Notes of Golden Time Episode 12 + Mid-series Review

By that, I mean I want to stare at your breasts

• Last week, Banri looked for a job without Kouko’s knowledge, and found one as a waiter for a very festive party.

• Summary of Golden Time Episode 12: Picking up at the party, Banri, Linda, and Yanagisawa are all fitting into their new jobs quite well. Yanagisawa is even pulled on stage to perform in his skimpy outfit by flexing his muscles. While this is going on, Kouko is desperately trying to get in touch with Banri, and even goes looking for him in the early hours of the morning. When she finds him at the party, she sees him and Linda extremely close to eachother and posing in a very provocative way. She then throws a drink in Banri’s face, then slaps him. Banri then tells her to meet him at his apartment. After his shift is over, Banri hurries to his apartment while looking at his phone, and is shocked to discover that Kouko sent him over 60 messages all asking where he is or is he’s alright. When Banri finally gets home, he and Kouko have a talk about why their relationship isn’t working, how Banri knew Linda before he got amnesia, and about how they can both work to make their relationship better. The next day, Banri and Linda are talking about the past, when Banri suggests that Linda forget she ever knew him. He states that he wants them to start over, which makes Linda visibly upset, but she agrees. She then proceeds to tear up the picture of Banri and Linda that Banri held so dear.

Lady, you’re making a big mistake. He’ll just cry on your floor all night

• My Take: What’s going on here? I like this episode a whole lot. Ugh. That’s going to make what I’m going to say at the end of this much, much harder.

• The party scenes were great. I love to see these characters out of their elements for once. It’s great to see Yanagisawa finally having a bit of a character, and to see him break the barriers of his own embarrassment and start contributing to the fun of the party. He even starts looking at Linda in a new way… but who couldn’t!? So many shots in this episode were just there to show how well-endowed she is!

Caught!

• I feel very conflicted about Kouko in this episode, specifically pertaining to the part where Banri sees how many messages she sent him. On the one hand, I think we’ll all agree that sending that many messages in one night is completely overbearing. On the other hand, I can understand why she sent them when we see the content of them. She was obviously worried about Banri! If I got a text from my significant other, then found out that they weren’t where they said they would be (knowing that they had a serious injury beforehand), I would start to get worried as well. So her intrusive nature finally seems completely justified for once, and this might be the first time in this entire series where I look at her and think that she did the right thing, or reacted the right way.

• Kouko’s breakdown was, for the first time, understandable, and I did start to feel bad for her. She acknowledged her problems. She acknowledged how overbearing she is and how she gets all vindictive over nothing. She acknowledges how she always crosses the line between what’s okay and what’s not okay, and how she hates herself for it. She looks at herself in this episode, and lets it all out. Finally, a bit of power from this character.

• But I still don’t like Banri. His response to everything is to apologize. Kouko gets worried about Banri, then overreacts. And he apologizes. Instead of talking about Kouko’s very obvious problems with her, he just says, “Yeah, it’s all my fault. You’re perfect and I’m the one who has wronged you”. I’m just done with this guy. He’s so spineless. He’s not fun to watch. He drives every scene he’s in into the ground.

• Linda wants Banri. Linda has always wanted Banri! She’s a filthy liar! Okay, we all knew that she liked Banri at some point in time (despite her efforts to deceive everyone and say she never liked him), but it becomes obvious here. That’s one of the reasons I actually like her character. I honestly think even she isn’t sure of her feelings, despite subconsciously she loves Banri. That’s just what I think, but it seemed pretty obvious to me.

I wonder how long that will work. Five… maybe six minutes?

• I’m going to be serious with you guys for a minute: After much thought, I have decided to drop Golden Time here at the midway point so that I can focus on blogging about other shows in the winter season. It wasn’t easy to come to this decision because I always like to finish a show that I am watching, for better or for worse. However, I feel that the upcoming season has a lot to offer, and I don’t wish to continue watching a show that I have lost a significant amount of faith in. So thank you for sticking by me for the duration of this show, and I’m truly sorry that I will not be continuing my blogging of Golden Time. Having said that,  this episode was a pretty interesting one for me to exit on, that’s for sure!

