Kono Oto Tomare Review Episodes 11 + 12

The Contrived Drama Continues

Kono Oto Tomare! Episode 11

There’s not a huge amount going on here. We get the end of the training camp which is satisfyingly sweet and then we head off to the tournament they’ve been preparing for. In amongst this we get some small character moments and they are trying super hard to humanise the teacher and make us not hate him after the fact but too little too late on that note.

Hozuki continues to grow as a person and a member of an ensemble asking for help when needed and searching for what she can do to help others. It is a lovely demonstration of her character journey and when the anime focuses on moments like these it is adorable.

The tournament beginning is less so. The guy we met at the joint school practice is there and his school is first in the tournament. Admittedly, their song is really good but the whole thing is interspersed with his tragic childhood and to be honest I just couldn’t invest in it because I just didn’t care about his character. As a rival school he works well enough but as someone I am supposed to sympathise with or connect with he’s had far too little showing in the anime for that connection to exist.

Anyway, the episode ends with them all freaked out over how good the first performance was and they aren’t on until the twenties so plenty of time for them to either rally together or melt down but I guess we’ll find out next episode which path they choose.

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Kono Oto Tomare! Episode 12

And the contrived external drama is going to plague this anime right until the end. Let’s introduce a high schooler who looks younger and has a hot temper for an altercation that has no value early in the episode. Then we can all be like wow and impressed that he can play really fast. I’d much rather just focus on the characters we know and how they feel about this public performance and their first competition as a club.

However, clearly we aren’t going to get that because at the end we contrive yet more drama where they injure Chika’s hand because the nerves of the situation clearly aren’t enough of an emotional situation.

It just hurts the overall enjoyment of the anime as they layer on these unnecessary trappings that detract from what works well in the story.

Also the angst back story for yet another character was totally unnecessary. Maybe if we had more than one episode left I could see the point in all these additions but there’s no way to deal with all of this before the end and it all just is working against what makes the show interesting. Kono Oto Tomare remains a mixed bag right until the end and we’ve got one more episode before we wrap it all up.