Comparing Honey and Clover and The Big Bang Theory

I have this ridiculous idea. I may not have been watching anime, but I’ve been catching up on The Big Bang Theory up to the end of its fourth season. There’s a new season, I know, but it’s still currently running and unfinished at the time of this writing. I couldn’t help myself from comparing that serial comedy with Honey and Clover, especially in light of the later seasons. It wasn’t obvious during the earlier seasons, as there was only Penny, but it showed its similarity to H&C when Bernadette, Amy, and Priya appeared. I said similarity because there is no actual competition among the characters in both series. They know who they love, and they love as best as they could, but don’t actively compete with their friends for the hearts of the people they’re interested in. Just as Penny spites Priya, she bears down on her emotions and respectfully gives Leonard and Priya their space after Leonard and her talked about it, Yamada whines about Rika but doesn’t actively go against her because she also recognizes the capabilities of Rika.

People have complained about the tone of TBBT to have become more serious, but I actually praise it. Instead of mere scientific laughfests from caricatures the viewer is increasingly made to appreciate the humanity of the characters that make up the show. While the comedy remains the focus, the emotions that underlie and that seethe beneath the terse sentences and the unsaid expressions make the show more colorful for me. It’s actually the jarring transitions that make me more endeared to series like this and H&C. Though it’s stomach-crampingly funny at one point, it immediately becomes a trigger for tears when beneath the laughs lie the emotions that the characters feel.

A great way to illustrate this is the awkward presence of Penny at the time when Leonard, Priya, and the rest of their friends were having dinner at Leonard’s apartment. There was witty banter throughout the occasion, but it was enlightening to see how Penny reacted to the aptness of the relationship between Leonard and Priya: both of them were highly intelligent and capable of holding a conversation. They were even able to recall a humorous scene in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew.  The aftermath, of course, is that Penny broke down into tears after Leonard and Priya were gone.  (season 4, episode 16)

It is this surprising and jarring transition that makes the comedy all the more funny and the sadness all the more grave, because it is unexpected and yet apropos for the occasion. I think I’ll get back to this later on: my point is that it is the background of comedy that illuminates and gives gravitas to the serious occurrences in the show, especially because the seriousness is unexpected. The seriousness jumps out at the viewer, and erodes the foundation of emotional stability because it precisely is jarring. Compared to series which are consistently sad, or just really fun-fests the series that are bittersweet are for me the ones that are more memorable because of this surprise element. The tears are jerked out of you.

 

Anime is just better than television. Period.

I am an honest guy for the most part. Yes, I do lie once in a while, although I can argue that I don’t lie as voraciously or as desperately as Satou from NHK. As I said in the previous post, I’d rather be honest with myself and admit that I’m an otaku, or whatever people like to call me, than dwell in a shell of lies and cowardice. Some people write me off as somebody helpless; they write me off as nothing more than an idiot. Some people, however, care to know more on why I like anime as a medium and why I love it more than most things (family excepted).

 

An Extensive Discussion on Honey and Clover II – 04

I’ve read a lot of the pertinent posts at AnimeSuki, and those made me realize that my ‘quasi-summary’ wasn’t even half as insightful as their posts. To make up for this, here’s an intensive disquisition of what ep4 of Honey and Clover II really was. I think it’s going to be somewhat long, so please bear with me.

 

Hot Anime Fangirls, Honey and Clover II – 04, Writing in English, Pugna, and Kurara Chibana

So many good things happened today for me. The most important good thing, however (make it excellent), was that I was able to download Honey and Clover II – 04 after a long wait. First of all, I’ve learned how to play Pugna (the Oblivion in DotA) more or less masterfully, and he’s arguably among the more difficult heroes to control. I was contented with myself back then.

