Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun Season 2

Episode 6

Welcome back to the winter anime season's most average high school rom-com, Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun. Ghosts? Apparitions? Curses? Huh? You must be thinking of a different show. Here there's nothing but milquetoast flirting and typical teen drama. “Make Believe” was quietly unsettling, letting the characters (human and apparition alike) loose in a seemingly idyllic school life where Nene's most pressing concern is whether to agree to a Sunday date with Hanak—er, Amane-kun. But from the moment the opening theme neglected to start, the tension built to an impressive crescendo.

How dull would it be if Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun was a run-of-the-mill rom-com? This episode demonstrated how bored I'd be if that were all there was to it. It's the lurking tragedy that lingers in each scene that gives this episode flavor. As a living person, Mitsuba is Kou's cocky, mouthy classmate and not particularly interesting. But when I saw him interacting with friends, like his ghost form always pinned for, I lost it. Amane is just a regular guy who has lost all of the impulsive, teasing spice of his apparition form. And yet, when a classmate lent him a book about space and I remembered his aspiration to become an astronaut, I felt a bittersweet longing for this future that he's doomed not to have. Nene recognizes this on some level when she realizes that her suspicion toward Amane is just bullying the poor dude. As a regular boy who hasn't undergone the same experiences as the apparition Hanako-kun, he's no match for Nene. The chemistry fizzles out. It's only the dramatic irony of viewers' knowledge that converts this to fanservice, so I'm not satisfied. I don't want to see Nene and Amane get together; I want to see Nene and Hanako-kun (and yes the inherent tragedy of that is part of the appeal)!

There's a fantastic scene when Nene and Kou reunite at the pool, elated to finally speak to somebody else who can admit something weird is going on. I loved seeing Amane and Mitsuba glaring daggers in the background—now more than ever, Nene and Hanako and Kou and Mitsuba are respectively the A couple and B couple of this rom-com. With a pin in the supernatural for this brief pool-cleaning respite, the only way for the narrative to develop these characters is romantically, and so romantic we get. But wait a minute… what about that strange tower with the super cool steampunk fairy tale fusion design? I loved that you could see the illustrious tower in so many unexpected frames: out the window, or in a reflection on a glass door. Even as the characters attempt to relax into this much softer narrative, with Nene making an effort to gaslight herself into a new genre because she wants Amane to live, the tower hangs ever more ominously overhead. Just when the cute pool-cleaning montage got my guard down, the denizen of the tower made herself known. It's Shijima, that mousy-looking girl Tsukasa revealed under the tablecloth to the Broadcasting Club, Mitsuba and all. No wonder Mitsuba can't deny something is up no matter how much he wishes it weren't true.

The tension builds and builds until it shatters—Aoi and Akane cracking into a million pieces simultaneously with Shijima slashing through her drawings of the two. Nene and Kou are reasonably horrified, but nobody else is acting normally when they claim it's business as usual. The others claim Aoi and Akane will be back on their feet soon, so perhaps Shijima isn't a malicious School Wonder. In her twisted way, perhaps she thinks she's helping Nene and her friends, drawing and redrawing them until they attain perfection in her eyes. She holds all the cards, and I see it as a point in this show's favor that I can't begin to imagine how the crew will get themselves out of this one.

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Lauren writes about model kits at Gunpla 101. She spends her days teaching her two small Newtypes to bring peace to the space colonies.