Recap: Hanekawa finally understands the source of her apparitions and pens her final wish. Black Hanekawa sets out to grant her wish as she confronts Kako the tiger one last time.

Jel’s Thoughts: I think a lot of people have found Hanekawa’s perfect and emotionless personality difficult to like. At the very least, many people found her stories to be boring as nothing ever seemed to affect her. Assuming this was the plan for her character all along, I’d say Monogatari has done a great job of turning the table and somehow getting us to care about a character that just wasn’t very interesting at the start. By rather literally returning her emotions to her, I couldn’t help but feel satisfied as the episode closed with a shot of Black Hanekawa’s scrawled “tadaima” in her notebook.

This episode almost started to lose me as the first third is essentially two lengthy monologues, and while the first had some rather amusing imagery of Hanekawa spanning the globe the second was nothing but turning notebook pages. It was one of those moments it felt a little too novel-ish for the animated medium, even if it was kind of an interesting way of having a conversation between two people that can’t exist at the same time. Fortunately we got a little dash of action just before my attention span ran out, and the surprisingly flashy return of our regularly scheduled protagonist. I’ll admit at first I was a little disappointed Hanekawa didn’t get to finish the fight herself, but really at that point her internal battle had already been won. Araragi’s role was just the final little piece she needed in returning to a normal, emotional human being, and his appearance brought some much needed closure to their relationship moving forward.

Overall I’ve enjoyed the Nekomonogatari arcs a lot more than I expected as they’ve managed to take Hanekawa’s seemingly dull personality and turn it into something meaningful. Accepting both the good and bad, black and white aspects of yourself may be a story that’s been told before, but I guarantee no one has told it this way. As Hanekawa’s story comes to a close and we turn our attention to the other girls, it really has me excited to see what kind of grand finales NisiOisin has in store for each arc. Given Araragi’s appearance in this episode, seems like things got a little crazy while he was away. So we’ll see how things wrap up with Mayoi as we move on to Kabukimonogatari.