 

Hikaru no Go vs. Akagi

Whereas in tj han’s blog the Bible is Last Exile, in my blog, the Qur’an is Honey and Clover. If you don’t like it I’m going to declare jihad on you, and I’m much more austere than tj han is (in case you didn’t get it, this was a joke). As you may have noticed, I’m probably going to wax lyrical about H&C for most of the time, but that’s not why I mentioned it in this post. I’ve mentioned why I like H&C in my other posts, but to stress a point, the biggest reasons as to why I really love it is because of its grit and humanistic realism. Stressed also in my other posts (H&C was spattered around in a commentary supposedly about [insert anime here]) is the fact that unrequited love exists in this series. How many romance series have you watched where the main leads don’t end up happily? There’s only quite a few of them. How about a romance series where you know someone’s going to end up alone? To date, only Honey and Clover is the only anime where you know that someone will be alone by the end of the series because there are more girls than guys, and despite the fact that they all are close friends, they also are the same competitors for the love of a guy or a girl inside that circle.

 

There goes another one of Bleach’s chances.

I talked to somebody who loved Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuuutsu so much that he hasn’t watched anything else after watching ShnY. He said that everything else just loses its luster when compared to an anime like that. Of course, being your resident Haruhi Suzumiya devil’s advocate, I disagree with him. I do, however, know of the feeling and totally understand it. And of course, you know of the anime I’m talking about: Honey and Clover.

 

Is music in anime only a little thing?

Compared to the animation and the plot, the music seems to be inconsequential in watching an anime. I realized, however, how big a ‘little thing’ music is when I viewed the final scene of the final episode of the first season of Honey and Clover with the subtle playing of Waltz compared with the exact same scene but without the music in the first episode of the second season. I was moved to tears for most of the time whenever I heard the love ballad of Waltz playing as Takemoto finally discovered himself and what he was looking for. Somehow, without that love ballad, it simply became just another scene. That’s what I noticed with most good shows. They have great music. Honey and Clover isn’t excellent simply because it has an excellent plot and good animation – it also has very wonderful music. The combination of music from Suga Shikao, Suneo Hair and SPITZ often works for the enhancement of a scene, or a cascade of scenes. How Mayama forcefully and desperately took Rika to a cup of coffee in the rain just to show how much he loves her was certainly made better with the fast pace of Yoru wo Kakeru. (It was very fitting, too – the lyrics were a perfect fit with the scene.) To add another, more recent scene, take for example the call scene between Nomiya and Yamada near the midpoint of the third episode of H&C’s second season. Without the melancholic yet positive tone of Suga Shikao‘s Koko no Iru Koto, I doubt it would have pulled that scene off. The music that plaintively plays in the background simply reflects the sheer loneliness of two characters reaching for unrequited loves. Even now, thinking about it, it was (and still is) extremely jarring.

 

Castrated. Immolated. Emasculated. More Mature.

This is an cocktail of Honey and Clover II – 03 and my life.

 

Honey & Clover II – 02

If I can describe what genius is in only three words, I would say ‘Honey and Clover.’ It’s a very good thing I held myself from watching the raws, because watching it with subs was nothing short of extremely fulfilling. My eyes are teary, yet I am smiling. I’d probably never see stuff like this with live-action melodramas; neither will I probably see the bittersweet beauty of unrequited love. This reads like Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, only with even less queerness and melodrama and with more substance. I could not help but applaud the whole episode – again, suffering and pain is juxtaposed with joy, contentment, and willingness to move on. I still have post-viewing goosebumps.

Hiccups are seemingly trite and banal things that disrupt the normalcy of quotidian living, but they’re given a dimension here – in fact, this is where the story of the characters revolve around in this episode and this is also where character development can be seen and grasped: because of the hiccups we discover more about the characters in the show. I bow down to you, Umino Chika.

I’d only be reiterating what other blogs like Memento and Random Curiosity have summarized, so I’ll refrain from doing a summary. However, I’d like to say that I’m very happy that Rika has finally gotten over Harada, no matter how much she tries to deny it or keep it to herself. Shuuji has already captured what she’s feeling toward Mayama – the love that she dedicates when she really likes a person, although she’s still extremely cautious. I loved how she thought that well of Mayama while blushing as she thought of his similarities with Harada. (I know that she loves the guy; you’ll probably see that later.) I was, again, (as usual with Honey and Clover episodes) clapping my hands like some five-year old kid on sugar high.

