Another week, another episode of Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu. I’ll say up front that this episode was better than the last one, though I think it gave me diabetes.
Set-up: Haruka wants to buy a PDS, or “portable dream-station.” This is the unholy union, I must assume, of a PSP and a DS. She wants one bad, but wants to spend a day in Akihabara, so she puts it at the end. Yes, she draws a cute little itinerary, finally winning my heart — I’ve spent too much time laughing at Rukia Kuchiki’s terrible drawings not to love this one.
Set-up: complete. I’ve noticed that a lot of Japanese comedies take as a premise something that can go somewhere really serious, but then ignore that for the laughs, or “the lulz.” I’m basically okay with that. Derrida once claimed (I’m paraphrasing here) that a fluent user of a language can’t use a word in that language without meaning all its meanings. Example: having read Derrida, I refused to ever use the word “impotent” when describing Beowulf in a paper about sword-use in Beowulf. It would have made sense, as in English it can mean “powerless.” It also means, though, well, “impotent,” and I was talking about swords. So I just didn’t use the word.
With the same logic, then, I can claim that the ideas brought up by comedies like this one (and Ouran High Host Club, the first show I noticed this tendency in) are still there, the creators just don’t spend all our time bitching about the problems of the world. I am okay with this.
What I’m getting at is that this episode doesn’t further the cause of integrating otaku into society, or whatever. It’s just funny. What’s interesting, actually, is that the “secret” is functioning as a way to hold Yuuto and Haruka together. Of course, each episode they add more things to that binding. So, basically, it’s a comic romance. Again, this is not a problem. Yuuto is slightly more interesting than the typical wimpy anime dude, and manages to be embarrassed about intimate moments with women without becoming Keitaro Urashima. Fuck that guy, by the way, Negi’s more awesome.
So the show’s not going to be a polemic. The best fiction can’t be polemic, because it gets in the way of the story. But crazy people — like me — can then use the fiction to create points of conversation and debate. Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu, if it turns out to be entertaining, can become the founding block for a lot of discussion about societal marginalization, but I don’t think it’s going to drive the point home all on its own.
Of interest, though, is the flashback — we learn Haruka became an otaku because she was depressed and a stranger gave her an otaku magazine to cheer her up. That’s actually a pretty polemic statement, while still acting as fluffy character development. It intimates, even says, that geeky pastimes cheer people up. It’s left up to us, the viewers, to finish the sentence. “Moe makes people feel good…”
Everyone: so it’s just another thing. Get off our backs.
P.S. We finally learn what sort of fangirl Haruka is. I’m basically okay with her being a moe-tron — both in her interests and, we’re finding, her self. I’m not quite sure how I feel about her total ignorance of slash, though, as she seems fairly well-informed.
Haha I actually laughed a lot during this reading – lots of witty remarks anyway. I probably won’t watch this, although this goes back into “when funny is just funny“. I haven’t read Derrida, I don’t know.
Haha. I was actually thinking of writing something sort-of responding to that post of yours, actually. That, and something Anamanachronism wrote. Not sure if I’ll end up doing it or not, but we’ll see.
I’m glad you were amused, anyway. Enough to comment, even. : )
[...] to Chuchlann’s recent writings on Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu I decided to watch the first three episodes – and what a good [...]