So you remember when you had a bird feeder behind your house as a kid (obviously there’s a lot of presuppositions there, but stay with me)?  Invariably somebody (probably Dad) would say “The thing is, once you start feeding them you can’t just stop, because they forget how to forage for themselves.”  This is invariably followed at some point by a diatribe against those fucking squirrels, but that’s not really my point.  No, this is my point – streamers are like people who feed the birds, then randomly decide to stop feeding them sometimes and leave them to starve.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m all in favor of legal streaming, though I don’t think it benefits the right people as much as it should.  But what it’s done is eliminate probably 95% of the subbing groups out there.  What happens when a show like Hi Score Girl gets ignored by the streaming services (and being picked up by Netflix Japan is as good as ignored, for Western viewers)?  The birds starve.  I don’t blame the noble souls who do pick up a series under such circumstances if the subs are late or (as is also the case this week) subpar – if someone tries to feed the birds, even crappy food is better than none.  But look at history – show like Waka Okami and Jikken-hin Kazoku get picked up, then go into limbo or become out and out forgotten.  It’s my great fear that this is happening with Hi Score Girl, and that would be a crying shame.

But here we are, and while “better late than never” is certainly a cliche, if the shoe fits…  As it happens this was a crucial episode, too, both because it comes on the heels of the series’ most subtle emotional powerhouse so far, and because for the first time it brings the three main players together.  Lots of things strike me in watching this episode, among them this: Hidaka and Oono are very different characters.  That seems obvious, but it really asserts itself in a big way from a narrative standpoint.  The emotional pitch of HSG is very different depending on which of the two girls is in focus.

In effect, there are two POV characters in Hi Score Girl – Haruo of course, and Hidaka.  Oono is not one, for obvious reasons – at least not in the conventional sense (we’ll talk about that more in coming weeks).  But she is the MacGuffin, the story’s main catalyst.  She’s the driver of change, the often unseen and almost always unheard presence who exerts a huge gravitational pull on Haruo’s arc, and by extension Hidaka’s.  Her skills as a gamer speak for themselves, but in other ways she’s a kind of screen on which Haruo especially but also Hidaka can project their own insecurities and desires.  It’s an odd and fascinating narrative structure – one not quite like any I’ve seen in a teen romance before.

In a way, this was one of the most gamer-centric eps so far, and a lot of the best moments sprung from that. Amasaki Kouhei is really nailing the comic moments here, and the way he talked to the screen during his SF II match was hilarious.  Haruo’s dialogues with Guile were also a charmer (seiyuu is a big factor there, too – those segments are much stronger in anime form).  But the headline is the return of Oono, though it takes both Haruo and Hidaka a while to connect the dots on that.  It’s certainly clear that Hidaka has cleared some kind of mental hurdle in her feelings about Haruo – she actually uses the “M” word in her inner musings.  But the poor girl just doesn’t understand what she’s up against yet…

There’s really only one person who could find a hidden character in the newly released Street Fighter II X, and that’s the moment when Haruo puts it all together.  He doesn’t see what we see – that Oono is still wearing the cheap ring he gave her as her going-away present (long after all the other trinkets are discarded and forgotten).  What he does see is the way she seemingly pushes him away – refuses to play him at SF II X, seems to speak through her actions in Final Fight.  It’s too much for a boy his age to deal with, of course, but Haruo still senses the truth of Oono’s situation and longs to be her knight in shining armor.  Meanwhile Hidaka sees all this from the outside, and tries to understand what she’s gotten herself into.  Yes, this story is only getting started – which underscores that much more what a crime it will be if this series is already half over…