Your Week in Anime (Week 661)

[u/Soupkitten]

This is a general discussion thread for whatever you've been watching this last week (or recently, we really aren't picky) that's not currently airing. For specifically discussing currently airing shows, go to This Week in Anime.

Make sure to talk more about your own thoughts on the show than just describing the plot, and use spoiler tags where appropriate. If you disagree with what someone is saying, make a comment saying why instead of just downvoting.

This is a week-long discussion, so feel free to post or reply any time.

Archive: Prev, Week 116, Our Year in Anime 2013, 2014

[u/VoidEmbracedWitch]

You can't have a triangle without three angles. It's literally in the name. Non-sequitur cold open out of the way, Rumbling Hearts is a show where I can't even mention the premise without it being a spoiler. Though I can say it's the rare romance that does (not) fuck around, heading into full-on melodrama territory. But does it work? Well...

Rumbling Hearts' main source of strive for the cast all traces back to the protagonist's indecisiveness and commitment issues. This isn't to say the spineless creature known as Narumi is at fault for everything, but he is superconductor for others' impulses, never offering up any resistance and never taking responsibility up for what he went along with. He's the sort of guy who can easily be talked into standing up his girlfriend by another girl and even end up buying a ring for her. That's the caliber of never letting his conscience or situational awareness get in the way Narumi rolls with. And at least to me, this passiveness as a conduit for drama makes him frustrating to watch. However, his passiveness isn't that of an average male romance protagonist who chickens out on every advance. Make no mistake, Narumi is passive, but an opportunist. This is undeniably the core of his character. His framing of past events always has him paint himself as someone with no agency. When he made the choice to let himself be strung along by someone who's not his date, it's not "if only I hadn't ignored her", it's "if I had made it on time". Narumi dodges confronting the reality that he is an actor on this stage for love and betrayal. By the end, the largely ignored 4th link of his high school friend group even directly calls him out on his attitude. He isn't unable to do anything about the situations he gets into. He simply chooses not to. The vision is there, but the interrogation of his mindset stops short of being too confrontational and only really kicks up way down the line. Unfortunate that Narumi is an expert at dodging the cognitive dissonance caused by his actions.

Now, why did I start these thoughts the way I did again? Oh, something about triangles. Hearts? Love? Love triangles! I'm an enjoyer of love triangles in the sense that the love is in every angle of it. Rumbling Hearts is obviously not this, but the love interests for Narumi are friends, so there should still be a triangular dynamic even if not every angle is romantic. Except that's not at all how it goes down. Instead it gives way to a much more unconventional setup. Haruka, the girl who crushed on Narumi and asked him out in the first episode, ends up walking the line between subject and object since her condition past the opening act makes her difficult for others to navigate around. She suffers a fate worse than landing in a painfully generic isekai world after being run over by a car: an amnesiac condition that makes her unreceptive to accepting the 3 years she spent in a coma, leaving her in belief she still has a budding romance with Narumi. And Mitsuki, her friend of dubious quality who snatched Narumi away from her when they were supposed to have a date, ends up almost never interacting with her. Instead she's left with her relationship being constantly strained by Narumi's now rekindled, partially guilt-driven attachment to Haruka. The problem with all of this is that it leaves the dynamic between the girls largely to be mediated through Narumi. And to not repeat the entire last paragraph, I have a hard time watching him—not because he's terrible, but because the show isn't doing enough with the fact he is.

So with my gripes about Narumi reiterated thoroughly, the ending raises a question about its circumstances: would it even have been able to go somewhere I like? I doubt it. Regardless of my personal distaste, the show attempts to frame Narumi in a sympathetic light more often than not. Or rather, it's paramount to keep him in a position where romance routes can work out. Without thoroughly uprooting the 2000s eroge target audience expectations, all options have to lead to girls being stuck with him and his whims. At least I can say him and Mitsuki are a match made in hell given the terrible behavior from her side that, unbeknownst to her, lifted the curtain on the second act with Haruka being sent into a coma.

To extend some grace to the show, mirroring it extending way too much to its protagonist, I quite like the character designs here. They adhere to an early digipaint style with flatly colored hair highlights in defined shape that always appeal to me. Additionally, Narumi's gremlin coworker Ayu at his part-time job keeps impressing with bizarre grimace after bizarre grimace that always makes me smile. Her disdain for Narumi matching my own is a nice bonus to her presence too. All in all, I have to say sorry to my Santa-sama since this was not a flavor of romance drama I could get into due to the leading dynamics being aggravating in a way I don't enjoy.

Akane Maniax turned out to be the most fun part of anything Rumbling Hearts related, following a meat for brains guy named cheese Gouda on his quest to live out the love at first sight story with Haruka's objectively better sister Akane. She, being a mostly sane person, doesn't immediately accept his overtures of affection though and absurdity ensues from there. Through both his over the top actions in person and doubly so his imagination running wild for hypotheticals where they end up together, even involving mecha battles later on, the 3 OVA episodes were a blast throughout. Yet underneath what he brings to the table, Rumbling Hearts' usual sensibilities remain present in Akane. The fallout from her sister's accident, losing both a relative and a guy she could treat like an older brother in Narumi continues to deeply affect her. Here we get an outsider glimpse into the struggles the original series cast deals with rather than being trapped in within. And of course she also developed a secret crush on Narumi. What kind of franchise do you think this is? Getting all of this filtered through Gouda's primary perspective makes for a fundamentally different experience from the main series and one I enjoyed.

The last and definitely least bigger part of Rumbling Hearts was Next Season, the alternate route OVA series diverging from the ending where Haruka does not get the payoff of being able to start a career in picture books after closing the chapter of her life with Narumi. Instead it's right back to misery for her. It's a shame when her wrapping things up and moving on was the most optimistic story beat in the original ending. And beyond undermining a thing I liked about the original resolution to kick off a smaller drama vortex, it commits a far worse sin: ruining the aesthetics of the original. Hair highlights now being done via bluntly applied gradients rather than deliberately shaped bright spots comes off as dissonant. It's particularly noticeable with Narumi's hair where the gradient intersects with the still solid, thick shadows, resulting in a garish clash of styles. The compositing overusing white soft lights does not mitigate the friction in its aesthetic. If anything, it just makes the OVA a milk spill anime.