The truth of the matter is, sticking the landing really matters a lot. This hasn’t been a great season of Aharen-san wa Hakarenai. Not compared to the first, anyway. Skipping around and skipping altogether certainly is a part of that. But the series did nail the ending, and that excuses so much. The fact is when you love characters as much as I love these protagonists, you’re inclined to look for reasons to forgive and forget. Too often this season Aharen has starved me of them, but this finale had them in abundance.
I’m not going to say it was flawless – I have a few quibbles I’ll get to in time. But the big stuff? Perfect, pretty much. Matsuboshi Shota (huh?) and Reina wound up together. Thank goodness, though I never really doubted it. It wasn’t easy, and it didn’t ignore the challenges high school sweethearts face in staying together. In fact it dealt with them in a very smart way, I thought. But it also celebrated Raidou’s infinite capacity both for imagination and kindness, and in that it did the characters and audience a great service. It’s that imagination and kindness that have driven the story from the very beginning (as the very final scene ably demonstrated).
Here’s the thing about Matsuboshi, or Shota, whatever his name is. I said last week that he really ought to be a teacher, because he’s ideally suited for it. So seeing him in that role was a sort of personal redemption for me (in addition to being very funny). We even got a look at Akkun and Mitsuba as high-schoolers, taking on the mantle of ahare cannons. But thinking about Raidou, he really ought to be a jack of all trades – his restless mind would never settle. Teacher, surveyor property analyst, novelist, astronaut – why not? Aharen is right – his potential is limitless. I can totally see him blazing through a bunch of different careers, as his curiosity pinballs him from one to the next. That was a great way to wrap up his character arc.
Then we had the letters. They were fittingly brought on by Raidou totally misinterpreting someone else’s intentions, but that’s OK – that was totally something he’d do. But Reina’s letter – that was another story. And again, I give the writing credit because I think it got this exactly right. I can totally buy Reina being worried about holding Shota back, especially after he expressed that his dream was to help her pursue hers. She also knows, I think, that relying on him as deeply as she had been is holding her back. To grow they need to be apart, I think that’s spot-on. But they absolutely love each other, so they need to reunite once they find their own paths in life, trusting that they’ll eventually converge.
So in that sense, the ending totally worked for me. Raidou on Mars? Sure, why the heck not. Using the device of Reina relating her memories to her granddaughter (while still looking about 18 herself) was fine, I can take it or leave it. The best part of all this was probably the graduation sequence, where Reina presented said letter to Shota. Shota proposing (albeit uniquely) on his high school graduation should certainly satisfy anyone complaining about the traditional lack of progress in teen romcoms.
This all built to the wedding itself, likewise a terrific transition. It would have been nice to have seen a chapter I know exists, where Shota meets Reina’s father and seeks permission to marry her. But it was good, nonetheless (and damn, Dad is a tall drink of water). The one discordant note for me was Ishikawa (sorry, still no first name there) proposing to Hanako. That felt like a loss of nerve, to be honest. If you have the guts to write Ishikawa as a gay character without fetishizing or trivializing it, I would just as soon not see that walked back. Sure he’s right – it isn’t “either or” with everyone. But I would have found it more satisfying to take the harder road with this subplot, rather than tying everything up neatly in a fanservice bow.
The other curious thing for me is this “Shota” business. I don’t think I imagined that Raidou-kun was Matsuboshi-kun, did I? I can’t remember now how I came to know that, but I did – or at least I thought I did. If his name was Shota all along that’s obviously fine, but how the hell did that misconception take hold in the first place? In any event, it was a great wrap for this great couple – Reina thanking Shota for being selfish. This is why they’re such a great pair – they’re always thinking of the other first, sometimes literally to a fault.
For all my disappointments with this sequel (and I won’t pretend they weren’t considerable), Reina and Shota are truly one of the best pairings in modern romcom. And he especially is a great character. He’s a force of nature, an explosion of creative thinking and innate decency. How can you not root for kids like this? It is ahare indeed, no question about it. I could have used more of it this season, but the finale made up a lot of lost ground in that respect. In hindsight we really needed three seasons here, not two. But having not even expected a second, I’m happy to have been able to spend one more cour with Shota and Reina.
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