and his Angora rabbit Tippy, which is reminiscent of Aria along with the European-inspired architecture of the town.

I saw Series I back when it first came out, and in my memories it sort of dragged its feet for seven episodes before getting its act together and serving the same kind of dorky but inexplicably funny humor as K-On, as well as amazingly drawn backgrounds and atmosphere that rivaled even Aria, for its last five. That was pretty much how I felt about it this time too. The first seven episodes are pretty and full of anodyne cuteness, but most of the jokes just don’t seem to ever land and the characters don’t develop a whole lot. Then we finally start to learn things about them, starting when Chino gets annoyed at Cocoa for finishing a jigsaw puzzle that Chino wanted to finish on her own. After this, the stories become a lot more character-driven. They’re still slow-paced iyashikei slice of life to the core, but they’re things that happen because of a character’s personality being a certain way, or because of the characters reacting to situations they’ve been placed in, instead of just scenes of the characters doing things the writers have decided would be cute. They’re still cute–painfully adorable, even–but the characters’ parts in the activities feel more distinct in later episodes than in the first seven. I wasn’t sure it would be able to continue into Series II, but it did; while not every episode of Series II was brilliantly paced or written, and some of them had noticeable story problems, they were all at least fun and presented something interesting about the characters.

In my review of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, I mentioned that I have a type when it comes to characters in cute girls doing cute things shows: I tend to like the weird ones, then the earnest and serious ones, then the shy ones, in about that order. This pattern holds again for Gochiusa: my favorite is the weird and spacey Chiya, followed by the serious and misfortunate Syaro, and then the shy Chino, with Rize and then Cocoa bringing up the rear.

That said, Chiya never quite reaches her potential as the weird character. Even though Gochiusa doesn’t need to have character arcs to do what it does, Syaro, Chino, and Cocoa actually have small character arcs anyway, but Chiya doesn’t. (Nor does Rize.) I would have liked to see her behave like the sort of person I imagine when I hear the over-the-top poetic names she gave to the items on Ama Usa An’s menu, but she doesn’t live up to that very often. Her other primary role is embarrassing, worrying about, and generally mothering Syaro, but the show is never entirely self-aware about this. I liked the joke in Series II where she wanted to be cuddled by Mocha, but I would’ve liked it more if the show had pointed out that Chiya has the same kind of motherly presence and gone somewhere with the idea that Mocha considered her an equal in some sense as a big sister.

I do like the characters, but none of them are as well realized as the K-On or Yuru Yuri cast (let alone MLP), which meant even though I had fun laughing along with their lives, I didn’t feel as attached to them, and when the show ended, I was pretty satisfied to leave them. Well, I do feel like I might want to check in on Syaro every so often, just to make sure she’s doing all right. Between her poverty, frustrated crush on Rize, bizarre fear of rabbits, constantly having people get her drunk on coffee just because they think it’s fun, getting perved on by Aoyama, and general misfortune, I worry about that girl.

Gochiusa is also really good about making sure everyone gets paired up so we can see how they get along. We see a lot of Cocoa with Chino and Cocoa with Chiya and Rize with Syaro, but we also get to see Chino with Chiya and Rize with Chino and Syaro with Cocoa. Even Maya and Megu and Mocha get to pair up with almost everyone in the main cast for a scene or two. The only character I didn’t find surpassingly adorable and charming was Aoyama Blue Mountain. She’s not that interesting and doesn’t do much of note, and she’s responsible for some of the worst jokes in the show. In general, anytime the show tried to do a sexual joke, it didn’t work for me, and Aoyama looking up Syaro’s skirt was the worst. It was also the only sexual joke that continued past the first seven episodes, and it made me feel a small dread every time a scene would open on the interior of Fleur de Lapin, where Aoyama did her perving. I wanted to see Syaro quit Fleur de Lapin and go work with Chiya at Ama Usa An, where she could wear a nice concealing kimono, but that unfortunately never happened.

On the big scale of cute girls doing cute things shows, Gochiusa doesn’t reach the top tier of K-On, Aria, and Yuru Yuri, and it’s not revolutionary, but I enjoyed it for its cute characters, charming atmosphere, and beautiful scenery. It was good to know this subgenre can still deliver.