Glasslip – Episode 03 Review

Glasslip 03 – Homegirl Still Can’t Drive

Why on earth did I pick this series to review?? This week’s installment of Glasslip was the most bland thing I have seen all week. Not only did Yukinari’s dramatic confession have absolutely no real effect on the characters, the series revealed absolutely nothing about Touko’s psychic powers.

Synopsis:

Kakeru comes to Touko’s house to talk with her about precognition, but they end up talking about nothing because eating pork cutlets is far more important to Touko than seeing the future. Despite Yuniknari’s confession to Touko last week, everything is still pretty much peachy for the gang’s “hiking trip”. Touko and Yanagi have a brief moment of extremely mild awkwardness, but everything is happily resolved by a 2.5-minute long conversation and a dip in the stream. Touko later formally rejects Yukinari, and he accepts it easily; feathers are clearly not ruffled. Hiro almost confesses to Sachi, but backs down after blushing a few times. Touko has a couple of inane and totally obvious future visions, and Hiro’s sister still can’t drive worth a shit.

Review:

What exactly was the point of this episode?

You see, there’s this thing that is commonly part of a story called a “plot”…. And it seems that the creators of Glasslip didn’t get the memo. It seems that they also didn’t hear about other elements of stories, like dramatic climaxes, character development, and tension building.

Episode 02 set the stage for all of those things to happen this week – and none of them did.

The real issue here is: dramatic things may happen, but nobody gives a shit. Kakeru is as stiff and uncomfortable as ever, Touko is as clueless as ever, and no matter what kind of world-shattering events the crew encounters, they are just too good as friends for it to change their relationships.

Good thing everything is cool now, right?

True, there was a little bit of weirdness between Touko and Yukinari (and Yannagi) on the hiking trip following Yukinari’s confession. It really didn’t amount to much – it was just that Yanagi was a little overly-enthusiastic at the beginning of the trip (which doesn’t seem particularly out of character for her) and Touko was a bit eager to put some physical distance between herself and Yukinari, which didn’t seem out of character at all either. Pretty much, some life shattering events (love-confessions, which challenged the status quo of their friend-crew) happened, and the results were mostly unnoticeable.

If the characters in the story don’t give a shit about the major dramatic happenings in the story, why should I? And they clearly didn’t – after a very short talk between Yanagi and Touko, everything was settled – Touko decided not to date Yukinari, and Yanagi decided to keep on liking him. There was not a single hint of the normal beef and lingering jealousy that would be present if that had actually been a conversation between two girls in real life. I mean, come on! If the guy you were in love with confessed to your best friend, you’d be a mess, right? You wouldn’t know who to side with, you’d have all sorts of internal struggles, and you’d be forever comparing yourself to your friend. But in Glasslip, everything is completely resolved with: “Do you like him?” – “I don’t know.” – “Are you going to date him?” – “No.” – “Okay, well I’m still gonna pursue him.” – “Good for you.” And that’s that.

Must be nice, eh? And it’s salt in the wounds of all of us out there who have lost a friend for the sake of love. What was the point of this episode anyways? Maybe just so we could “understand” that the friendships between these girls are so entrenched that no guy or love affair could ever make them waiver? Yeah, right. I’m not buying it.

Nobody (or at least nobody who isn’t a sociopath) could just stand by, all happy and cheery, while the person they love confesses to their best friend. I know that Yanagi was trying hard to put up a brave front at first, but she honestly seemed fine with everything after talking with Touko.

The chicken-threatening transfer student once again shows common sense.

And Yukinari didn’t get upset when Touko rejected him. He walked off, which is maybe what “men” do when they’re upset, but he seemed to take it all in stride. He wasn’t noticeably affected by the rejection later when everyone was packing up. What is that? How could you not be upset when the person you love officially rejects you? Touko fell to her knees in grief – but why? No one else did.

What is wrong with these characters? Can anybody say “one-dimensional”? The group dynamic is so solid that nothing can affect it… And that doesn’t make for a story. A story can come from any angle – maybe a lot of drama happens, and everyone pulls through it, but they remain friends in the end. Or maybe, a lot of things happen, and everyone grows up, but they remain friends. But at this point, some things have happened, and no one gives a shit, and everyone remains friends. What is interesting about a group of people who are impervious to change, growth, and coming-of-age?

That brings me to Touko’s future-visions this week… First, Touko saw Yanagi crying, and she said, “Do I make Yanagi cry?” Let me go ahead and be the first to say: “No shit, Sherlock.” Any teenage girl, if the guy they loved confessed to their best friend, would cry. Duh. And the second vision Touko had was of Sachi sitting on her bed staring at her hands. Well, what exactly is different about that? I mean, most of the times we’ve seen Sachi has involved her sitting in her room (usually on her bed) staring at a book or doing nothing. Why would it be surprising in the least to have a vision of Sachi sitting in her room doing nothing?

Yeah, ummmm, I saw that one coming.

All I’m saying is that you don’t need the gift of prophecy to know that: a) it will your hurt your best friend’s feelings if the guy she likes confesses to you, and b) a friend who sits around doing nothing in the present will probably sit around doing nothing in the future. Wait… Since I already knew these things, does that mean I’m psychic?

Clearly, I invested waaay too much energy into last week’s review. Touko’s psychic power is pretty much useless (although since she is socially retarded, it may be a game-changer for her). On top of that, her friends are so dull that nothing short of a nuclear bomb dropped on their hangout-café could inspire any sort of change or growth in any of them. And, sadly, it seems that the writers involved in Glasslip are as dull as the characters they create – they’ve clearly never had any friend-drama or precognition to deal with.

