Common Name: Slow Start
Score: 4/10, 3/5
Length: 12 Episodes
Genre: Moe, Shoujo, Slice of Life, Comedy, School Life, Yuri
Summary: Due her suddenly contracting mumps just before her high school entrance exams, Ichinose Hana was forced to take a gap year before starting her high school career. Now, one year later, Hana is 16-year-old high school freshman with a deep-seated fear that people will find out about her gap year. However, as Hana spends more time with her newfound friends, her fears begin to abate as she learns that everyone has something that bothers them deeply. Whether or not someone wants to talk about that something, though, is entirely their own choice. So, perhaps the day will come when Hana feels like she will be able to confide in her friends, but there's certainly no rush since she's found a good group of friends who have proven they care about her a great deal.
Review: Progress is almost always a slow, tedious, and clumsy process. The acceptance of new and different ways to live is one of the most common and troublesome kinds of progress there is though due to the simple arrogance that people think they've got humanity pinned down--that there's no more room for growth or that we've peaked as a species. One of the most interesting ways to analyze how wrong that idea is comes from the simple analysis of how our media changes over time. Certain concepts or ideas, once considered taboo, slowly become more and more mainstream and acceptable which in turn inspires others to push back against these changes using their own forms of media. Slow Start, I think, is an interesting example of both a positive and negative push for change. Positive, because the show seems to be very interested in normalizing the concept of homosexuality as something that just isn't that big of a deal. Negative, because it somehow manages to almost satirically turn that message of acceptance into an easy means to associate homosexuality with deviance and promiscuity. So, it's honestly a bit hard for me to tell where this show really stands, which in turn makes it hard for me to make up my mind how I feel about this show.
Yeah, the best I can do is say that this just about sums up my current mood while writing this.
To be perfectly clear, though, it's not like I expect this show to bring about some kind of sexual revolution; quite the contrary, in fact. I like to think of this show as a product of that very revolution that's being dealt with across the world. In that context, this show pretty much sums up the issue of homosexuality in Japan as I understand it. It has become something that people can't easily ignore anymore but a lot of people still don't know how to address it, not to say it's that much better here in the states. That's how we've ended up with a show that somehow manages to normalize adult homosexual relationships one minute and then falls right back into the Sapphic yuri-bait tropes we've come to expect from the industry. I'll digress for now, though, since homosexuality isn't necessarily the crux of this show's plot so much as the foil to its central issue of Hana coming to terms with the situation she's found herself in and realizing that things aren't actually as bad as she might think.
Granted, that separation doesn't necessarily stop the show from
injecting those issues into Hana's story along the way.
To paint in broad strokes, Ichinose Hana's story is a slow and gradual one that hinges primarily on her reacclimating to school life after her gap year. For those who aren't aware, a gap year, not to be confused with being held back a grade, is a year-long break in one's schooling that normally happens between high school and college. On occasion, though, a gap year might occur between middle school and high school as is the case with Hana. More specifically, her gap year is born from a case of the mumps getting in the way of her taking her entrance exam. Now, normally, this wouldn't actually be much of an issue. As I understand it, a student can take an entrance exam and enter school at any point in the year--hence why the sudden transfer student trope exists--but in Hana's case, the idea of falling behind and missing out on this huge milestone with her current friends has traumatized her so much that it just wouldn't be reasonable to force her to go to school. So, without so much as a "so long and thanks for all the fish" to her old classmates and friends, Hana's parents find it infinitely more reasonable to send Hana away to live with her cousin and attend a totally new high school. That makes sense, right?
Yeah, I don't get it either. But like I said, this show is nothing if not clumsy.
So, with all her fears, insecurities, anxieties, and other means of self-depreciation running on max, Hana is summarily thrown into high school a year late and a year older than all of her classmates. Being the moeblob garbage this is, it doesn't take long for Hana to find a good circle of friends who would immediately be willing to take a bullet for our delicate little flower. First and foremost, mainly because she's my favorite, we are introduced to Momochi Tama who can essentially be described as "the most genki otaku who ever genki'd." On the surface, Tama is the most energetic and excitable character of the cast who is playful in every respect. Over the course of the show, however, it is generally understood that all of her outward playfulness serves two purposes. Firstly, it serves as her standard means of having fun with and supporting her friends whenever they feel low. Secondly, it is a means of masking her social ineptitude. Namely, she struggles with having "real" conversations with people which makes it hard for her to support her friends in any kind of meaningful way. So, settling with what little she can do rather than bemoaning what she can't, Tama usually just sticks with using silliness to keep people's spirits up and drive away any bad feelings.
