It’s bad of me, I know, but I didn’t even finish episode 1 of Hanayamata. I was feeling quite favorably inclined towards a series about Japanese dance because I enjoyed Aki no Kanade so much, but this isn’t quite what I was looking for. For one thing it takes Hanayamata forever to get round to the actual dancing part. It hasn’t even happened yet in episode 1 and who knows when it will take place. Instead all the time is taken up by the heroine Naru whining on about how not-special she is and how much she wants to be a fairy princess and on and on. I know she’s 14 and that’s pretty much par for the course at that age, but it doesn’t make it any less annoying to watch.
There aren’t any other likeable characters to root for either. Based on the preview of episode 2 her friend Yaya-chan is probably going to turn jealous and clingy before being rehabilitated. The American Hana is just your stereotypical blonde, hyper Western otaku that you come across from time to time in anime these days. It would have been pretty interesting if she had indeed turned out to be something otherworldly like in Naru’s imagination, but no she’s just another weeaboo.
And what’s with all that blushing? It should be possible to set an anime in a girls’ school without having them always blushing at each other and idolizing the other girls and on and on with the yuri overtones. Long story short, halfway through episode 1 of Hanayamata I realized there was no dancing, there was a lot of whining and blushing and there were no likeable characters, so I’m going to bail while the getting is good. Scratch another item off my backlog!