©竹嶋えく・一迅社／ささやくように恋を唄う製作委員会
I’ll be honest: this episode could have ended at around the seventeen-minute mark and I would have been extremely happy. It’s the moment of beautiful triumph: Yori has fully overcome her reservations about singing and songwriting and has put her feelings into a song while Himari has sorted through her emotions and arrived at her conclusion, that she loves Yori romantically now that she’s gotten to know her. They’ve overcome their internal hurdles to be together in a way that makes sense to them—and that’s what we’ve been waiting for. Are there a few too many flashbacks while we’re getting there? Yes, but I think we’ve all reached the point of understanding this series’ production values; we’re never going to go a week without that white background crossed by a diagonal line of pastel shapes and shortcuts will be taken whenever possible. But it doesn’t skimp on the actual plot and I can be happy with that.
“The actual plot” is, of course, why the episode went on for six more minutes after the moment of romantic triumph. Much like the source manga goes beyond the three volumes adapted here, the anime still has six episodes to go, meaning that there’s more story to tell. That offers us the rare chance to see Himari and Yori together after the usual happy ending stopping point, which is nice, and it also seems set to shift the focus from their relationship to the music storyline—particularly as regards the girl Yori replaced in SSGirls.
We’ve seen Shiho in the background of earlier episodes and the opening theme—just enough to extrapolate that she and Aki have some tumultuous history. The opening theme implies that Shiho may have had an unrequited crush on Aki but opening imagery can be deceptive, so we can’t rely on that implication as the unvarnished truth. This week makes it very clear that whatever the cause, Shiho leaving SSGirls was not an amicable breakup—or at least not on her part. That’s not all that hard to believe; while she’s called SSGirls “casuals” and “amateurs” before, this week has her doing that right to their faces, with calculated amounts of venom reserved for Yori, her replacement. Shiho seems to think that she’s a better and more serious musician than the others which makes her a better human being than they are. Her words suggest that she believes that only trained professionals have any business playing before an audience—with the implicit understanding that she, unlike them, is one.
There’s an interesting parallel with Yori’s initial feelings about joining the band. She said that while she didn’t mind pinch-hitting, she typically preferred to sing for herself, in private. There wasn’t much appeal to performing for others. If we juxtapose that with Shiho’s barbed comments, it looks like Yori may have initially agreed with her—albeit for much less snooty reasons. She simply didn’t feel good enough to perform. Himari helped to change that for her, allowing her to find her voice for someone else, and that’s worked out for her. Is the implication that it didn’t work out for Shiho? Or is she just a product of her own background and experience? That’s something to pay attention to going forward because her deliberate cruelty may be masking something, even as it still has the power to make her former bandmates at least a little bit afraid of her. Kaoru slamming the door shut when she sees Shiho on the other side says a lot.
As we move into the second arc of the story, things look to be shifting out of the closed sphere of Himari and Yori’s romance into a broader area that incorporates more people and a sense of competition. Luckily we’ll still have the happy couple to ease whatever pain Shiho seems eager to bring.
Rating:
Whisper Me a Love Song is currently streaming on
HIDIVE.
