Sekai-ichi Hatsukoi 10-12:
Yeah, so. Pictures, thousand words, etc.
1) Even the shoujo isn't immune to the anthology format. But, what better way to keep a relationship fresh than to have another relationship (a love triangle no less) to distract people?
2) Abandoned puppies/kittens are Japanese Spanish-fly. Apparently there are thousands of abandoned animals living in boxes in Japan just waiting for some boy to rescue them and for some girl/guy to notice them doing so.
3) I know expecting a BL show to somehow represent the Japanese LGBT community is fairly unreasonable, but it's not like I was expecting the Japanese version of Queer as Folk either. So, instead, we have characters who are essentially male "heroines" being seduced by cooler, older men with some lip service being paid to being gay ("I don't like boys... that was an accident back in high school!") before the lip-mashing begins. I can certainly see the appeal, but these characters are gay in the same way that Koruko from Railgun is a lesbian. Also, the pseudo-out/pseudo-closeted dichotomy would be interesting if it weren't so shallow. It really is a have your cake and eat it too situation, unless guys falling over each other and playing tongue hockey is a perfectly normal occurrence in Japan.
Hanasaku Iroha 13:
So, the bad taste of Tokyo is gone and the show is back to the same old beats. Oh, and in an effort to be as subtle as possible, they had the voice actresses play their mothers in the flashback. This was exactly how I saw this arc playing out, even if I expected it to be the finale of the series rather than the half-way point. Of course, this means the vastly inferior KoHana arc will end as expected as well, short of some last minute Fractale-like twist.
