It would be hard to overstate how weird and all over the map Eren the Southpaw is. In some ways. It’s almost as if it’s multiple narratives with no real connection to each other, despite the literal connection in the plot. That’s sort of the point, I get that. The contract between Kouichi’s world and Eren’s, and Akari’s. But I feel like it goes deeper than that. There’s an authenticity and gritty honesty to Kouichi’s arc that’s totally – and I do mean totally – lacking from the other two. Occam’s Razor would certainly suggest that’s because Kouichi’s is the world Kappy came from. He’s writing what he knows.

How true that is, search me. I don’t know the guy. Maybe he knows modeling and street art just as well as advertising and marketing. It sure doesn’t play that way, though. Instead of authenticity it feels like we get an avalanche of drama for its own sake. It doesn’t help that everyone inhabiting those worlds are insufferable (a word I’ve used several times in connection to Hidarikiki no Eren). Pretentious and ridiculous and utterly full of themselves. I hate all of them to be honest, and having known a few people like that in real life makes it worse. If these are who Kouichi envies, he really ought to do some soul-searching.

The upshot of all this is that there are some eps – like last week’s – that I find really riveting. And others where I’m literally riding the slider bar. Seriously, every minute with Eren and Sayuri and Tony Jacobs and the ridiculous “producers” felt like a week. It’s not just that I don’t like these people – it’s that their stories seem very silly. Sayuri paying some parkour chick to run around posing as Eren for marketing purposes just so totally fits. What I’m not totally sure is just how much it’s intended that we find these pompous twits silly and awful, and how much Kappy wants to admire them for being tortured by their raving genius.

How in the world does this end, then? The manga is on 25 volumes, so presumably we’re getting nowhere close to the full story in 13 episodes. Eren is heading back to Japan, it seems, so at least we’re probably going to get some interaction with Kouichi again to shift her dynamic. But this turn likely means more of Akari too. Are we headed for some some of romantic twists and turns in one of these directions (“I’m marrying Tony”, ROFL)? Is Sayuri coming back too, to further complicate things? Ironically among the main cast it’s only Kouichi and Eren who haven’t been linked romantically. And while I don’t especially want to see that box checked, it would certainly shake things up.