In a sense, it was perfectly fine for Hinamatusri to shift the focus away from Hitomi for a while.  It was absolutely healthy in fact, since she’s not even the one in the title and she was frankly dominating the narrative.  And to its credit, the show absolutely succeeded in diversifying – for me it proved beyond any doubt that it could be very successful with Anzu and Hina in front.  But that doesn’t mean I didn’t miss the Hitomi-centric chapters.  And I still consider Hitomi the strongest character in the female cast by a fair margin – she’s one of the best anime characters of the season, in fact.

The thing about Hitomi is…  I mean, she’s fucking hilarious, without a doubt, but she’s also kind of tragic.  And she’s being exploited by Utako in a major way.  In fact, the untrustworthiness and irresponsibility of adults is a major theme of this Hitomi-centric episode – and it doesn’t even feature her homeroom teacher, who sees her at a bar every night and chooses to pretend he doesn’t.  Nitta is the closest thing to a responsible adult in the bunch (apart from Anzu’s sainted step-parents) and that’s a pretty pathetic statement.

That’s what’s funny about Hinamatsuri (and not in the “ha ha” way, though it has tons of that too).  The absurdity is hilarious, but when a show actually does “serious” this well and shows that things have consequences…  Don’t you feel a little guilty for laughing?  Hitomi is a genius girl in a sense – she’s great at everything she tries.  She works incredibly hard, and thinks of others before herself.  But she has a terrible problem saying “no” (as in, she can’t whatsoever) and as a result, she’s miserable.  Utako is particularly awful this week (good riddance from the OP, then), encouraging Hitomi to run away from home after her mother (Sakurai Harumi) confronts her over sneaking out at night and refuses to believe the truth – who can blame her – instead all but accusing her daughter of being a prostitute.

It’s nice that Nitta has enough decency to be offended by all this, and I’m hoping that pointed look at the end of the A-part signifies that he’s going to step up soon and put a stop to it.  But he also enables Utako by finding Hitomi an apartment (luxury at ¥150000/month) and generally playing along.  Poor Hitomi ends up taking on a bunch of jobs (all of which she excels at), getting bullied by older office ladies and in tears over how much she hates her life after even her mother buys in to the fantasy.  It’s funny – but it’s not.  And that, in a nutshell, is why this show is so freaky and so fascinating.

Next up we have an Anzu chapter, with Hitomi (who got some free time, I guess) co-starring.  And this time around the awful adult is Sabu, who encourages Anzu to take the ¥5000 she got as allowance and gamble it on the horses.  There’s some depth to this chapter for sure.  Her parents encourage Anzu to spend it on something fun, but even with Hitomi’s help she can’t find anything she deems worth spending it on when she’s used to making her fun for free.  So she decides to spend it on a gift for her parents (a neck massager) which she’s just short of funds for.  Hitomi (natch) offers to make up the difference and that would have been perfectly fine, but Sabu has to butt in unasked and hash up the whole thing.

This one has a happy ending in the sense that Hitomi encourages Anzu to re-focus on what’s important about giving a gift, which results in her giving one that costs nothing but her step-parents love.  Anzu’s story is easily the more redemptive in Hinamatsuri, which is nice in and of itself.  But as with the whole “consequences” thing, by being willing to show us redemptive stories, Hinamaturi makes it that much harder for us to write off the ones it tells (most of them) which are not.  It’s going to fail miserably because of the huge disconnect between what it looks like and what it actually is, but Hinamatsuri is a series with balls of steel – and it deserves much better than that.