[Kaoru Chujo]

Someone earlier questioned whether these people are more self-aware than real high-school students. Maybe they are. Maybe this is a show about adults, dressed up in high school drag. At the very least, these are extraordinary high-school students. And there's nothing wrong with that.

The drawing and animation are certainly outstanding, but sometimes -- as in a couple of the gifs posted by Shergal (for which, thanks!) -- I got a whiff of animators showing off, maybe even to each other, in a way that was enjoyable but that slightly took away from the flow of the scene. Not that I'm complaining, since the animation gave a pleasure of its own, and the distraction was slight.

Rakshasa makes the interesting distinction between asocial and anti-social, but sometimes one can be a bit of both. In any case, I agree that English as commonly spoken in North America has become poorer by abandoning a lot of useful words and distinctions between words. Possibly that was partly because many of us are immigrants from non-English-speaking countries. Possibly partly because our media are aimed at a low reading level, to capture everyone. In any case, I've had a couple of Chinese-speaking people complain to me that English doesn't have the words for nuances they want to express. I reply that it does, but that we don't commonly use a lot of words that are available to us, because we think that a lot of people wouldn't know them -- or because we don't know them ourselves.

I can't blame Mayaka. She is following her feelings. Perhaps I have trouble understanding her feelings for Satoshi, or how she can maintain them in the face of his resistance, but maybe she is unconsciously aware of the fact that he feels something for her, too.

Nor can I really blame Satoshi. He has a difficult problem. He thinks he has overcome his dissatisfaction with himself and life by becoming uncompetitive. Like his friend Houtarou, he has reached a kind of equilibrium by backing out. But this is a false equilibrium in both cases. They are covering up their true feelings, rather than actually solving their problems.

Here is where the girls come in: it's hard to resist the call of the hormones. Their reactions to these girls destroy their false equilibria and force them out into the real world of feeling.

As Rakshasa and Arabesque say, Houtarou probably ended up doing the right thing by lying. Chitanda's final thanks shows that she thought so, anyway. Call it a "white lie" (we have the same concept in English-speaking countries).

I wonder what Kaoishin_sama thinks of this show. He often decries the reflex worship of KyoAni, and I sometimes agree (I'm not a fan of K-On, except for the animation). But I think this show, at least, actually deserves the worship.