HANEBADO: WHAT WENT WRONG

When the first episode of Hanebado aired , I very confidently declared it to be a contender for the anime of the season. Now that the show is seven episodes in , I don't think of it to be anything more than average.

Today I will be sharing my views on Hanebado and what in my opinion is the reason the show's quality declined over the span of seven weeks.

Before going into this , I just want to point out that as I have already talked about the series before , I am not going to be giving any brief summary for the story of the anime in this blog. So , if you guys want to be filled in , you can check my previous blog here. 

Now , let's rewind the clock back to the first episode. The reason why I liked that episode so much was because the show presented it's story as to be focussed around Nagisa and also included the mystery of Hanesaki's past. But after the second episode , the show did this weird thing where it pushed Nagisa onto the sidelines and switched the protagonist's role to Hanesaki. Although a bit disappointed by this approach , I was fine by this shift as I was excited to learn about Hanesaki's past and I thought that Nagisa would carry on to get enough screen time in the future episodes as well. But the show disappointed me in both of those regards.

Not only did it completely push Nagisa's character onto the sidelines , it even failed to deliver on a good backstory for Hanesaki. The backstory was so ridiculous that it just came across as plain stupid. There were numerous scenes which were supposed to be emotionally charged but lacked impact as the story behind those scenes was just too farfetched to be believable. This made Hanesaki's character feel even more ridiculous and the character gave the feeling of being edgy just for the sake of it.

Moving on to Hanesaki becoming the protagonist , that was probably the stupidest thing that could have happened. I mean , if Hanesaki was supposed to end up being the main protagonist then why did the first two episodes solely focus on Nagisa. If they would have focussed on Hanesaki right from the first episode , it would have been a lot better as then I would have realised back then that the show is going to turn out to be mediocre. The reason I say this is because the first two episodes were the best two episodes of the anime in my opinion , Nagisa was a far better protagonist , her character felt a lot more real and relatable. Her backstory (as little as we got of it) was actually a lot better. The challenges that she faced in her past although paled in comparison to the ridiculous amount of pain that Hanesaki went through , were a lot more believable. And you have to remember that this is a sports anime , the challenges faced by Nagisa felt to be far more in line with the theme of the show which made her a more likable protagonist.

These annoying choices that the studio made mixed with a poorly executed story structure dropped the quality of the show considerably. To be fair , the show does have its moments here and there , but these moments never add up to become something coherent because of the poorly structured story and average writing. The only good thing about it are the animations , which have been exceptional throughout the seven episodes and that is the only department in which I feel the show did not disappoint me.

 I am hoping that the show is able to atleast end well , but frankly I don't expect that to happen as Hanesaki's ridiculous backstory needs a conclusion and I don't think that the show will be able to provide a satisfying ending to her story. So yeah , Hanebado is something that made a brilliant first impression but at the end turned out to be mediocre. If you have not checked out the series yet , then I would suggest you not to while if you are like me and are keeping up with the series , just hope that it doesn't become even more ridiculous.

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