Mid-series Review

College is awesome. Well, I take that back; college can be awesome. But if your name is Tada Banri, college can be a confusing mixture of relationship troubles and an attempt to discover who you really are. Set in a private law school in Tokyo, Golden Time is essentially a romantic drama about the life of newly admitted freshman Tada Banri and how he copes with having no memories of his past while still trying to meet new people and fit in. Golden Time is a show that, despite its early promising signals, turned out to become a real difficult one to get myself motivated to watch, much less write about. That’s not to say that this show doesn’t have its moments. But at this point in the show, any initial hope that I had for it has completely gone away.

The plot of the show seems simple enough to keep any fan of drama and romance happy for its 24 episode run, but when put into practice, it becomes a tiring experience after the first couple of episodes. That’s mainly because each episode either has nothing happening in it or has too much going on. It can either be dreadfully boring or it can bombard you with information and images at an alarming pace. Any and all speculation that can be had about what will happen to these characters comes to fruition in the first couple of episodes, basically destroying the overall payoff. Simply put; if these characters have no buildup to the events we’re all speculating to happen to them, then why should we care when these events finally do happen to them?

I’ll always stand by my comments I made early on in this show where I defend the plot-point of Banri having amnesia. Sure, it’s cliché, but this is a setting where it can be used well. However, that plot-point becomes sorely overused and constantly shoved in the viewer’s face to the extent where it becomes obnoxious. It’s as if the people behind this show didn’t know if they wanted to make a relationship drama or a mystery where Banri tries to discover who he was. So what we got was a combination of both, and neither of them are executed properly.

That’s mainly due to the overall weakness of our cast of players, specifically Banri. Most, if not all, of the problems that fall upon this man throughout the show happen because he just refuses to face his problems and discuss them. Instead, he decides to have emotional outbursts at every corner in what appeared to be an attempt to make everyone around him feel so bad and make them believe that they themselves were the ones who wronged Banri. After this happens many, many times, it started to annoy me to no end! I don’t want to watch a show, much less a drama, where the main character can’t work out his problems like and adult. Banri just can’t carry a scene on his own because he’s always inclined to make everything either awkward or melodramatic. And that becomes old real fast.

However, the one beacon of hope in this show was the supporting cast. This includes Yanagisawa, Nana, Chinami, 2D, and Linda. All five of these characters were more interesting than the two that were thrust in our faces during this show. For instance; Yanagisawa’s relationship with Chinami! We know that she shot him down early on, but since that point, we rarely see them together, despite the fact that they actually talked about the rejection a bit and became friends! Linda is a nice psychological study, as well. Her motivations in her actions towards Banri are never really known to be driven by romantic intent or plain guilt. Nana is just a neat character who doesn’t get enough screentime (but, anyone could just watch the show she’s based off of for more about her, so I won’t complain about it anymore), and 2D had a lot of great laughs. Why didn’t the series highlight these characters more than it did?

Golden Time is just a drama through the eyes of a starry-eyed adolescent whose view on relationships is so twisted that they believe that Banri and Kouko pass for a normal, sweet couple that will make you swoon at every line. I have to say, this show came from the same person who gave us Toradora? Even though I wasn’t a big fan of that series, it at least had more dignity and intrigue than Golden Time. I know that it’s unfair to compare two different works by the same author, but there’s a certain standard I was expecting, and Golden Time just didn’t live up to that.

I’ve been told that the light novel series is superior to the anime in terms of storytelling, so I might just have to read those. I honestly didn’t hate the show, but I didn’t like it either. It falls somewhere in the middle for me. I can appreciate the plot and the setting, but I can’t tolerate the bland characters and the immense amount of filler that came along with Golden Time, at least as it stands at the half-way point.