Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun Season 2

Episodes 1-2

Who's ready for another charming, color-saturated, broken-music-box-sounding episode of everyone's favorite horror-fairy-tale blend, Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun? Season 2 will be full of sweet moments, and adorable apparitions, and I wasn't expecting the other shoe to drop off the daikon leg quite so quickly. Here are spoilers, because it's impossible to discuss “The Three Clock Keepers” without the bombshell reveal that brought its flippant antics to a screeching halt. Time travel hijinks kick off this deceptively dark episode before the big reveal.

Since there's been a five-year gap since I last reviewed Hanako-kun, I'm in the midst of a season 1 rewatch. But even if you aren't interested in such a commitment, Nene made sure you don't need to. Her after-school theater, complete with Puppet Nene seemingly in cosplay as the grass-type Pokémon Shaymin, covered all the key beats from 2020. The main thing you need to remember is that each of the seven School Wonders has a yorishiro, a “battery” that contains their power, which Nene and Hanako-kun are working with the exorcist Kou to seek out. But to find the source of a School Wonder's power, our trio needs to find the School Wonder first. The energetic season opener ensures that the hunt for the Clock Keeper doesn't drag on too long and resolves within the episode. Who would have thought that Aoi Akane's longtime admirer, Akane Aoi (yep), had ties to the occult? Perhaps that's why the former, female Aoi always has a new spooky story to chill Nene's bones.

Interestingly, Akane is a human rather than a pure apparition, and his contract with Kaku and Mirai only extends until graduation. This implies that the clock keeper who controls the present is always a mortal being—who better to be the keeper of the present-day present time? I attribute Akane's comparable weakness to his humanity; Mirai, a pure apparition, is not bound by such restrictions. While Akane can only stop time for five minutes, Mirai can bounce around willy-nilly transforming the school into an old folks home. Mirai, a tiny chaos gremlin who reminds Nene of her hamster, fits right in with the Mokke and even likes the same candies. It's a little tactless for Akane to call her stupid, but when a trick that works on hamster brains works on her. It was a bit shortsighted of Mirai to try to age up a person with as much spiritual power as Kou, who conveniently became more powerful as an adult. Like all of the apparitions we've met in the show so far, the logic to her power is internal to the show; its strengths and weaknesses are played up for drama's sake.

Mirai can't pull Nene into the future because she has none. Hanako seems to have known this since Day 1, noting that only people who are close to death are capable of summoning him (and maybe I should have suspected something given her memento mori brooch). Since Nene passes out under Mirai's attempt, we don't see her reaction to this discovery. That's a little unfortunate because it puts her in a damsel in distress situation, unable to be a participating actor in her friends' new quest to save her life. It's clear that Kou's determination to change Nene's fate gives Hanako-kun hope, but it's extremely hard for him to convey this. In the time that we've gotten to know Hanako, we've seen that he hides his feelings behind crudeness and dirty jokes. When Akane calls him a murderer, Hanako is rattled at first but fully accepts and even seems to relish the abuse. “I love humans like you,” Hanako says, and perhaps he means humans who hate Hanako as much as the apparition not-so-secretly hates himself. While Akane and Kou bond over their attempt to do the impossible, Hanako mostly insults them and can barely express how much their effort to save Nene has moved him.

Whether Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun is angling for a silly or intense mood, its visual style keeps the story immersive and consistent. Across five years, the show has kept its ultra-saturated color palette that favors reds and greens over everything else, resulting in a vibrant and warm world where Hanako's black uniform is invariably colored brown. This second season is off to a strong start, and episode two's jaw-dropping reveal means that the action is more urgent and the stakes are higher than ever.

Rating:

---

Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun Season 2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and Hulu on Sundays.

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

lmnopb02 o eup iup du