Oh, look! Your friend who does nothing…. Is busy doing nothing!!

And now…. Since the series hasn’t given me any material worth writing about… I will tell you about my own experience with future-visions and young love.

Rant:

My best girl friend (for many years), was a single mother of a small child. Her baby-daddy wasn’t right in the head and had left her all alone to raise the child. Needless to say, she was having a hard time finding a good man (and one that was also young, sexy, intelligent, and possessing of a lucrative and legal job) to partner up with.

She finally met a guy. According to her, he was the hottest man on earth, not to mention the fact that he was smart, kind, sensitive, made plenty of money, and was a good lay (and he was obviously madly in love with her). Needless to say, I was suspicious. I loved her with all my heart – we were best friends – and I was very protective over her and her baby. I’m not a lesbian; but there was almost some yuri-action going on… I would go to her house every night after work and do the dishes while she put the baby down. Later we would stay up late drinking, cuddling, and cursing the insufficiency of men in general.

When she finally caught the man of her dreams, I insisted on meeting him. After all, I was essentially the man of the house, and I wouldn’t turn my position over to some run-of-the-mill douchebag. When I met him, it was at a “family” gathering – and my group of friends was ever so much more of a “family” than the crew in Glasslip.

It was hate-at-first-sight. The instant I saw “John”, I wanted him to die. None of our friends liked him, but I was horrified by him. I just knew that he was the menace that would ruin our happy little family.

That night, I dreamed about him. In my dream, he wrecked the happy, peaceful lives me and my friends had all been living together. John’s existence destroyed everything I had worked so hard to build. I woke up and called my girl friend, weeping, begging her to dump him immediately. She obviously refused; after all, he was the man of her dreams and he had already (after two weeks) promised to marry her, raise her child and the children they’d have together, and buy a farm with her where they could live out their happy-hippy-fantasy lives.

I continued to plead with her, to no avail. Our friendship waned – I couldn’t help but distance myself from her, since she had not taken to heart this earth-shattering precognition of mine. Months later, when he was feeling lackluster about their relationship, she began to obsess. She would text me constantly. Every time he left the house, I heard about it. Every time he stared into space, I got a text: “Is he thinking about some other girl?” Every time he took a shit, she was wondering why he wasn’t paying attention to her.

More than a year after my nightmares of John, my friend and I had grown apart. I just couldn’t handle the fact that she was throwing her life away over some “John” who clearly wasn’t into her. And then, suddenly… I found myself at a bar downtown, being stalked by a scary dude. I escaped the bar and headed outside, but scary-dude was following me. The infamous “John” happened to be at his vehicle right across the street, and I desperately made a beeline for him. Under my breath, acting casually, I said, “Look, man, I know we both hate each other, but you have to help me out for one second.” He agreed to play the part of my boyfriend until the scary stalker went away.  But by then, the tides had turned. The crisis made us realize that we had never actually had a conversation, and so we went out for drinks.

The first time we sat down together and talked, we mutually (and instantaneously) realized that we had everything in common. We were perfect for each other. We talked about our hopes, dreams, and future plans; we talked about how our mutual friend (his girlfriend) had lost her shit and was going down the psychotic road of unrequited love. We fell in love, completely, utterly, and hopelessly – after only one drink.

We tried so hard to do the right thing. We went to our friends and told them our story. We talked with everyone. We presented our love officially and respectfully to our entire community before it was consummated. But for what? Every single one of our friends rejected and expelled us, but everyone had such different reasons as to why they hated us, that there was no end to the infighting. Eventually, we gave up on being accepted, but by then our entire crew was destroyed. Almost a decade later, many of them are still not friends with each other. Some of them are now dead.

Eventually we broke up. We had also found out that we were cousins – that combined with the other harsh realities of the world weighed upon us heavily. And honestly, the insane attraction people feel for each other only lasts for so long.

The point of my story is this: In less than a page, on a blog post, I can tell you something that actually happened in real life that is 10,000 times more interesting than anything that’s happened in Glasslip. In my story, there’s precognition, there’s drama, there is friendship and pain, and there’s romance. Sure, I may be your awesome onee-sama, Kelfio, but when it comes down to it I’m just a random person on the internet. And if I can tell you just a snippet of my life, and it is way more believable, honest, tragic, supernatural, moving, and real than an anime we’re all watching, then there’s a big problem with the anime in question.

Come on guys. Make Glasslip better, pronto.

Don’t make me regret choosing to blog this series.

This is how I feel about watching Glasslip.

In conclusion… I was really disappointed with this episode. I could be wrong, but at this point, it seems like this series is a slice-of-life wherein some things happen, but none of those things matter at all. The things that could be interesting are left untouched, the characters are undeveloped, and all drama and tension is simply washed away by how nice shallow everyone is.

I’m still curious about the series though, simply because something still seems creepy about it. However, at this point, I think the only thing that could save the series is if people start dying off. I’m rooting for Sachi to suddenly disappear and be found, dismembered, in a dumpster, by Hiro. That’s probably just my frustration and boredom talking, of course, but hopefully something cool (or just something at all) will happen next week. I’m not going to hold my breath though.

Episode Rating: 4.0/10.0

What did you guys think of this episode? How many of you are dropping the series at this point? Am I going to be the only person left watching this series??