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REVIEW: Hanasaku Iroha Episodes 8-13 Streaming

If someone had told me that I would like this series I would have laughed at them but once I started watching it I was hooked. It is very well done.

To me it seems as if the whole deal with Ko is all said and done, and it's time to move on from that, but that arc (if at all finished, we dunno yet at this point) was handled nicely and really let Ohana blossom further as the shows main character.

The relationship between Ohana and her mother and grandmother has plenty of unresolved ragged edges—it is honestly written after all—but if the series has any sense they'll be left that way.

especially when I know such an opinion is absolutely unsupportable by anything that happens in the show

Where do I begin...? Well, first, when Ohana discovers she's about to be packed up and shipped out of Tokyo overnight, she gets excited and happily talks about how great it will be to leave her boring life for something that's finally "dramatic" to her best friend. No "I'll miss you" or "We should keep in touch," just "Yay! I'm finally leaving this lousy place with no regrets!" It's only when he confesses that he's fallen for her that she feels bad -- not for having been a callous jackass to her best friend, but because she feels awkward knowing that he now likes her. How will it effect her?

Hell, everything in the episode was about her. Why should she have to work to earn her keep? Nevermind that all indications in the episode are that most of the kids in the village work part time somewhere to help make money, nor that this is common among anyone whose family isn't either very well off, thereby making her a spoiled brat. Why should she have to be considerate of guests in an inn and put them first? Shouldn't her needs be the most important? The clincher is when she protests her grandmother's abuse of Minko, not for Miko's sake but because she feels bad that someone is being punished for something she did. Of course, Ohana is then horrified when her grandmother follows through on her request to punish her instead (and okay, child abuse is wrong, but still), and when Minko calls her out for being a selfish little whiner, she cries and doesn't know why Minko could possibly hate her. And we're somehow supposed to feel bad for her??

Now, maybe this will be the point of the series: that Ohana needs to grow up, realize how her actions affect others, develop true empathy, and grow into being a better person who can, ultimately, stand up to her grandmother. And it is perhaps realistic to have a teenager be this self-involved, especially when her mother has set such a lousy example to her. And so if ANN runs one of their later reviews of the first six episode or so and this turns out to be the case, I might return to it.

First things first: Fantastic review, and not just because I agree with it 99.5% (the 0.5 percent being that I would give the show an overall of A, Story B+, Animation B+, Art A+, Music A).