Anime Pilgrimage RTT

Honey & Clover II – episode 7

August 15, 2006 on 10:26 pm | In Honey and Clover | 6 Comments

“Forward, in the direction of the light”

This episode was cruel. The last shot actually made me sick, and I’m having a hard time sitting at my computer right now hoping that my interpretation is wrong. The fact that the ending had nothing to do with the rest of the episode yet overshadows the story so completely essentially negates the 20 minutes that came before it.

Hopefully I’m just being over dramatic. Either way, I can’t properly focus on this episode’s contents.

Titanic Spoilers

Kaoru recalls the situation that led to the downfall of the Morita Technological Research Institute: betrayal at the hands of Uncle Negishi, Morita Tsukasa’s best friend and Kaoru’s spiritual twin.

It’s easy to see straight up the parallels between Tsukasa and Negishi and Morita and Kaoru, and that Negishi is like a second father to Kaoru. It’s not that Tsukasa doesn’t love Kaoru, but that it’s so much easier for him to demonstrate that love towards the son that is so much more like himself.

There are fundamental differences in the situation, of course: I don’t think that Kaoru would ever betray Morita in order to test him, an act that I thought was completely unacceptable (you can’t take everything away from the man who has it all just to see if he’s still the same or if his spirit is crushed*), but one may argue that having Morita pursue the dream of rebuilding the Morita Technological Research Institute in favour of doing whatever else he may have liked to do (to the point of missing graduation for all of those years) is comparable.
I think that Kaoru’s ambition is noble, though. One can see the desperation from whence Negishi’s actions sprung, but that sort of testing is plain wrong. It takes away a great deal of the sympathy that he would have otherwise garnered from having a mother with some form of alzheimers or senility, never having married, and from having a terminal illness.

You get a strong feeling for the character of Tsukasa, but we are still not given any real answers as to his fate: young Kaoru and Morita seemed to be alone in the city, but why? There’s no indication that he died or that he went underground. We’re also uncertain as to whether their mother, Ricchan, died or if she was simply not present in these episodes (Negishi’s memories indicating that Ricchan and Tsukasa got about with the [then] present forms of their children, which indicates that she either died recently or she’s still around).

At any rate, the episode gets the differences between the brothers across well and illustrates the problems that a child can feel if they believe that they were not the favoured one in a family. The fatalism and the “all or nothing” nature of these characters’ existences is sad but understandable.

This creates a perfectly serviceable episode, which is fine, but the final shot throws it all out:

What does that mean, exactly? It was one of those few moments in all of my anime and movie watching careers where my body froze over, and the first time where I can remember a plot development making me physically ill. The first idea that I took was a suicide attempt from Hagu-chan, but the glass is too fragmented to suggest that she’s cut herself. I don’t know what to think of it, which means that this is incredibly skilled and incredibly bastardlike production.

I hate you, Kuroda Yosuke. Give me back my Hagu!

*Dang: The Book of Job.