In the end, I can only call Hidarikiki no Eren a failure. But an interesting one, to be sure. That’s just from my perspective of course – I can’t speak to what its real objectives were as a story. But that’s part of the problem. Even at the end I’m still not totally sure what the point of this was, and what message it was trying to get across – especially with the finale itself. We’re talking about an ongoing manga here, where the anime only covered a small portion, and I’m sure that’s a factor. But I think the disconnect goes deeper than that.

The show devolved into a kind of mad race to the bottom as far as increasingly insufferable characters are concerned. I thought Akari could never be caught but damn – given a few more episodes Sakuma might just have pipped her. Seriously, these fucking people. Sakuma moves in and completely takes over the session, disregarding everything the client actually wants out of it and bullying Chiaki into giving her approval. This finally pushes Kouichi past the breaking point, and even though Rukawa craps a brick over it Kouichi decides he can’t keep deferring to geniuses his whole life.

That brings us back to the cold open in the first episode, where Sakuma was beating the crap out of Kouichi. For daring to interrupt his photographic jerk-off session, where he was supposedly reaching some epiphany with Akari. If ever there were two characters who deserved each other, it’s these two. Seriously, twenty-seven can’t come soon enough. For all his flaws – and they are more than considerable – Kouichi is the only one of the main cast I don’t want to dip in beef broth and toss into a pit of hungry tigers. At least he feels recognizably human emotions and behaves in recognizably human ways. If that’s normal and it’s supposed to be a dig, normal looks pretty underrated from where I’m sitting.

The fact that Eren the Southpaw can make me as angry as this ep made me is proof that it’s doing something right. In this thread at least, it’s engaging, But what are we doing here, really? Eren pretty much winds up being irrelevant apart from being the plot’s dark matter, the subject of everyone else’s misplaced obsessions. Why is Kouichi apologizing to Sakuma at the end, begging him to do his goddam job? I fear this comes dangerously close to suggesting that geniuses (so-called) actually are better than everyone else and we need to bend over backwards to stroke their egos so they’ll cast their light on the rest of us.

The dedication card at the end – “To everyone who couldn’t become geniuses” – suggests that mangaka Kappy is Kouichi, pretty much. But rather than victorious or even redemptive this ending feels like a concession of defeat. Kouichi wasted his life obsessing over what he could never be and, if we read the tea leaves in the most obvious way, we’re to believe he was right to. Screw that. Where would these supposed geniuses be without enablers and hangers-on, never mind the ones who actually do all the work they’d never lower themselves to do that makes what they call work even possible?

No, we’re not perfect. None of us, including geniuses. People who think they are don’t deserve to have that delusion bought into. I ask again, what was the point? Hidarikiki no Eren was unpredictable, weird, often interesting. When it was about the Japanese corporate hell it was genuinely gripping at times. But now that it’s over I can’t think of any compelling reason why is needed to exist, or why this story needed to be told. Maybe that’s a big reason why it was an appealingly weird and unpredictable as it was, but it doesn’t make what we’re left with any more satisfying.