|
I'm going to not rise to the "pretty good" bait (I consider it "pretty average"), and just stick to the main thrust of this discussion. I do think that the second episode (Hagino's date episode with Hiroki) is one of the two or three best (if not the best) comedic episode I've seen in any erogame-anime conversion. And the Elis confession episode (and aftermath episodes) were very powerful, but I thought the whole thing lost steam after that.
If the eyecatch had had Kiri in it, that would have been an out-of-left-field moment. Hagino or the Director (both were shown to have some level of romantic feelings towards Hiroki) would have been an out-of-the-stadium moment. Elis is in between, it's out of the bleacher seats. Clearly Hiroki has deep, meaningful feelings for her; however, we were continually lead to believe these feelings were platonic. The last time these feelings had come up in any sort of meaningful way, Hiroki had rejected Elis.
Nothing really lead us to believe that he was going to end up with Kiri either; however, this does not equate to evidence that he was considering Elis. Most evidence that indicates anything regarding his feelings towards Kiri is circumstantial - it relies on either things we didn't see (like her confessions) or things we have no meaningful basis for comparison on (like how slow the relationship seemed to be moving, we have no idea how long it would normally take those two - since neither has ever been in a relationship before). His feelings towards Elis were (we thought) crystal-clear when he rejected her earlier in the series: he loves her like a little sister (or a daughter, I guess).
Honestly, when the credits started rolling, I thought he was going to be shut of both of them - and I thought that would be an okay ending. He started painting again, he showed Elis that she was very important to him, he had managed to break it off with Kiri after giving it a shot, Elis had gotten over her weird thing with the color red, and she looked like she was moving on with her life in France. At that point I thought it did a wonderful job with themes of growing up. Kiri and Hiroki had left their past behind, Elis was leaving her childhood things behind, and everyone was moving forward. Unfortunately the eyecatch kind of undoes some of that. But, on the other hand, it's less than twenty seconds of the show, so I can't really understand how it "ruins" it for some people either.
|