Nichijou Half Season Review [Completed]

Looking back at my notes for Episode 20, I realize something very strange. One note says ‘my earphones started fuzzing, and the cover of one already fell off :(‘

Well, guess what?

That earphone (the left one) has officially broke. Apparently, I accidentally ripped the wire inside the cover (since the cover fell off), and I’m too lazy to solder them or even tape them together so meh. Connecting the two cut ends of the wire together will ‘fix’ it, but I’m too lazy to reproduce that ‘fix’, so I’ll just listen to things through one ear until I stop being lazy and buy a new one.

(Protip: ‘Mushyrulez’ and ‘Laziness’ are synonyms)

Anyways, what did that have to do with anything?

I’m just saying that Nichijou’s music is so awesome it broke my earphones. Even the OP, which I thought was ridiculous and stupid and I hated has grown on me and now I don’t think it’s ridiculous nor stupid and I love it.

I’m pretty sure people have already talked about this (I might have, but I’m too lazy to read through my previous gruels), but I don’t know, as Nichijou posts are usually as indecipherable as the show itself. If you haven’t yet guessed, I’m not very in tune with the bloligon. That wasn’t a fusion of loli and bigon, that was a fusion of blog and polygon.

Anyways, Nichijou is excellent not because the characters are developed, but because each different relationship is developed. Amateur writers will often treat each character separately, and have them all act the same way to different people. That’s not true, though – do you act the same way to your dad that you do to your friends? Nichijou shows how different people act differently. As an example, take gundere – it’s obvious that she acts differently towards Sasahara, but she also acts differently to her friends and her sister. Towards her sister, she’s a lot more sisterly; to her friends, she’s a lot less informal; to, say, Mio’s sister, she’s rather detached and formal. Another example would be Izumi’s brother (by the way, Izumi still lives with her father…), who acts all flustered and annoyed at home (was that actually porn?), but acts like a COOL GUY at school.

These different relationships that develop over time (an extreme example is Nano getting integrated into the school; another one would be Mio gradually losing her frenetic lust for Sasahara, which was rather prominent earlier on in the series) make the show very multi-layered, and yet, these types of things do not consciously influence our enjoyment of the series – they unconsciously do. Nichijou really isn’t about its jokes; it’s about its relationships.

So it makes sense that it’s now becoming a moe slice-of-life romantic comedy instead of what was once just a simple comedy.

The design and cinematography of Nichijou is also amazing – you can clearly see the time spent into this. It’s even more amazing because it’s a comedy, and scenes can be so realistic yet so cartoon-ish simultaneously. I don’t know if it’s surrealism or what, but Nichijou’s characteristic blending of realistic backgrounds and shading on people who don’t even have noses fits in perfectly with its style. The school chase scene in Episode 25 was particularly impressive – these are techniques you really only see in the best anime. Yet, with subpar sales in Japan, I doubt Nichijou will get a second season unless it becomes a cult classic, which… it just might.

It’s funny, Mio and Yukko actually were practising taekwondo’s back-breakfalls in that flashback. I wonder if the mangaka practised taekwondo and did many stupid things there, à la Yukko. Who is the main character, anyways? I thought it was Mio at first, but Yukko does figure more prominently in skits, in the OP, etc. It’s like Yuru Yuri, where you’d expect Akari to be the main character, but Kyouko takes more prominence. Was there an episode without her?

Continuing on about Yuru Yuri, Kyouko suddenly turned all nice and everybody was sad. Nano also suddenly had the chance to get her screw taken off, but decided not to. It became part of her life, so that without the screw, Nano would just not be Nano anymore. Yet, isn’t that bad? You shouldn’t be determined by physical traits, you should be determined by who you are. Even without the screw, Nano is Nano – even if she wasn’t a robot, Nano is Nano. In fact, even if Nano is a robot, she /isn’t/ one, because nobody thinks she’s a robot, and she doesn’t behave differently from normal people. At the beginning, she may have felt like a robot, and Hakase demonstrated that by modifying her body. However, after much development, nobody thinks of her as a robot anymore. Even Hakase stopped with the body modification. Besides, how do you know someone isn’t a robot? You don’t. All of us could be robots, but it wouldn’t matter.

That time when Sakamoto (excuse me, Taisho) sneezed and swallowed his snot made me feel really gross and sick. :(

My stomach started churning because whenever someone does something I imagine myself doing it as well, and though I regularly do swallow snot (subconsciously), this time felt rather horrible for some reason. Maybe it’s because I’m watching HorribleSubs.

For example, I was in this cabin in America or somewhere, and since there was nothing to do, I watched an episode of the Twilight Zone (note: I don’t watch much TV, so that was the first and only episode of Twilight Zone I’ve watched). This guy has cancer, and some other guy cures it by giving him nanorobots. However, the nanorobots continue to make adjustments to his body until he started growing gills.

I imagined myself growing gills, and suddenly I got all scared and nauseous and I just wanted to curl up in a little ball and NOT GET GILLS. Even now I feel really weird and scared that I might suddenly get gills simply because I’m typing this sentence. When I see Remilia, I look at her wings and get scared and think ‘holy shit, what if I had wings? 1. They would fucking hurt 2. They would fucking hurt 3. How will I wear clothes and sleep 4. They would fucking hurt’. Argh writing this paragraph right now is like torture, I DON’T WANT GILLS OR WINGS OR WHATEVER ALRIGHT THANKS

Oh those paragraphs had nothing to do with Nichijou by the way

Anyways, Nichijou was a nice show. Everything was connected, and many funny things happened – perhaps more funny because they could happen to us too, and have already happened to some of us. Coincidences like these happen every day, and life is sometimes just as funny as Nichijou (except for mine, notice how I haven’t drawn a new O-NEC).

And that’s our life, our Nichijou.

SECOND SEASON BETTER AIR AT THE SAME TIME AS YURU YURI’S SECOND SEASON ALRIGHT

tl;dr: I ONLY DO THINGS MAI WAY

Overall Rating: 7/10 (Brilliant)

P.S. Link goes to TVTropes, I am not responsible if your parents find your dead corpse in front of a computer with a decomposing sandwich next to it as people generally eat sandwiches while going to TVTropes, and uh, I guess they die from not remembering to eat their sandwiches.