Hatsukoi Limited 08: This is by far the best show this season

Posted: June 4, 2009 | Author: flomu | Filed under: Uncategorized |12 Comments »

Before this episode, I had thought that the love polygon, which grew at the rate of approximately 3.1415… new sides per episode, was a hopeless jumble of who-knows-what.  Apparently, J.C. Staff knows what, and the daunting (love triangle)^5 is quickly and surely losing sides and angles.

A week ago, I predicted that Higashi no Eden and Hatsukoi Limited could turn out to have some shitty endings – Eden due to the missing Selecao and Hatsukoi due to the sheer number of people in the huge entangled relationship.  This episode proved me wrong.  Well, at least on the latter hypothesis.  The former still stands.

Hatsukoi Limited never ceases to amaze me.  After taking a horrible concept of “mega oppai = OHNOES I CAN’T SWIM ANYMOARZ” and turning it into something decent (some would say awesome), this show goes on to twist the cliched Valentine’s Day plot into something downright incredible.

Hell, I won’t stop there.  This episode wasn’t just the best Valentine’s Day episode I’ve ever seen.  It’s the perfect Valentine’s Day episode ever made.

The usual Valentine’s Day plotline goes something like this:

• Girl is excited and nervous
• Guy displays indifference or excitement
• Girl goes home and makes chocolate for Guy
• Girl gives chocolate to Guy
• Guy beats Girl up and takes back money from night before

Now obviously, Hatsukoi Limited would have trouble fitting into this plotline.  For one, there’s not just one male and one female here.  Nonetheless, this episode could have followed the stereotyped scenes in order.  It could have been a chocolate-giving cycle with a bunch of unsolved drama at the end, but it wasn’t.

This entire episode looked something like this:

By the time it got to the vertical asymptote right there, I was sure that a huge piece of failure would emerge… and then comic relief not only helped Misaki become less nervous, but it also helped the scene go from a prospective failure to one of epic win.

The diagram doesn’t do the episode enough justice, though.  More/less chaos doesn’t directly corrolate to more/less win.  Thus:

And continuing on with that comic relief point… the comedy and romance here were in perfect balance.  For an anime with a title like “Hatsukoi Limited,” or “First love limited,” there should definitely be no OMGHOLYSHITDRAMA, and this episode was a great example of how Hatsukoi Limited manages to keep up this light-hearted theme.

Right at the most dramatic part, in a scene where a love triangle + Arihara comes into broad daylight, comic relief (in the form of Ayumi and her mount) strikes to remind us that this ain’t no CLANNAD.  It’s a romantic comedy where the comedy helps tone down the drama that naturally comes with romance, and does so flawlessly.  Another romantic comedy could have either succumbed to dramatic elements or have messed up the scene with bad comedy.

Hatsukoi Limited manages to avoid both of these problems by intertwining comedy and romance throughout each episode.  There is never any dramatic episode with only a bit of comedy on the side, or vice versa.  Sometimes we see a comedic scene followed by a dramatic scene followed by a comedic scene, etc.  We never get too much drama or too much comedy.  For example, this episode switched from a comedic scene of Ayumi and Kei to a dramatic, cliched [almost] chocolate-giving scene of Yuuji (Arihara) and Misaki.

And what’s more, this blend of comedy and drama doesn’t go unjustified.  The very title “Hatsukoi Limited” signifies that the people in the show are naive.  They don’t know much about love, since they all experience their “limited” “first loves” during the series.  Naturally, this translates into Kei’s superficial “judge a book by its cover” attitude towards men, Koyoi’s brother complex, and Ayumi’s never really giving Misao a chance.  In this episode, the same theme is present.  We see Ayumi and Koyoi try their hands at matchmaking, Misaki believing that she needs a reason to love Yuuji Arihara, and Kei and Kusuda’s continuing confused love/hate relationship.

…and another thing on Kei + Kusuda (copypasta from a forum):

…they seem to be the most realistic couple. The other couples are just a bunch of stereotypical anime couples, whereas this one actually incorporates the naturally naive personalities of both sides and the confused position they have on love itself, which is essentially what hatsukoi (“first love”) really is – a confusing experience that can grow with time and learning.

Kei and Kusuda are really, really mismatched.  Kei is a tall goddess, an idol and a role model for her classmates and the rest of the school.  Kusuda is an ugly, perverted guy who has no popularity whatsoever.  Though Kei x Kusuda seems a bit extreme, an interesting point is made: Love happens.

Most themes of romance anime are in the following list:

• Love is the strongest thing in the world
• People do anything in the name of love
• Love hurts
• Love sucks
• blah blah and happily ever after <— overused
• fanservicefanservicefanservicefanservicefanservice
• BAWWWWW
• THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP
• Love makes people faggots (School Days)

I haven’t seen that many romance anime (~30?), but rarely do I see an anime based around a theme like “Love happens.”  We are always shown how love can help people get stronger, get better, come back to life, etc. – the miraculous effects of love.  Instead of following this trend, Hatsukoi Limited goes and focuses on how relationships start, stopping before the first date, that first tissue box scene, etc.  Indeed, this is the “Limited” part of the anime, but in terms of how well this can get and actually becomes, it truly is unlimited.

Poop.  LOLCOMICRELIEF

tl;dr Hatsukoi Limited episode 8 proves and continues the epicness of the anime.

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