We’re at the point with Kono Yo no Hate de Koi o Utau Shoujo YU-NO where it’s making good progress on half the job.  The premise is very interesting, and it definitely has me intrigued.  But the execution is still indifferent enough that I’m not invested in any of the specific events or characters yet.  YU-NO is still an idea – not an uninteresting one, but not yet a fully-fledged story for me.  But we’re in this for two cours and VN adaptations can tend to have this issue – even the good ones – so I’m not close to giving up yet.

There was a point during the first half of this week’s episode where I almost felt myself buying in.  I think it peaked with the three-way conversation in Arima-sensei’s study between Takuya, Mio and Masakatsu, but the B-part got kind of silly and very formulaic and whatever momentum was there was kind of frittered away.  I rather liked the way Takuya went about researching the idea of the Parallel World Constitutive Theorem – it was very logical and systematic, giving us a bit of insight into how his mind works.  I also liked the flashback to the conversation between Takuya and his father, which showed the dynamic between them – there was definitely an edge there, but clearly their relationship was complicated.

The whole “400 Year Cycle” theory was interesting too.  I’ve heard bits and pieces of this in various real-world settings, but never spliced together in exactly this way.  I especially noted Takuya’s assertion that the theory – which held that major changes in Japan on a 400 year cycle were instigated by outsiders – got him kicked out of his academic society and denounced by the right.  That sounds about spot-on actually – Japanese nationalists are extremely uncomfortable with how much of the country’s cultural framework came from abroad, especially Korea.  I’m not sure where YU-NO intends to go with it but I like that it had the balls to call attention to it.

The stuff with Ayumi’s sleazeball assistant, on the other hand, was fairly tired and silly.  He comes off as a plot device, pretty much, and it was pretty obvious he set up the whole drama at the end in order to come to Ayumi’s “rescue” and win her favor (in all sorts of ways, presumably).  He did everything but twirl his moustache here, so he doesn’t make a very interesting villain, even for a mid-boss.  As for Takuya’s use of the device his father left for him to try and win the day, it was clever to a point but reflects a certain naïveté that I guess isn’t totally out of character for a kid his age.

Takuya certainly isn’t a mass-produced model as VN protagonists go, which is a hopeful sign.  He’s pretty fearless and rather smart, but there’s a recklessness to the way he goes about things that’s surely going to get him into trouble.  I mean, creating parallel worlds left and right, even with something as simple as the soda cans – it never occurred to him that there could be consequences to that, either personally or in terms of a butterfly effect?  At least he has the sense to think about this when he gets mysterious headaches.  I get the sense that Takuya intentionally tuned out academic learning as a kind of rebellion against his academically-inclined father, and that there’s a gap between his street smarts and his book knowledge as a result.  He’s interesting and so is YU-NO – but it’s going to have to step up its overall game at some point soon to keep me invested.