That Was a Good Last Episode

In English, “last” can mean “final” or “previous”; this pun is made possible by translation, although by syntax it infers the “final” definition in common use, as in “the last episode.” Instead, “The last episode was good” would suggest the punned meaning. Anyway, as you can see this is really about episode 11 of Genshiken Nidaime.

That picture would make sense if there were 11 balls left in the box, but nobody makes boxes like that. Instead, there are 5 mouths chewing in this cut. I’m going to call it even.

Bonus points if you can remember who own the 5 mouths.

Oggy is the new Iggy. This episode recap is brought to you by Crunchyroll. I wish they credit their subbers somehow, or if they do, maybe more prominently. Well, it’s not clear who provided the subs originally. Since this is a NIS/NISA title IRT CR, I’m going to assume the R1 DVD/BD subs will be based on the same subs with minor edits.

For some reason, with Saki in the center, the story goes through all these key meta points straight on. Like Hato’s sexuality. I guess people want to know?

Kind of like, the rose-lenses view of your college anime club is just that, and does not reflect the nature of society in light of non-normalized behavior, sexuality being one of them. Well, I think Saki is speaking more so out of experience and age at this point. It’s a good joke but I think it hits somewhere far off enough to not interrupt this enjoyable anime with serious social issues to jar the otaku out of their reveries.

Because, this is what happens next. Yeah, I mean, obviously, this is almost Servant x Service tier.

The last time I enjoyed an anime where the my harem lead can’t be this popular was about a little sister who can’t be this cute. I think Madarame fits pretty well in those shoes. This is kind of the meta narrative I had before watching episode 11. It’s basically like this internal dialog I have:

1. So what kind of a harem would you create if it’s got to have some tinge of realism?
2. I guess if you are an otaku? Wouldn’t the girls around you be also otaku? Don’t they get along better? Otaku couples are more realistic after all.
3. Doesn’t this mean a bunch of them are also fujoshi?
4. So your romantic interests will be doing slash fics with you and any other guy friends they have?
5. What if one of them is actually a trap?

And there we have it. Thankfully, while being Madarame is suffering, we quickly see Genshiken play up some quality relationship drama to diffuse that meta-jerking, which wraps up the core piece of the Saki x Mada plotline. I think the theme and lesson there is pretty clear so I won’t rehash it.

However being overconfident usually means this:

Right before this scene was probably my favorite piece from the episode. Not just the montage between Sasahara-imouto and Hato, putting their plan in motion, but also specifically this:

There are two things about it that’s cool. The flash cut is also a perspective change. It also reminds me of, well, Ocean Waves. Especially since right before that cut was the tunnel CG zoom piece.

And that’s basically a wrap. The new Saki is Rina Satou (My Railgun Can’t Be a Middle Schooler), and while nobody is going to win an award for this, she works well with Okitsu. The sound direction made Saki and Madarame’s talk stand out differently than the rest of the episode, controlling the white noise in the background. Well, it’s kind of a binary thing but it adds a certain effect.

Oh, while Sue is in her usual godly plot machine form, she’s rather sweet this week.

Lastly, two more references.

You know, this is kind of the joke, but I would dig some yuri romcom based on these two characters. Not sure how that is possible, but… At any rate, even if Kugayama said Aoi Hana I guess NISA’s gonna NISA. Well, it’s the Genshiken thing to do. And we see it again below–

For those of you unfamiliar with “Zekashima” it’s basically Kancolle, the hot web game where you raise anthropomorphic battleships. It’s on Kotaku, FFS. The joke here is that because of the high demand, the servers are rationing logins, so only a certain number of people can connect to the server at any given time. This means all the new prospective players can only, well, look at art on pixiv or some such most of the time.

For a second I thought they were talking about Final Fantasy 14 though. I’m not sure if that’s not otaku enough or what.

PS. I forgot one main issue I have with this episode. It’s basically I don’t see how Keiko can mouth off these cool lines when she was talking to Hato. They read more like something Saki would say (if we let Saki be the eloquent one in the group). Seems like just it’s the author bleeding in. Similarly speaking I guess Keiko and Hato had a bonding moment, which is to say, how did Keiko do that?