On the other side of the story, I simply felt Ayu’s pain. After four years (extremely realistic) she still can’t get over Mayama, after all. I didn’t think it was kind of her not to speak of how Rika thinks about Mayama from Shuuji’s observations, but that’s really what you feel when you’re totally in love, and the one you love can’t love back. What’s better, however, was Morita. He again shows his wonderful dualistic side – though seemingly carefree and only fatuous, what he said to Ayu was a sage’s advice. I think Morita has the most dynamic characterization in this story, and I think he’s the one character that’s the most colorful.

Takemoto has indeed changed for the better. Clotheslining Morita because he teased Hagu (he couldn’t do this before, but now he has the balls), never regretting the past (that’s my boy!), and looking forward to the future as well as trying to be a friend to Hagu – I truly wish I had a friend like him. It would simply make life just a LOT more beautiful to live and look at. 🙂

Hagu’s pain was too believable. We have a bird’s eye view of humanity through the lives of six friends involved with art – and this is what makes Honey and Clover so beautiful: we see good characters full of human foibles and weaknesses, all struggling to live life as they also struggle with their relationships within the group. They’re not perfect, they’re not perennially good, but they’re totally human. And that, my friends, is what makes H&C II a true gem to look at.

(Oh, and I was listening to Waltz as I was typing this.)

 

 

Metonymy in Honey and Clover

Other than feeling a surge of emotion while watching Honey and Clover, I also appreciate its smartness. The example I’m going to expound on in the following sentences may not be the most recent, but it certainly proves (to me, at least) that Honey and Clover‘s simplistic use of imagery is among the most profound among the anime I’ve seen. It may not be the most complex or mind-boggling, but it is thought-provoking once you do delve deeper into it.

Remember the OP animation from ep13 to ep24 of Honey and Clover? That was among the few examples I’ve seen of subtle metonymy in an anime.

Quoting Wikipedia,

In rhetoric and cognitive linguistics, metonymy (in Greek μετά (meta) = after/later and όνομα (onoma) = name) (pronounced /mɛ.’tɒ.nə.mi/) is the use of a single characteristic to identify a more complex entity. It is also known as denominatio or pars pro toto (part for the whole). […] when A is used to refer to B, […] a metonym if A is commonly associated with B but not a part of it.

I didn’t realize the genius in that animation the first time I saw it. However, as the series progressed, you could see the insight the anime has: the pictures symbolize the memories of the six friends as a whole: it seems disparate, fleeting (flying); nevertheless, they never move far apart one another and converge more than once. The scooter is a metonym of Mayama; the pot is for Yamada; the poodle is for Hagu; the giraffe is for Hagu and Morita’s relationship – incidentally, Hagu and Morita are close by, which lets us return to our Wikipedia article.

[…] Advertising frequently uses this kind of metonymy, putting a product in close proximity to something desirable in order to make an indirect association that would seem crass if made with a direct comparison.

It’s not a joke: Honey and Clover is among the first anime I’ve seen that uses cognitive and rhetorical linguistics. (Heavy words, aren’t they? They all suggest higher forms of language use. Metonymy is a figure of speech that I transmuted to aptly describe what the anime used in its 2nd OP, anyway.) It may seem all that simple to you, but simply to produce an OP animation that subtly links all the characters involved in the series is nothing short of amazing. The bike symbolizes Takemoto, as we all saw later on, as well as the paper plane. The shooting star symbolizes all their wishes, but it’s more of a metaphor. The umbrella symbolizes Rika: this is the image that etches itself on Yamada’s mind as she saw Mayama fetching Rika, and this is what once bound Rika and Mayama together, because the umbrella itself is a metonym for rain. The ferris wheel is terminally in both the 2nd OP and the 1st ED, because it is a metaphor for the full circle of life; however, it also is a metonym of the main characters of Honey and Clover: something always happens near a Ferris wheel, from the revelation of the relationship between Shuu, Rika, and Harada by Shuu to Mayama to Nomiya and Yamada talking together with Yamada heartbroken and Nomiya on her side, taking care of her. All of that, my friends, is only in the span of a minute and thirty seconds.

And people still wonder why I think of Honey and Clover as a great show.