Narenare -Cheer for you!-

Episode 8

At this point, my expectations for this show have sunk pretty low, and while I've more or less given up on it returning to the heights of its first two episodes, I'm at least willing to settle for it staying entertaining. To the show's credit, this week's episode is the most interesting it has been in quite a while as it dips back into a larger character drama—and the relationship between the girls might get put to the test. Of course “interesting” isn't quite the same as “strong”, as this new storyline comes with its own set of problems—and given the general track record with the show's writing, I'm more worried than excited about how it'll try resolving them.

So it seems like the girls have finally managed to go viral. “How”, you might ask? Apparently, they made the news when they were cheerleading at that baseball game in last week's episode and folks were so impressed that the girls are now flooded with cheerleading requests. It's a little silly considering that this seems like something that would at best make local news (and even then they were cheerleading at a baseball game which isn't exactly an unusual sight). But compared to the previous coincidence of all of Anna's overseas friends being music megastars, this at least feels somewhat grounded in reality—so it's probably not worth harping over too much. At any rate, the girls have at last reached internet stardom. While things seem to be going smoothly at first, they run into a new problem: they're getting and taking on too many requests. Trying to figure out a good balance between trying to keep your audience satisfied and not burning yourself out in the process is a lesson that any content creator on the internet has to learn at some point, so when it inevitably gets to be too much, Megumi suggests that the girls cut down on the amount of requests they accept to keep things manageable, and they're all in agreement.

All that is, except for Kanata who doesn't like the idea of turning people down because she feels like even the smallest request could be important to the person who sent it (which, while sympathetic, comes off as a bit naive if you've spent any length of time on the internet). The rest of the girls still agree with the idea of slowing things down but rather than accept that, Kanata decides to take matters into her own hands and apologize to all the people whose requests they've turned down while doing her personal routine for them. It's a nice gesture, but it definitely isn't healthy as she's clearly exhausting herself trying to do this—and going behind the others' backs to do this isn't exactly great either. When this all backfires and drags down the channel's reputation, Anna justifiably goes off on her and things look like they could become sour between the two. Hopefully, all this backlash teaches Kanata not to take on too much by herself and to respect the decisions of others—as that is the lesson she should be learning from all this. However, if there's one thing this show has made clear: it values the spirit of cheerleading above anything else. Since that's at the core of Kanata's actions, it's hard to know how critical it'll be towards her behavior here.

Between all this, we also get a scene between Kanata and Megumi, as Kanata walks in on her pushing herself too hard to start walking again. With the girls' sudden rise to success, Megumi has started to feel like she's dragging the rest of them down and goes off about how quickly recovering so she can cheer alongside them is the least she can do. It's not exactly a bad scene, but since the bulk of this episode was otherwise focused on Kanata, it feels a bit disconnected from everything else that was going on. Since this happens in the middle of Kanata overexerting herself, I guess the idea was to point out that both of them are overdoing things—but since Kanata has yet to make that realization, and never makes the connection, she just comes off acting like a little hypocritical. It does seem like there might be something else going on with Megumi though, as when everyone else starts blowing up at Kanata, we learn that the source of the sudden internet backlash the girls have been receiving started from a vague but personal jab at Kanata regarding her history with the cheerleading club at her school. While the rest of the girls assume that one of the said club members must have done it, the bigger implication is that Megumi left the comment, which begs the question as to why.

No seriously: why? By all accounts, Kanata and Megumi seem like good friends, and even knowing that Megumi resents feeling like she doesn't contribute much to the group, it's a bit of a stretch to think she'd opt to take that out on Kanata specifically. It's also possible that she was aware of what Kanata had been up to behind everyone else's back the entire time and thought that this would be the best way to stop her from pushing herself. Considering her feelings about not doing enough for the others, it's hard to imagine she'd intentionally sabotage the channel just to teach Kanata a lesson. This could always be an intentional red herring but that almost feels a bit too convoluted for what we've seen from the show's writing style. So for now, I'm inclined to take these hints of Megumi as the culprit at face value. At any rate, we'll have to wait until next week to see how this all resolves—and I'll admit this is the first time in a while that I've been genuinely curious to see where the story is going. After all the previous letdowns, I'm not trusting that destination to be anywhere good but I'm hoping that it'll at least manage to be one worth talking about.

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