Even if it was just a ploy to keep the viewer interested, I love cats, so it worked for me. In fact, without the cats the majority of this episode would've been a pain to sit through. I love slice-of-life and have really been looking forward to this show, but the majority of the first half was a snooze-fest. There's also the problem that for most of the episode, these boys...didn't really act like boys. Since I'm a girl, I can't exactly talk about the nuances of male relationships, but all the teenage boys that I've known would rather be caught dead than brush their friend's hair and talk about how they acted in preschool. In the show's defense, the "cute girls doing cute things" genre is not exactly an accurate representation of how girls act in school either, but for a series where the main selling point is that they're guys, not girls, I was expecting them to act much more like guys. There was also a bit of a problem with the preschool flashback scenes that occurred throughout the episode, since the "kids" acted exactly like their high school counterparts and not like preschoolers, which was jarring experience for me, having worked with kids. On top of this, there's the fact that J.C. Staff is animating this show, and they're already making dubious decisions on how to spend the animation budget. A CG basketball? Really? For most of the opening half, I was expecting the as-yet-to-be-introduced fifth character to show up and break the show out of its monotonous conversation, but that never happened. Instead, the episode focuses on finding Yuki (one of the twins) a club to join. And that's it. Nothing else happens in the episode. With all of that said, I think that this show still holds promise. There's the aforementioned cats, which work as metaphors for what the characters are saying and thinking or as a stand-in for what is happening. For example, when Kaname drags Yuki off to look at clubs there's a shot of a person holding a cat by the back of its neck. The humor in this episode also worked really well for me, even though most of it was based of off the fact that Yuki doesn't feel like doing anything despite being excellent at everything. There's also a hint of something going on between Kaname and the teacher (not in that way, pervs), and there's a girl who makes frequent appearances throughout the episode, yet we never see her face. Basically, I think that this was a "status quo" episode, setting up the characters and how their friendship works before dropping in the new character, who will hopefully change things up a bit. I think that this could've been done in one episode, but I guess we'll have to see how they're going to present it before deciding if this was the right move or not. In any case, despite the problems with this first episode, there's still a certain charm about this series and I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. Images from Crunchyroll.com.
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