Narenare -Cheer for you!-

Episode 7

After getting arcs for Kanata and Anna, it's finally time for Nodoka's turn in the spotlight. In theory, this would make for a solid episode since the contrast between her nice girl persona and her actual desire not to deal with other people seems like a topic that would be interesting or at least a little fun to talk about. In execution, it's resulted in the dullest episode of the show so far—and one that might have killed the last embers of my enthusiasm for it.

Although the girls have gotten their new cheerleading request services up and running, they don't get any takers until they receive an offer from a girl named Rara who goes to the same school as Nodoka. Rara is the captain of their school's cheer squad and wants the PomPoms to support them in cheering for the baseball team in their upcoming game and competing with their rivals at Kanata's school. We learn that she used to be part of the cheer squad herself but could never really wrap her mind around the idea that cheering for others would somehow make them better at sports. She disliked having to constantly involve herself in other people's business when she'd rather just be left alone (which as a fellow introvert I can relate to immensely), so she decided to stick with keeping to herself and her friends.

With that potential drama, I was expecting to see Nodoka's desire to stay in her comfort zone or some fun cheerleading theatrics between the two teams—but somehow we end up with neither. Instead, it's mostly a lot of cutting away between the competing cheer routines of the two squads and the actual baseball game—which certainly feels true to life for anyone who goes to local games but isn't really what I'd call exciting. And the constant back and forth made it hard to tell what exactly the show wanted me to focus on. While the cheerleading routines are well-animated and look pretty realistic, the focus on realism arguably works against it here. There is just enough extra flash in the cheer routine of Kanata's school to show more of an emphasis on their actual performance but the visual direction of both routines is honestly bland—and for a show centered around cheerleading, it didn't feel like it did much to draw me into their performances. It doesn't help that there isn't really much to the core conflict here since we learn even before the game starts that Rara and the captain from Kanata's school are childhood friends. Neither side seems to have out for the other, so the stakes here mostly come down to a difference in opinion. While there are certainly differences between competitive cheerleading and cheerleading as a form of support, it's not exactly a topic that holds much interest to anyone outside the world of cheerleading—so I feel like there needed to be a little more to the overall presentation if it really wanted to focus on that idea.

I also felt a little underwhelmed with how Nodoka's part in this ended as it ultimately came down to her simply getting more invested in cheering for her team than she expected and feeling frustrated when they ended up losing. It's at least a bit of a bittersweet resolution compared to how neat and tidy Kanata and Anna's stories were wrapped up. But much like how their arcs ended, it feels like a bit too simple of an ending when compared to how much the show had to work with. In the end, it doesn't really feel like anything about Nodoka really changed beyond gaining a bit more appreciation about the idea of cheering for others—and while I've accepted that's all the show is really interested in, it does suck to see it repeatedly present potentially complex character stories only to resolve them in the easiest way possible.

I'll be honest though: my problems with some of the writing aside, my biggest issue with this episode is that it's boring. Nothing about it is particularly bad, even when compared to some of the lows of previous episodes, but even with everything it presented, there wasn't a whole lot to actually latch onto. This is the most I've struggled to talk about the show up till now. It feels like we've come a long way from the promise of the first couple of episodes—and with how much the show has stumbled since then, I'm no longer confident that it'll be able to turn things around.

Rating:

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