I am not going to go into a summary of all episodes. Other blogs does it better, and I realize that the first episode of the season doesn’t have much elements of the Sunohara-ke arc.

I’ll just try to look into the elements of the arc.

The Characters

Sunohara Youhei

While not the lead of the series, he is the focus of this arc, with his sister. From how I see it, Youhei somehow ran away from the main issue during most of the arc. He distanced himself from his sister, under the “I don’t care” mask. I could relate in some ways to him, I did have this issue with my siblings during my teenager years, and yes, teenagers are dumb. When you are the elder of the family, you have this overwhelming feeling of responsibility over your shoulder while your younger siblings are looking up to you. Some suck it up and will work hard to make their siblings proud. Others, like me, basically dropped it and let them find their own ways (not really the wisest thing to do). What do they do when they fuck it up (like, when Sunohara left the football team), some will try harder or move to try their luck in something new. Finally, some will just drop the ball, and grow apathetic. If you are this big brother or this big sister, you all one day had this overwhelming feeling and fear, “what should I do if I fail and do not live up to my siblings’ expectation?”
How you deal with the problem is a matter of personality, circumstances, education and experiences of life.
In Sunohara’s case, this is how we see in the anime. He was a clown, true, the audience in general liked him for that. However, it comes to a point that the clown doesn’t want to entertain anymore or loses his mojo. We see in this arc a less pleasant side of Sunohara. Sunohara the clown left his place to Sunohara grown apathetic, due to circumstances of the past. In the western european point of view, by fighting back he did something right. In america, this may have ended with school shooting. In the japanese context, he not only paid for himself, but he also paid for the group. Sunohara’s apathy had been shown in its worst light when Tomoya pretended to date Mei. Anyone in his right mind would have gone postal on Tomoya at that point. This scene was truly putting me at unease. If KeyKyoAni wanted me to dislike Tomoya and Sunohara, they did it right.
However, he is not beyond salvation and still have a part of him that want to protect his sister. This is where I have gained a little more respect for the character. It also illustrate one thing, no matter how much you have distanced yourself from you siblings or parents, there are still this little bit of you that worry about them deep inside your guts. It’s in the blood.
In the end of the arc, it seems we are back to square one with Sunohara being victim again of Tomoya’s pranks, however the relationship between the siblings have gotten better. Now, how the events of the arc will affect Sunohara in the long run is still in the air.

Sunohara Mei

Mei’s worries are legitimate. From experience, I know younger siblings DOES worry about you when you lost your way. Now was she doing it right? Not always. Let’s tell it frankly, unlike the previous arcs where sports seemed to solve shit, here it brought in the open one of the roots of Youhei’s problems, something that Mei never knew. What could we have expected from her if her own brother did not have told her about it? Not much, and not things done right. To be fair with Youhei, boys especially the ones in elder position have too much pride and refuse, out of fear to lose sibling respect, to tell their problems; often, they’ll try to hide them under the carpet and put on the “reliable” or “not caring” mask, it will be until the problem can not be managed anymore and where the elder is stuck in a dead end. Mei’s intents are to avoid this thing to happen to her big brother. However, being a children, her options were limited and she was painfully confronted to the cruelty of highschool boys, the ones who bullies.

The others

From a cold point of view, they fullfilled their roles. Pushing the Sibling Arc plot along until its resolution. They provided the situations and the circumstances. Tomoya, at times, was needlessly cruel and petty; then again, he was never a saint, and never had the pretention to be the most noble. However, as he voiced his concerns and ended up in that fight, he have shown that he was, at least, able to care for people. Do remember that not every male in anime have to be flawlessly noble, or idiotically heroic, or arrogant with successful deeds in his sleeve. Sometimes, it is needed to see something less pleasant from them. Otherwise, they’d be cardboard character templates in the vast ocean of cardboard character templates.

I don’t have much to say about the other characters, it is as I said, they brought their brick into building the relationship between the siblings.

The Story

The substance of the story

Mutual trust between siblings brings happiness? To me, it seems to be the point of the arc. By refusing to communicate with his sister, Youhei dug himself into a hole. And only dire circumstances could slap him hard in the face and awaken what we thought he have lost. Of course, given his circumstances and his position as the elder, it was hard for him to break that wall between himself and Mei. It’s hard enough for one man to admit one failure, especially when it is related to his passion (football in Youhei’s case), it is harder to get over it and move, and do it right. It’s the hardest when you have younger brothers and sisters looking at you, and telling them why you screwed up.

How the story unfold

Starting on a comedy note, we were given a full treat of Sunohara comedy. Sanae posing as Youhei’s girlfriend iced the cake. However, in the comedy scale, the true killer was Mei Sunohara’s “oniichan” attack. This is where Yukari Tamura truly delivered. I always thought there were four kinds of loli or imouto in the world of anime, the deadpans (Chiaki Minami), the objects of desire (plenty and too many to name), the tricksters (Mikan) and the ones voiced by Yukari Tamura. She voices little sisters or lolitas like no one else. And one can notice that Mei in episode 3 was given the Lucky*Star sugary moé treatment (not to mention it was directed by one of those involved in L*S).

However, comedy should and is expected to have an equal amount of drama. I was angry at Youhei’s apathy, but can somewhat relate to it and yet know what kind of consequences it could have. I was equally angry at Tomoya, just like I was angry at some friends pulling jokes or pranks at times when they really should not. And if people thought that Kyou beating up Sunohara was fun, the events with the football team brought this feeling of unease and anger. Putting this thing into perspective, when one of your friends does the Gibbs Slap on another of your friends, it may bring smirks and chuckles. But when a stranger does it on the same friend, you may feel upset. Well, that’s how I see it.

Finally the resolution. As I have said, it was when things looked dire that Sunohara broke out of his shell. We can say about time. Things are now alright between the siblings, yet Sunohara can still fall to Tomoya’s pranks. You can be the best buddies of the world, nothing can stop you from going Tom & Jerry over each others. The question is what will Sunohara do when drama will knock on Tomoya’s door; and how much the events of his arc will weight in the future.

The execution

At times, it felt that Kyoto Animation needlessly stretched some events or plot points, like the one where Mei did not know who is Youhei’s girlfriend (mitigated later when she said she pretended to not know); or the bullying by the football team, well done in a way it conjures a feeling of rightful anger from the viewers, but feeling played out more than necessary (then again it is difficult, from a storytelling point of view, to show bullying), to be fair we are supposed to feel smpathy for Mei, not to see that bullies can be human and should be expected to receive equal sympathy.

In term of execution and storytelling, while Kyoto Animation proved they can deliver, it still shows that they are still learning.

Overall

This was a story arc I liked. I could relate to it, as far as the sibling relationship topic is concerned. It was not too long, always a good thing after the criticism regarding the lenghts of Makoto arc (Kanon 2006) and the Fuuko arc (Clannad S1). While I thought that the studio delivered, I can’t help but think there are things that needs to be improved. I can only hope that they continue to improve as more episodes are made.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 1st, 2008 at 1:39 pm and is filed under Anime.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.