Yahari Ore no Seishun Rabukome wa Machigatteiru - 11 & 12

"Thus, The Curtain Rises On Each of Their Stages, As The Festival Reaches a Feverish Pitch" and "And Thus His, Her, and Her Teenage Lives stay Messed Up"

For all of you who were skeptical about the Hachiman=Batman comparison, have no doubt, we have our Dark Knight.

Episode 11

Sometimes, you have to be that guy, the one who has to speak up when no one else will because it's wrong not to. But no one wants to be that guy; thanks to social backlash, the truth isn't always necessarily the best option when it comes to dealing with other people. There are times that to say something will only harm your relationships with others or otherwise make someone already being hurt feel doubly worse. Contrary to popular youth belief, it is not easy for everyone to have friends. There's a sense of delicacy people need to be able to deal with others, but unfortunately that sort of thing doesn't account for all the unpleasantries one may come upon whilst in a social setting. And that's where that guy has to come in to remove the facade of happiness and pleasantries and show the truth no one wants to see. Even so, being that guy is something you do not want to be. Nobody wants to bring the ire upon themselves and looked down on for lacking that very delicacy that has inadvertently caused the problem. No one wants to be friends with people who have no tact.

Unfortunately, there comes a point where, by the horrible hypocrisy of social norm, you have to take one for the team and be that guy. Something must be done to fix the problem, and something must be said. Perhaps because Hachiman has very few friends in the first place, he decides to place himself in the hot seat when no one else will. Honestly, I think that while he could have been less inflammatory about it, Hachiman was right to speak up against Sagami. I would have been pissed off at her by this point myself, and I was the sort of person in school that, like Hachiman and Yukinon, got put in positions of power I didn't want and was given a lot of work to do because no one else did their jobs. If Sagami wanted to be chairman, she shouldn't have decided halfway through she didn't feel like working and pushed all the work on the rest. Even worse, she never helps people like Yukino who end up with loads more work than they bargained for in the first place, and for whom she's actually responsible for overworking (consciously or otherwise). It's as he says, the kanji for people, 人, is not as equal as it looks in type. In reality, those representations of people are not mutually supporting one another; one is leaning against the other while the other does all the work to keep the former up. And in that committee, there are definitely people being leaned on without getting any support back.

So, by pointing out what everyone was trying to ignore, Hachiman has become that guy. He's that guy who looks selfish for complaining about being overworked and that others are getting it easier than he is. He's that guy who makes things unpleasant and more stressful to deal with, so by default, he's now in the wrong. But Hachiman knows all that. He knows what it's like to be that guy and he knows that at least by speaking up, he might make the committee change the way they do things and consequently help people like Yukino who are being overworked to illness. It's the only way he knows how to do things, and in any case, unlike Yukino, who has Yui, Hachiman barely feels like he's losing any friends in the process; he's not dumb enough not to realize that Yui has an interest in him anyway.

Episode 12

Of all the things I expected of this series, I never really thought it would go through without Hachiman fundamentally changing who he is. Though he does have some companionship now, he didn't get those friends by being someone he's not, or by trying to please people he secretly didn't like very much. He didn't become a popular kid, and he didn't fall in love with the perfect person to make him accept himself either. In fact, he says very clearly, "I love who I am"; he didn't need someone to tell him to do so, nor did he have to go through some life changing event to realize it. That's what I like about this series so much; it's not about the romcom elements even though it has plenty of the trappings for those. Even though everyone else wants Hikki to change and conform, he doesn't want to. Hachiman has always been Hachiman, pessimistic to a fault and comfortably himself. Oh, and Batman.

That doesn't mean he gets a happy ending (Batman doesn't get one either, after all); though Yukino finally really manages to make friends with Yui, Hachiman himself is pretty much back where he started, too awkward and pessimistic to really fit in with anyone else, but making that slow progress to at least keep company with Yui, Yukino, the chuunibyou, and the trap. It's not a happy in the sense that he's gotten what he always wanted, but he at least does have that sense of satisfaction in that he did the right thing and helped everyone out. In order to get Sagami back he had to make her feel needed, but he wasn't about to let her get away with exactly what she wanted the whole time either. Sagami had to learn a lesson and realize that what she was doing was wrong, and that throwing a fit to gain attention was selfish of her. Though it sucks for her that she messed up, and though everyone else despises what he did, at least Sagami herself has seen the truth behind what she's been doing, and at the least she's going to take what she learned from her failures and remember what he said to her.

That's all in a good day's work for Hachiman, but you have to admire the risk he took. Loner he may be, but Hachiman has always wanted friends, even if he doesn't agree with the ways of society. It took him a lot to risk those new connections with the popular kids (who were starting to think maybe he wasn't as bad as he seemed), and he lost a lot as a result. But even so, doing the right thing isn't always the easiest thing, and Hachiman did what he could the only way he knew, so is it really so bad that he stuck with his ideals? I for one admire the fact that he didn't have some perfect solution given to him at the end to show him there was a better way out; it's something you don't see everyday, the stark realism of the way things work in youth relationships (and otherwise, really). I suppose in the end the title speaks for itself; Hachiman's Youth Romcom is, and always was, just as he Expected it to be. And even if he's not surrounded by friends singing his praises, that's not such a bad way to go.

N.B.: Thanks to Ivan for helping me with caps for the last few episodes of this! Next post covers the extra story in episode 13.