These are the times that try men’s souls. This man, anyway. And honestly my soul is fine, I just get aggravated when I see so many romcom tropes heaped into one pile. I mentioned earlier that there were times when I struggled some with Ao no Hako as a manga. It so often dances this fine line with cliche and frankly it’s miraculous that it seems to fall on the right side of it as often as it does. But it still loses me for stretches. Not as often these days, fortunately.
In execution all this comes out pretty well, I don’t deny that. And that’s the story with Blue Box, really. It’s such a prototypical shounen romcom that it feels bound by it sometimes. Being in WSJ probably doesn’t help (though this is a pretty atypical WSJ romcon in a lot of ways). I liked this episode to a point, but – as with the chapters it adapts – I felt at times as if I were seeing a bunch of boxes being checked off in succession.
The summer festival and fireworks are the canvas for all this. And there’s certainly no more classic a setting in shounen romcon. Hina gets all dressed up in Yukata. She plays her usual tsun routine with Taiki, who’s used to her by now. She gets bitten by a mosquito, he provides balm. He fecklessly compliments her, she can’t help but take it the wrong way. They have an easy familiaity between them, there’s no denying that. But at this point the evidence suggests any romantic feelings are strictly one-way traffic.
Of course, Chinatsu comes to the festival too. And of course Taiki runs into her (she’s already spotted him with Hina, but he doesn’t know this). She’s in the process of helping a lost little girl named Yume, and good boy Taiki jumps in to offer assistance. This is all pretty low-hanging fruit to be honest, but the gist of it is Taiki leaves Hina alone for a rather extended period of time (did he not take his phone?). She gets a visit from their middle school friend Ito and his group, and he invites himself to join her in their viewing spot (and judging by his blush he’s got a thing for her). But Hina refuses, which says all we need to know (but we knew that already).
This is messy of course. Hina is allowing herself to feel like she has a chance, maybe for the first time. But Taiki seems to have no sense of her as a potential romantic partner. Chinatsu believes Taiki lied to her when he said he was going to the fireworks with a group (which he believed to be true). She reveals her feelings when she later stumbles upon Taiki taking a nap during practice in the eaves of the gym, but the real headline is not her mistaken belief that he lied, but that it bothers her as much as it does. And when she asks the sleeping boy if he and Hina are dating, she adds that the answer will change her feelings towards him as a “roommate”.
I won’t say anybody is in the wrong here, but this triangle element is the part of Ao no Hako that feels very generic. It literally exhausts me – I just want it to be over. There’s a lot of interesting stuff happening even in an episode like this one but it can be hard to appreciate it when things get this derivative. It’s easier for me now, knowing that soldiering on is worth it – I had no such assurances reading the manga as it was being released (which I still do). But new viewers seem to be loving this side of the show, so as usual my tastes are squarely in the minority here.
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