Recap

Nozaki’s editor stops by, leading to horror stories about his obnoxious previous editor and a meeting with his neighbor, a fellow manga author. After reviewing Nozaki’s upcoming manuscripts, the editor suggests he learn how to see things from the heroine’s point of view. Naturally, Nozaki takes his advice too far.

Jel’s Thoughts

This episode dipped dangerously into the self indulgent territory I loathe when it comes to “art about making art” stories. I rolled my eyes a bit at the highly unlikely odds of another successful manga artist living in the same building, and the complaints about Nozaki’s previous editor made me wonder if this particular author had an axe to grind. Had this been the first episode I might have dropped the show right then, but framed in the context of the rest of the series I was OK with it. The actual business of making manga is just one part of Nozaki’s life and not the entire focus of the show, and when taken from the perspective of Chiyo getting to know him better it really wasn’t that bad.

It helped too that there were still quite a few good gags this week. I found it funny seeing Nozaki finally getting fired up over something, in this case his self-centered former editor. Seeing him overcompensate with his gratitude to the new editor was even funnier and a pretty clever, well written joke. The real comedy gold is in the B half of the episode though, particularly when Nozaki runs into Kashima. How or why she decides to just play along with Nozaki’s experiment is left to your imagination, and I was laughing pretty hard at all her deadpan expressions throughout. The whole bit led to another sweet moment with Hori as well. I would totally watch a spinoff show about their relationship as the few minutes of screen time they get together are always great.

It was going to be tough to follow up last week’s near flawless episode, and while this week’s outing isn’t nearly as good it has enough going for it to keep the show’s momentum going. I do worry now that we’ve dabbled in some “manga about making manga” scenes that we’re going to see more of those in the future, but I’ve seen enough to feel confident that Nozaki-kun will do the right thing. I was thinking while watching that there’s been a distinct lack of Seo these past two weeks, so I’m glad to see the previews seem to indicate she’ll be featured a lot more prominently next week.

Marlin’s Thoughts

I think when going into this style of show you gotta accept the author is going to use it to vent his frustrations every once in a while. I think it’s fine as long as it doesn’t dominate the show and can still generate some nice gags. Nozaki kun succeeded in at least getting me to laugh with the brutal tanuki murder. It’s also nice to see some genuine emotion from the big guy from time to time.

The quality of the second half also made up for the lackluster parts in the beginning. Nozaki’s overreaction to every shoujo heroine trope had me in stitches. The scene with Kashima was a fantastic little visual gag that could only work so well with the mixing of those two characters. The ending scene was icing on the cake as it finally teased the main relationship from Nozaki’s point of view. Cant wait for next week to come.