©Nare Nare Project/Nanare Hana Nare Production Committee
After last week’s episode, I was very wary of the direction this show was taking because I wasn’t sure how much I liked the change in perspective and how it suddenly broke away from all Nodoka’s obsession after the first three episodes. Still, I want to stay optimistic because I liked what the first few episodes had to offer and hold off on passing judgment until this new storyline is over. Now that it’s happened, I can safely say that it’s disappointing and makes me very worried about what will happen to the rest of the show.
After learning about Anna’s situation from Nodoka, Kanata and others designed a cheering ceremony to support the record store. This in itself already feels a bit strange. While I understand that these girls want to support their friends, it does feel like they’re overstepping a bit here, considering that this is also very much about the business of people they don’t know. It certainly didn’t help that they ended up doing most of it without Anna knowing, and considering they even ended up signing up for a local festival to do it, it felt like they should have gotten her involved to begin with. Anna found herself angrier about the whole situation because the friends she’d made at the store couldn’t give her much support, so she understandably didn’t react well when the girls came up with a solution. As with the situation on the other side, all it takes is a few words of encouragement from others. Anna decides to go along with their plan, even though she knows it’s unlikely to have much effect.
While all this is unstable, it’s nothing compared to the actual resolution. When the festival arrives and the girls start dancing, Anna’s overseas friends come to support them. While this might be a little too cheesy for my taste, it would be easy to wave if so. What’s even more difficult to resist is that her friends are also popular music artists, and their appearance brings a lot of traffic to YJ’s store. This convenience takes the scene from heartwarming to ridiculous and more or less ruins the entire plot. Regardless of how stupid the idea itself is, it also makes everyone involved look pretty stupid, since a few social media posts from the people promoting the store could have resolved the entire conflict. The only saving grace here is that the girls’ cheering ceremony didn’t magically save the store, but it almost feels like it would have been the more believable choice considering how it turned out.
The real problem is that while YJ is still considering closing the store, he’s keeping it open purely for Anna’s sake. His solution to attracting more customers is… opening a cafe on the first floor, which, you know, isn’t a bad business decision, but also feels like one he should have thought of before things got so dire.
I don’t like to be so picky about plots because I don’t think a story needs to have perfect logic to be effective, but this is such a downright weird resolution that it’s hard not to. It felt too simplistic for what a messy problem the show was trying to tackle, and while I was willing to give it a bit of a thumbs-down when Kanata overcame her Yip disease in the same convenient way, seeing this too simplistic now Solution Already I was worried this might be a feature rather than a bug. Since all of this ends without learning the details of what happened to Anna’s father, I’d like to keep some hope that the show might do more with that later, but even if it does, I don’t believe it will Solve this problem with execution. There’s still plenty of time for this show to turn around, so I’m not ready to write it off just yet. But if this ends up being a sign of things to come, I’m not sure how much I want to continue rooting for this cheerleading show.
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Narenare – Cheers for you! Currently streaming on Crunchyroll.
