While it has been better than three years since the first season ended , the vibe here is a bit different than what I remember. The silliness factor is ramped way up. And this is reflected in the visual style (which I’m not the first person to point out). Things have gotten sort of Gainax-y actually, now that I think about it. Which is interesting, since the director and most of the key staff have carried over from the first season (there is a smattering of Gainax and Trigger among them, but that’s not unusual).
On balance the new aesthetic is working for me. From memory it seemed like the first season was going more for “lush”, and pretty. A function of that was that it objectified Marin more, where she’s more of a goofy schoolgirl here. CloverWorks being a chameleon studio makes this kind of shift easier, it must be said.I did find this ep a bit less engaging than the premiere, as it was much more focused on cosplay and had a few too tropey moments. But on the whole it still brought a pretty sizable charm factor a lot of the time.
In terms of romcom tropes, it’s hard to top “guy denying they’re dating too vociferously” and “anime cold”. You know my view on this – not only ought they fess up to their friends, but they should be acting on their attraction for each other. But again, tropes and all that. And we shouldn’t forget “guy defending girl from nampa bros” – though in this case they were actually Marin’s hair stylists. The cutest part of this was Marin stealthily kissing Wakana on the bunny head. The only part of this that gets through is the sound, which he mistakes for a “Tch!” (which is about the rudest thing you can do in Japan, verbally at least).
Wakana visiting Marin while she was sick was basically the standard operating procedure for such events in anime, though it was executed perfectly well. After they both recover (because tropes dictate he has to get sick too, though it’s off-screen) they head out for a cosplay event at Sunshine City in Ikebukuro. There the pair have an encounter with a cosplayer named Amane Himeno (Murase Ayumu) who’s having a skirt malfunction. Gojo-kun is a tailoring superman who never travels without a sewing kit, and a friendship is born.
Given the context of the story, I don’t think the idea of a cross-dressing cosplayer should surprise Wakana and Marin as much as it seems to. Himeno’s real name is Chitose Amano but Amane is his cosplay moniker, and he’s surprised (and not the first to be) that Marin’s real name gets offered up so freely. It’s obvious as soon as Murase starts speaking that Amane is a dude, but he’s very good at his craft – right down to the way he constructs his fake cleavage (which he promises to demonstrate to Marin and Wakana). Wakana is utterly fascinated by Amane’s glue stick, which it turns out he uses to stick his hair to his face coquettishly (which seems like a bad idea to me, but what do I know).
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