This lovely child with two grandmas who live together *cough* would be my spirit animal
were it not for the fact that I am nowhere near as energetic or extroverted.
Next, we are introduced to the packaged pair that is Tokura Eiko and Sengoku Kamuri and the myriad missteps this show makes when it comes to expressing their relationship. Before I get ahead of myself, though, I say these two characters are a packaged deal because it's hard to really define one without the other. Kamuri, being the simplest of the two, is a shy, socially incapable child that simply can't get by in the world without Eiko by her side. On her own, the girl's main defining traits are that she sleeps a lot, eats a lot, and is weirdly good at the piano and that's about it. Aside from that, her character is defined almost exclusively by her less-than-healthy dependence on Eiko to save her when unwanted social interactions crop up. Eiko, on the other hand, is far more open and sociable and exudes dominant feminine sexuality. While it might be apt to call her a social butterfly, the show goes out of its way to admit that she's more of a stray cat that wanders from place to place, stealing the attentions and hearts of every girl she meets, but always ends up back in the welcoming and adoring arms of Kamuri when she's grown exhausted from flirting with every other girl she can.
More on why I think I think these two characters are the source of most of this show's problems later.
Outside of Hana's main friend group, we come to meet and understand the problems of two other characters that become constants in Hana's high school career. First is Hana's older cousin, Kyouzuka Shion. Shion's role throughout the show can basically be described as an older sister/mother figure to Hana. As much as Shion loves Hana, though, it is slowly revealed as the show goes on that she never really asked for any of this and fears about not living up to other people's standards as well as her own potential. To elaborate, her roles as a landlady and Hana's caretaker were essentially forced on her because there was little other choice. Following the death of her grandfather, the previous manager of the apartment complex, Shion fell into a position where it was either take up her grandfather's mantle or let go of the home they both cherished. Similarly, due to all of Hana's trauma and insecurities regarding her gap year, Shion became the only person Hana's parents could reasonably turn to. So, it once again became an issue of deciding whether or not she should support her darling cousin in a time of need or if she should just let her struggle in her insecurities without a place to feel at home and safe from the judging eyes of the world. Obviously, there wasn't actually much of a choice in either case since Shion is ultimately a kind and caring person but, like most semi-functional adults, she still worries about and considers the what-ifs from time to time.
Just because she's kind doesn't mean she can't be savage
as fuck when Hana pushes her buttons though.
The second character the show focuses outside of Hana's friend group is Hana's NEET neighbor, Hannen Hiroe. While it might be something of a disservice to Hannen's character, she can accurately be described as just being Proto-Hana. Like Hana, she falls prey to an accident and illness that left her unable to take the entrance exams to the college of her choice. Disheartened by how easily her life was changed after such a simple mistake, Hannen shuts herself off from the world for two years and basically gives up all hope of becoming a "proper adult." Once the relatable story Hana and her struggles to get better reach Hannen's doorstep, though, it becomes impossible for her to still accept that there's no hope for her own recovery and reintegration into society. So, like Hana, she endeavors to jump back into the world of academia.
Since Hana is the latest model, she comes with more friends and features added at no extra cost,
which just makes Hannen look even more pathetic by comparison.
I go so far as to list all these important characters and their struggles mainly because they effectively become the solution to all of Hana's problems. With each new friend and new struggle, the more she realizes that her problems aren't nearly as dire as those of the people around her--people who seem to function perfectly well in society--excluding Kamuri. Thankfully, the show doesn't use this process to devalue Hana's problems so much as give her a reason to improve as well as evidence that she can get better. It's likely that her insecurities will never be gone since that's just kind of the crux of her character, but she's learning as she goes. In that way, the show does a pretty great job expressing that difficult subject matter.
Too bad the show buries that important lesson and character growth
under a metric ton of needlessly perverse Sapphic garbage.
