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Originally Posted by Guardian Enzo
That's certainly fine if you felt it was heartwarming - to me it was a hackneyed and totally false moment. If you're going to dedicate the bulk of the episode to utterly preposterous physical comedy, it's hard to throw in what's supposed to be a heart-tugger at the end and expect it to be anything but jarring. I'm fine with mixing drama and humor - I think this show has done it in every episode (which some folks clearly don't). The problem lies in trying to buy emotional impact without doing the grunt work in earning it. Humor can quite effectively be used to build an ep to an emotional crescendo - I just didn't feel this episode was remotely effective in doing so.
Would it have worked marginally better if the comedy was actually funny? Sure, a little. But other than the "Drop your cocks!" moment it all fell flat for me - broad in the worst sense of the term. Clumsy, artificial and totally discordant with the rest of the series. And the gag about the employee trying to get themselves fired has been done to death, and often much more creatively than this.
I'm not going to stop enjoying the show - at it's best I think it achieves greatness, and I really love it at those times. I'm just at the point of accepting that there are going to be clunkers thrown in every few weeks.
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I did find a couple scenes and directorial decisions felt a bit off, but for the most part I didn't find this episode discordant or lacking in buildup. And I give the credit for that to the fact that pretty much everything we saw was consistent with what I've grown to expect from Tomoe as a character. From previous episodes, I had basically pegged her as a) a bit of a romanticist and b) a little imp hiding behind the facade of a traditional Japanese beauty. So I could totally see her enjoying blasting LARPers with a pressure washer and squealing inside when her juniors call her "sis". Hearing this was going to be a Tomoe episode meant I wanted to see her "sparkle", and she did. It's not gut-bustingly hilarious, but it is certainly one hell of a feel good episode.
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Originally Posted by Triple_R
But there is a certain constant shifting in mood and tone that I see in this anime, and it can be a bit jarring and leave you wondering what exactly the anime is aiming for overall.
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I hate to belabour the point, but I think I know what the show is trying to do overall thus far...
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Originally Posted by Triple_R
To use a comparison that you'll probably get, 0utf0xZer0, and which acejem recently shared with me, I see Hana-Saku Iroha starting to have identity issues approaching what Angel Beats! suffered from.
My own view is that there's kind of a sliding scale of drama and comedy, and that this is most pronounced in a slice of life or romance anime.
From my perspective, this anime has ran the full gamut of that sliding scale, with episodes that felt much more dramatic than comedic to me (Episodes 1 and 2), episodes that felt almost entirely comedic to me (Episodes 3 and 7), and episodes right smack dab in the middle (Episodes 4 through 6).
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Well, the thing you have to remember is that I never saw episodes 1 and 2 as "much more dramatic than comedic". From my perspective, what Hana-Saku Iroha is trying to do at this point (and I expect it will shift gears later on) is make a comedy that is also emotionally poignant (and drop dead gorgeous looking). And at least from where I stand its been succeeding at that with flying colours.
It's very much a heartfelt show, and hence what makes it great is actually the exact same thing that makes K-On! season 2 better than season 1. It just happens to do it much better than K-On's second season because its not just doing it as a way of applying a new coat of paint to an existing franchise. Plus, Hana-Saku has been building a storyline in a "mosiac" fashion each episode, likely setting up some decent drama later on.
It someone were to extract the best elements of K-On! and True Tears and combine them into one work, I imagine the result would look a lot like Hana-Saku Iroha.
(Yes, I did just bring K-On! into this... I can feel the laser sights on my back as I type.)
As for the comparison with Angel Beats - in my opinion, all of the elements in Angel Beats belonged there and it was time allocation that created so many issues. They needed to spend more time doing more stories like the one in episode 10 before moving on to the finale, and also building Otanashi's relationship with Kanade. Hana-Saku, by contrast, is a 26 episode show and is fleshing out Ohana's relationship with the inn and its other workers practically every episode.