Xebek’s Blog

Yakumo deals with her feelings for Harima, while Tenma comes to a revelation as to who Harima is and what happened in the past.

Summary:

• Yakumo stands face to face with the spirit. The spirit asks if she loves Harima and Yakumo doesn’t deny it, saying even so he likes Tenma. The spirit asks if its ok to sacrifice her happiness for her sister’s
• Yakumo flashes back to when she and Tenma were kids. Tenma was a klutz and always screwed things up for Yakumo, calling her childish names “Yamo”, ruining her art work, and eventually destroying her favorite picture book.
• The book was given to her by their father and we see the end of the book she was reading before about how Otome and Uta were always together for the whole time. Yakumo tells the spirit how she will always be with Tenma as she tires to do her best and she is nice.
• Meanwhile Harima is on top of Tenma, being held there by her in her sleep. She wakes up and wonders what is going on and freaks out. She then sees Harima without his glasses and recognizes him as the pervert from way before. Harima admits it but says that he isn’t really a pervert. He says he knows his reasons won’t matter, but the reason he hid his identity was…. Harima is about to say because he loves Tenma but his phone rings. He answers it and finds out that Karasuma was in an accident.
• Harima tells Tenma about Karasuma and rushes her over on his motorcycle. However they get into an accident along the way. We see them wake up in the hospital, Tenma perfectly fine. Karasuma appears before her and finds out he is fine, in fact he won the word cup in soccer.
• We see Harima in another hospital room with Itoko. We find out that Harima avoided the accident and caught Tenma as they were falling down a cliff. He was then hit by a truck after protecting Tenma.
• The next day at the start of the new term, Harima goes to school ready to drop out because he only went there because of Tenma. When he gets to school Tenma sees him and chases him down, as Harima runs away not able to face her. Eventually eh is corned and we find out Tenma doesn’t remember last night, and doesn’t know Harima is the pervert from before.
• Harima decides to stay in school and is happy after getting the tape of the TV show from Tenma that she promised before, ready to face the new term.

Impressions:

Well, the end. I have overall impressions on series below under Final thoughts so this section is about the last episode specifically…I loved it. I thought this episode was beautifully done. It ended with an overall good feeling, while wrapping some things up but not too tightly because of a third season that is imminent. I said from the beginning Harima wouldn’t end up with anyone in the end, it’s not that kind of show. They may have some ending at the end of the third season, but this episode and overall series wasn’t bad because it didn’t conclude. It didn’t have to.

I liked how Yakumo actually admitted to herself basically that she loves Harima, instead of them going for some thing where she denies it to herself or says some crap to herself about how she doesn’t love him, but he will always be an important person. Although Yakumo’s overall conclusion to the Harima deal likely didn’t go over well with some I thought it was fine, they left the door plenty open for something to happen, while settling fairly nicely into a cease fire on the subject.

The one thing that irritated mea bit about the Yakumo segment was that she said she was doing all this for her sister, because she wanted her sister to be happy, but its not Tenma who likes Harima with Harima being oblivious. If Yakumo’s sole drive was to make Tenma happy, wouldn’t she try and get something to happen between her and Karasuma? Anyways, not that I didn’t like that she didn’t end up with Harima, just found that odd. I though her conclusion was fine.

I absolutely loved in this episode the whole bit where they showed Tenma and Yakumo as kids. That was just so hilarious and adorable, defiantly one of my favorite parts. Both Yakumo and Tenma were so cute as kids, I loved how Tenma called Yakumo Yamo and did all the things to try and help her. Overall, defiantly a very cute moment.

Final Words:

So it ends…yet not really. It seems pretty obvious if not for surely confirmed that there will be a third season, which I’m thrilled about. School Rumble overall has been an amazingly enjoyable series, this second season being no exception. Now, I know a lot of people are upset that there was no concrete conclusion to some of the open ended relationships between people, but I thought from the very beginning that there would not be any conclusion. Even if there was no third season I would still think that this one would end inconclusively. As I’ve said before this is not a serious romance anime, it is a comedy first and foremost. They use the relationships and the misunderstandings from them to fuel the comedy. I thought they did a great job of ending this overall, it seemed to have a nice feel to it as long as you weren’t expecting Harima to actually end up with someone. They made slight progress in showing some people get closer, yet there wasn’t anything concrete.

One thing that when looking back on it I really liked is how much they included side characters in this series. At the end of this episode when they were showing everyone in the class doing their own thing it reminded me of all the episodes that focused on some side characters. Even if the episodes didn’t’ focus on them, usually when the episode was broken down into three segments, one of them would have nothing to do with Tenma and Harima and so on, which I found rather interesting. We saw a lot with Karen, Imadori and Lala, there was a small segment about Sakano and Satsuki in the basketball bit, and the pervert guys. Everything together that went off the main track to deal with everyone in the class added to the show I think. It made the show more about the class itself.