Narenare -Cheer for you!-

Episode 10

With all the problems Kanata caused over the last couple of episodes with her antics, I was pretty shocked with how this week's episode started. Namely, Anna decided to shut down the PomPom channel because she somehow realized that Kanata was right about how their focus should have stayed on fulfilling every request they got, no matter how small, and to achieve that, they're going back to operating locally. I said last week that I wasn't big on how everything was resolved because I didn't get the impression that the show thought Kanata did anything wrong other than pushing herself, and this pretty much confirms that. While I can get the sentiment behind why the girls would want to shut things down, it didn't feel like they were having any actual problems with operating beyond the ones Kanata caused by going behind their backs and driving herself into exhaustion. This just kind of makes it feel like there wasn't much of a lesson for Kanata to learn to begin with, and between this and the rest of what she gets in this episode, I've only gotten more and more frustrated with how her character has been handled.

Before we get to that, though, we at least see how the other girls handle things slowing down. With the channel shut down, we get a montage of them doing their casual cheer routines and a few interactions highlighting how much they've grown or gotten closer to each other. But since a lot of the character arcs we've gotten with them either fell flat or ended without the girls going through any real change, I didn't feel much of anything from this sequence of events, and it didn't really land for me the way the show was clearly expecting it to. It didn't help that parts of this featured some of the shoddiest animation we've seen out of the show so far. While P.A. Works finishing the show in advance means it's probably not in any danger of visibly melting in the last few episodes, it was distracting enough that I'm worried about where else it might end up cutting corners.

Circling back around to Kanata, she tells Megumi that now that she's left everything with the cheer club behind her, she's decided to start seeking out something new for herself. This something seemingly comes in wanting to learn how to dance, as when she sees a girl from her cheer club named Miyabi doing it, she pesters her into being her teacher. This also somehow results in Kanata getting to rejoin the cheer club, which, even putting aside how much that immediately flies in the face of her earlier conversation, just feels like a weird move to pull at this stage since it was otherwise starting to feel like she'd gotten over that. This also ends up bringing back some of my previous issues with how the show has handled Kanata's yips, as she keeps claiming that she still isn't able to “fly” the way she wants to even after we've seen her performing gymnastics and cheerleading routines just fine in previous episodes. Her tumble last week was the most we'd see her struggling with it in a while, and even that came off more like it was caused by her being distracted by her argument with Megumi rather than directly resulting from her condition. I suppose it's better than continuing to ignore it almost entirely, but it feels like something that the show should have been portraying a lot more consistently than it's been doing up to now.

My biggest gripe with the episode is learning the identity of the anonymous poster who called Kanata out. Since Kanata spent so much of the episode pestering Miyabi, I was expecting her to be the culprit, but instead, it turns out that she is another girl in the club named Mari. The cheer club members honestly haven't stood out much individually, so I wasn't even sure if this was a character who'd simply blended too much into the background to stand out or if it was someone we outright hadn't met before. As it turns out, though, we have seen her because she's actually the girl who was involved in the incident that caused Kanata's yips to begin with. This is a solid twist on paper, but the problem here is that we haven't seen or really heard about this character beyond the one scene she was in, and this revelation had such little build-up that I had to double back to the first episode to even remember who she was. The only real impact this has is in how it affects Kanata, and despite the post-credits stinger giving us a montage of how close the two of them used to be, all I could think about was how little the show had done to make me care about any of this. I'm guessing that Kanata's past incident will finally come back into play for the finale, but the show has handled her character so poorly up to now that any interest I had in that is mostly gone. At this point, the only big thing I'm anticipating is for this show to finally end.

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Narenare -Cheer for you!- is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.