Review-Roundup: Ao Haru Ride 01/02, Hanayamata 01/02

After all, everybody knows that a girl’s value rises and falls with how cute she is. That’s the ONLY way for girls to be worthy of any guy’s interest.

It’s great to be a male love-interest in a shoujo-series! Really, NOTHING is the guy’s fault, he just can be an asshole and look down on the women who are interested in him. After all, he’s way too cool and deep to stoop to a normal person’s sensibility for social interactions. It gets even better if the guy has a dark past. There’s no better way to be pretentious than to say “You just don’t get me.” while having this dark past lurking there in the background unmentioned. Being considered cool was never easier! That guy just has to wait for the female main-character to do all the plot-work for the romance to happen! So, here are the two series, I will cover this time:

Ao Haru Ride: A long time ago Futaba was a good, cute girl that was naturally hated by all girls but nowadays she’s an integral part of the girl-yakuza to escape that hatred. She even had a boyfriend-in-waiting once! Except that the guy stood her up and then disappeared into a jungle or wherever the fuck he was going. Enjoying her life as an unattractive girl-gorilla she suddenly meets her former boyfriend-but-not-exactly-that again. And he turned into a real sourpuss! But Futaba starts to question her descent into girl-barbarism as she rediscovers her feelings for the knight-in-shining-armor whose head got stuck in his own asshole.

Hanayamata: Naru is convinced that she sucks at being alive but she has good friends that she supports wholeheartedly. Getting closer to suicide with each meandering day, one night is about to change her life forever. While slavishly following someone else’s wishes again, she meets a weird girl who immediately decides to start dancing with Naru. Weirded out by the girl because she looked very UN-JAPANESE, Naru at first tries to distance herself from this newcomer. But this American girl called Hana convinces Naru to join her Yosakoi-club and for the first time in Naru’s life she feels like she has found something she can devote herself to. And with that her great friendship with Hana begins.