Quote:
Originally Posted by Guardian Enzo
"Nice and subtle" in this case is synonymous for "If you blinked, you missed it". 
I guess it just depends on how low your expectations are. If you take it as a given that only female characters will actually be explored in terms of why they do things rather than simply be shown doing them, then TT was fine. And if you're benchmarking against shows where the male leads are either oversexed idiots or complete ciphers, then it look great by comparison. That doesn't stop me from wanting more, though.
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What I put in bold were indeed factors in me being mostly cool with how the two guys were handled in this show. They're also two reasons why I don't see as much genericness or "sameness" in Tari Tari as what Reckoner does.
I mean, how many "Slice of High School Life" shows has two of its main cast characters in a really lowkey romance, almost with the romance as an afterthought? In a medium that tends to be melodramatic about romance, I honestly kind of found this refreshing.
But what I
really found refreshing about the two guys is that neither one even came remotely close to being a pervert. How many "Slice of High School Life" anime have two important teenaged male characters with neither of them being at least as perverted as, say,
Clannad's Sunohara? The wingman of anime is typically this oversexed guy who kind of acts as a motivator to push the male lead forward. And while I don't always mind this, it is kind of an overused character type in anime, imo.
Well, there's no clear-cut wingman between Wien and Tanaka (this in itself is refreshing to me - contrast with Taichi and Aoki in
Kokoro Connect where I think we all know who the wingman is
). And neither Wien or Tanaka act even remotely perverted towards their three female friends. If I was Sawa's dad or Wakana's dad, I'd feel some relieved that Wien and Tanaka were the two closest male peers in their lives.
Just for a change of pace, it's nice to see two teenage guys in anime that really are just close, platonic friends with three teenage female peers (albeit with one of the guys and one of the girls having the potential to gradually shift into more than that).
I will concede, though, that there probably should have been more badminton in this show. I felt like the writers realized in the last few episodes that Tanaka really did get less focus than the other four (even significantly less than Wien, yeah), and so they tried to compensate for that with a few scenes where Tanaka is driving the plot activity and doing some stuff apart from the rest of the club. But it definitely can seem a bit "too little, too late".
However, Tari Tari does enough things right, and enough things refreshingly different (good comedy/drama fusion and balance, no clear-cut wingman between the two guys, no pervert between the two main guys, etc...) that I guess I just didn't care that much about its flaws.
One last note is that I think that Kazu-kun is pretty much right on Wakana. On the whole, I think this show really straddles the line between having a main character with a strong immediate supporting cast, and being a true ensemble cast performance. Truth be told, it's not like Konatsu had some grand personal issue either - She didn't have much more drama surrounding her than what Wien or Tanaka did.
Ultimately, I do think Wakana is the main character in this show if anybody is, with the other four really straddling the line between strong supporting cast and true ensemble cast.
If you view this show as being about Wakana and her four friends then the way the guys were handled now seems less of an issue, imo.