Ao no Hako (Blue Box) – 06

I’ve made no false claims to be a neutral on Hina. You may disagree with my take on her (it ain’t positive) but I’ve never been anything less that totally honest about it. I find her in a word, annoying. In many more words irritating, selfish, and cliched. Unfortunately all of the aspects of Blue Box which don’t work are centered around her. And just as unfortunately she’s a major player, especially around this point in the story. As a result this passage of the series is pretty much a slog for me.

That leaves me on the horns of a dilemma about how to cover these arcs. My instinct tells me that when we get an episode like this, which is pretty much all Hina all the time, the best course is to largely skim it. When I say she’s at the heart of the series’ missteps I mainly mean she indulges Miura Kouji’s obvious love of romcom tropes. Let’s crank up the triangle and the long-suffering osananajimi routine, and without a trace of irony. Love triangles can be very effective when all three corners are winning characters. And then we have Ao no Hako.

What especially annoys me about Hina, apart from that she’s a walking cliche, is that she’s ridiculously self-absorbed. Which, to Miura’s credit, he has Taiki point out (albeit in a non-pejorative way) this week. Her deal is basically that she wants to treat Taiki like a pet dog she’s mildly fond of. And have him be standing by and ready if she decides he’s worth something more. And she’s all weepy when she realizes he’s not just waiting around to see whether she decides to do more than mock him and occasionally pat his head. I don’t feel sorry for Hina she wallows in self-pity about how unfair Chinatsu is as an opponent because Chinatsu actually treats people decently and doesn’t spend all her time worrying about herself. Have an issue with that? Be a better person.

But that is what it is. Characters like Hina are staples of shounen romcom and almost universally loved by fans for it. Most of the time it matters naught for me because I don’t follow those series but this one is better in so many ways, and I do follow it. So slog it is, get through these sorts of episodes and know there’s brighter days ahead. When we like a series sometimes we just have to accept it warts and all, and there’s no amount of Compound W that will exempt Ao no Hako from that.

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5 comments

  1. E

    I don’t know. Maybe it’s just because I once had a friendship with a girl back in high school that looked almost identical to Taiki and Hina’s, but quite a bit of her rings true for me even through all the tropes.

    I think your “pet dog” comment misses the mark a bit. In that 12-15 age range, it’s common (at least in my experience) for a boy and a girl to have the kind of friendship we see here. It’s teasing, lively, and dynamic in a way same-sex friendships aren’t, but neither person has matured enough to really see the girl as a woman/guy as a man (which is typically a death knell for the friendship, at least in that incarnation). Chinatsu has basically already moved quite a bit of the way from girl-hood to woman-hood despite her lack of romantic experience, Hina is only just realizing that the status quo isn’t going to hold, and Taiki is somewhere between them: trying to hold onto the friendship with Hina but taking inexorable steps toward manhood with Chinatsu as motivation. We see Hina genuinely only now discovering that she has feelings for Taiki, that she’s effectively already lost the match (being behind Taiki metaphorically, with Chinatsu in front), and that she has no good way of dealing with any of that. When she panics, it’s way easier to just fall back on the “oh, we’re just friends; just like old times” routine, but I suspect that doing so is going to tear her up inside until she ends up venting her feelings onto Taiki in an ungraceful manner.

    I’m not arguing that this is the most profound relationship ever depicted, and I wonder if the author was even trying to make this a believable triangle. Forgetting the rather silly “badminton/gymnastics fanboy” dualism thing, it’s obvious from the outside that Taiki and Chinatsu are a better pair (although Chinatsu being pessimistic there at the end is totally believable). Maybe it’s more like a “let’s see how this relatively immature overachieving girl deals with being in over her head and failing at something in which she’s inexperienced” kind of a thing.

  2. r

    I second the above opinion. At least so far, I’ve found Hina to be an interesting and compelling character. She genuinely wanted to push Taiki and Chinatsu together because she wasn’t aware of her own budding feelings, even though an “outsider looking in” probably could the route it could take. She never put Taiki on hold, she just had that kind of teasing friendship with him. Make no mistake, I do love the chemistry between the leads, but I haven’t found Hina’s presence annoying at all.

  3. B

    What a bafflingly negative take on Hina that’s completely unsupported by the source.

  4. N

    The comments are rebelling 😀

    I don’t love Hina, but I don’t find her so bad, and as a character I find her more interesting than Chinatsu who I feel is quite blend.

  5. J

    I highly disagree with this review. I love Hina and her character has a lot more depth and interesting layer than a lot of other “loosing heroine” in the love triangle. I feel a lot more sympathetic towards her than other childhood friend and her internal conflict feels more real than tropey. So yeah, bad take all around on a well-liked character.

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