Hyouka 7-8
So I picked up Hyouka again after dropping it awhile ago. I know that this part of the series isn't the strongest, but I just don't see myself ever really enjoying this show.
First off, I didn't find it boring or slow-paced. And neither of these things would be strikes against it for me. I consider myself a connoisseur of all things boring and slow-paced. In both these episodes, in fact, I found both these episodes too fast-paced, with too many cuts. They were telling low-stake, everyday-life stories at the pace of a serious drama, as if the actions shown were supposed to have the impact of a serious drama. This out of whack relationship between form and subject matter is really my main complaint against the show. The mysteries were another part where the tone taken just seemed off to me. I didn't mind that the mysteries chosen were banal. I can see how this is a show about those banal moments. But when you treat them like matters of great importance, and expect the audience to feel likewise, your efforts are bound to fail. Case in point: the student film. The seriousness with which the student looking for help and the other club members treated a problem that really didn't matter at all (the film being unfinished) was ridiculous (on a tangent: they had to jerry-rig the fuck out of that storyline to make it into a mystery. Why couldn't they ask the sick student? Why couldn't they just make up their own ending? It's a freaking student made film. From my experience as a student, no one would give a damn if the film ended up not making perfect sense).
Hyouka has all these moments that just rub me the wrong way. Take the student film. Obviously they were trying to emulate the look of an amateur production. But at no point while watching it did I ever feel that I was actually watching a bad student film. It was more like somebody's fever dream of a bad student film, some horrible combination of cg and traditional animation told from the perspective of a video game. Then there's the characters. Just the way they speak bugs me. It's like they're mimicking the speech patterns, the behaviors of real life, but doing it inside an anime world. And dear god, the database kid. Oh how I hate him (I also hate perpetually-pouting girl, but she doesn't really play as big a role as database). His mannerisms are just so affected. He has the uncanny-valley version of a personality, half anime-quirk, half real human. Even the prettiness of the background art itself bugged me. It presents an everyday world robbed of any grit, any ugliness, any banality.
TLDR version: Hyouka is too much typical anime, not boring enough. It's yet another story about a manic pixie dream girl bringing excitement to a boy looking only to lead an everyday life.
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