The Failed Attempt At Tension
Episode 6
Kono Oto Tomare has a problem. It isn’t that school club anime are a dime a dozen or that we’ve heard very little music considering it is a music based club. I mean, both of those things could be a problem for some viewers but they are mostly fine.
No. The greater problem this series has is it insists on trying to insert a villain as an antagonist for the club to overcome rather than just focusing on the basic drama that could come from a group of people coming together and working to achieve a goal. Even then, having an antagonist in this type of story is doable, but the writers here clearly have no idea how to write a villain and the end result is, to put it mildly, awful.
For all the touching moments this episode brings where we see the members of the club coming together or interacting, there’s at least one moment where we have a character on screen who exists just to be painful. There’s a beautiful emotional moment in the episode where the granny running the Koto repair shop gives Chika the Koto his grandfather made for him and it is a spectacular emotional point and great for a mid-season episode, and yet it is utterly squandered because of everything else this episode is doing.
If you’ve read my previous reviews you already know my thoughts on the Vice-Principal who wants to shut down the club. In fairness, the resolution here where the club thanked their adversary rather than being bitter about the ordeal was actually relatively well handled, even if that doesn’t off-set how irritating and artificial that drama was in the first place. However, episode 6 gives us two new characters each equally awful in how they are presented.
Keep in mind, I’m not annoyed that they are antagonists. Or just awful people. Characters that are awful people can be quite fun. But a character who exists only to stir a plot and seems to have no drive or reason for it other than the most superficial is not a fun character.
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So when both the club advisor and new member show up simply to create ‘drama’ in this episode it mostly just hurts. The club advisor being another fine example of teachers who are just god-awful at their job and I’m wondering just why we are getting so many of these this season in anime. This guy and the teacher from Hitoribocchi should get together and both leave the profession.
The new club member is slightly more interesting in that she seems to be trying to kill her own boredom by messing with people, but if that’s all there is to her she’s going to end up being pretty flat and if they are just setting up another healing/redemption story I think we could safely say this anime doesn’t need another one of those and could we just get on with the story already.
Basically this episode is a turning point and not necessarily for the better. Unless Kono Oto Tomare manages to handles some of its cast a little better I’m pretty sure my overall enjoyment of this series is about to do a steep decline.
Thank-you for reading 100 Word Anime.
Join the discussion in the comments.
Karandi James
- Kono Oto Tomare! Series Review
- Kono Oto Tomare! Episodes 1 + 2
- Kono Oto Tomare! Episodes 3 + 4
- Kono Oto Tomare! Episode 5
- Kono Oto Tomare! Episode 6
- Kono Oto Tomare! Episode 7
- Kono Oto Tomare! Episode 8
- Kono Oto Tomare! Episode 9
- Kono Oto Tomare! Episode 10
- Kono Oto Tomare! Episodes 11 + 12
- Kono Oto Tomare! Episode 13
- Images from: Kono Oto Tomare! Dir. M Ryouma. Platinum Vision. 2019.
Yah. Just as I was afraid of, the series hasn’t been able to sustain it’s early peak.
I watched the first episodes and it just didn’t grab me. All the reasons you mentioned.