Anime Pilgrimage RTT

Hanbun no Tsuki ga Noboru Sora – episode 2

March 5, 2006 on 7:08 pm | In HanTsuki | Comments Off

“The inheritance of Tada’s collection”

Stupid and dangerous; that’s the turn the events in HanTsuki take after Rika’s doctor is introduced.

After exerting himself at Mount Fortress, Yuuichi is given the damage: he will have to stay in hospital for another year. One of his friends comes to visit and to inspect the pornography collection that Yuuichi inherited from one of his fellow patients; Rika walks in on them reading “Moeloli” magazine and appears to take it fine. It is not until she starts attacking Yuuichi and locking him on the roof that he realises that she has a problem.
Yuuichi then meets Doctor Natsume, who amuses himself by deepening the rift between the two. As Yuuichi realises something about Rika, he gets angrier at her and all hope is lost.

I should not be surprised by a girl having a totally irrational response to a minor indiscretion on the part of a boy – this is, after all, anime, and irrationality is the course of the millennium in certain genres. The hospital setting of HanTsuki makes such trite behaviour even more frustrating: it’s simply irresponsible to forever throw books at people, or trip them up, if they’re convalescing with hepatitis or whatever illness it is that they have.
This goes double if you’re a nurse who knocks her patients to the ground and kicks them in the back. Forgive me for saying so, but that’s not on.

This Natsume character is nothing short of a manipulative bastard who acts in a thoroughly unprofessional manner; you do not toy with the lives of your patients. I thought that Akiko was pushing a bit of a line in trying to get Yuuichi and Rika to talk to each other, but Natsume is definitely wrong for setting both Rika and Yuuichi up for falls.
Yuuichi’s jealousy of Natsume made some sense, at least, but I found the whole initial premise of Rika’s anger too ridiculous to really justify any of the drama in this episode.

Can going up into the mountains really exacerbate a condition so much that it lengthens a hospital stay by a year? I am rapidly losing faith in this program and, if I did not have it all available, might have given it up by this point. The direction is disappointingly interesting in its use of split screen, muted pallates and unspoken dialogue; on this episode it truly was wasted.

How can a show set up a sweet premise and then make all of its characters idiots come the second episode? HanTsuki is a good example of this bizarre phenomenon. I’ll give it more time to redeem itself; if it doesn’t, I’ll cry.