As much as Slow Start succeeds with Hana growing to a point where she can be comfortable with who she is and learning to make the best of her less-than-ideal situation, it also trips, stumbles, and faceplants into the pavement at every other turn. To say that Hana's story gets muddled in the rest of the show's obnoxious comedy and moeblob nonsense would be an understatement. It gets veritably trivialized. Granted, one of the main reasons for that is due simply to the fact that Hana is a super low-key character that never really grabs the attention of the audience. Yet the show doesn't do much, if anything, to actually support bringing that story to the forefront since it takes far more time with the rest of the cast who are infinitely more expressive and engaging. The thing that distracted me the most, however, was the weird way this show danced around the idea of homosexuality throughout the show, struggling to figure out where it should stand amidst all the eggshells. As I said before, though, this show somehow ends up being both progressive and highly offensive when it comes to the hot-button topic of homosexuality.
Correction: it somehow ends up being progressive, offensive, and stupid beyond all reason.
On the one hand, I loved how this show just low-key slipped a respectable homosexual couple into the show without making a big deal of it. I nearly did a double take when I noticed that Tama has two grandmas that live together and raise the energetic little otaku, seeming to live a perfectly normal and happy relationship without ever actually drawing attention to it. It's just kind of a fact of Tama's family life that explains a great deal about how open Tama is with her own sexual preferences, cited mainly through her loving support of Hana and her obsession with girl-on-girl harem dating sims. As grating and idiotic as some of Tana's erotic gags can be, though, her little jokes and sprinklings of degeneracy throughout the show pale in comparison to the issues born of Eiko and Kamuri's confused relationship.
Ok, I say it's their relationship to blame, but it's mainly Eiko's obsession with
flirting with everyone but Kamuri that's the problem here.
Look, I don't mind nonstandard relationships so long as everyone involved is aware of and consents to how their relationship works, and the relationship Eiko and Kamuri share is anything but standard. Rather than taking cues from how the show handles Tama's family and normalizing their nonstandard relationship, though, Slow Start pretty much does a 180 when it comes to these two. To elaborate, as I have come to understand it, Eiko and Kamuri's relationship is built purely on the fact that both of them understand that Kamuri cannot function without regular contact with Eiko--charging her Eikonium stores each day, to steal a cute concept from the Nyaruko anime. Beyond Kamuri's dependence on Eiko, there seems to be some unsaid agreement that the two are basically a couple, but that Eiko is free to flirt with anyone since everyone loves Eiko anyway.
This is the closest thing to an explanation we get in the show, and it's not even delivered in a convincing manner. The way she says it, it's more like a
"Well, it's not like I can stop her" tone than an accepting one.
I say "seems to be" because the show never actually expresses this idea. The boundaries of what's fine and what's not in their relationship are never addressed and are left entirely to the imagination of the audience. So, rather than normalizing the nonstandard, the show instead goes whole ham on fetishizing Eiko's promiscuity to an absurd degree. We're given moment after moment of Eiko flirting with other girls and putting herself in compromising situations for her own amusement. To make the matter all the more confusing and frustrating, we only ever see Kamuri express her affection for Eiko; never the other way around. Because of this additional layer of ambiguity, it easily feels like Eiko is either taking advantage of Kamuri's feelings at best or actively cheating on her at worst. In either case, their relationship is turned into little more than a betrayal of the kinds of progressive ideas Slow Start tried to express elsewhere in the series and that baffles me to no small degree.
I am as done with these two as Kamuri looks like she is with everything.
Now, OK, I might be willing to buy that the show didn't want to go into the nitty-gritty since youth isn't that mature or well-defined or some such nonsense. Even if that is the case, I don't feel like it belongs in this show. Drawing so much attention to the walking, talking Sapphic fetish that is Eiko and all the drama born of the do they/don't they with Kamuri does little more for this show than distract from Hana's story; the story that is supposed to be the main plot of this entire show. Clumsiness is one thing but this way the show handles it's material dips heavily into the realm of bad. Even as a piece of generic moeblob, it just doesn't meet the standard needed to be considered good. The art is fine, but nothing to marvel at. The music is there, but it's clearly phoned in. The only character designs that stand out are Kamuri and Tama, but one of those is clearly a rip-off of Kanna from Maid Dragon in both form and function (they even share the same VA for Christ's sake). So, yeah, no matter how much I might have liked or hoped to like this show, I cannot recommend it in good conscience. There are dozens of better shows that feature very similar premises and execution but are able to do so without tripping over their own two feet. You'd be better off finding one of those instead.