Narenare -Cheer for you!-

Episode 5

I felt pretty cautious about the show's direction after last week's episode since I wasn't sure how much I liked the shift in perspective and how abruptly it pulled away from all of Nodoka's hangups after the first three episodes. Still, I wanted to be optimistic since I liked what those first few episodes had to offer and did not pass judgment until this new storyline ended. Now that it has, I can safely say it was disappointing and has me seriously worried about what to expect from the rest of the show.

After getting the rundown on Anna's situation from Nodoka, Kanata and the others devise a cheer routine to support the record store. This already feels a little wonky on its own. While I get that these girls want to support their friend, considering that this also largely involves the business of someone they don't know, it does feel like they're overstepping a little here. It certainly doesn't help that they end up doing the majority of this without Anna's knowledge, and considering they even end up going as far as registering for a local festival to do it, it feels like something they should have gotten her in on from the beginning. Anna only finds herself getting angrier about the whole situation as the friends she made at the shop aren't able to lend her much support, so she understandably doesn't react well when the girls propose their solution. Similar to resolving Kanata's situation, all it takes is a few words of encouragement from the others. Anna decides to go along with their plan, even knowing it isn't likely to do much.

As shaky as all that is, it's nothing compared to the actual resolution. When the day of the festival arrives, and the girls start their dance, Anna's friends from overseas also come to lend their support. While that may be a bit too cheesy for my tastes, it would be easy enough to handwave if that was the extent of it. What's a lot harder to handwave is that her friends are also popular music artists, and their presence brings a lot of traffic to YJ's shop. It's a level of convenience that turns the scene from heartwarming to ridiculous and more or less undermines this entire plot. Putting aside how clearly silly the very idea of this is, it also makes everyone involved seem pretty stupid since a couple of social media posts from these guys promoting the store probably could have solved this entire conflict. The only saving grace here is that the girls' cheer routine doesn't magically save the shop, but given how this turned out, it almost feels like it would have been the more believable option.

The real kicker here is that while YJ still contemplates closing shop, he keeps it open purely for Anna's sake. His solution for bringing in more customers is to…open up a café on the first floor, which, you know, isn't exactly a bad business decision, but also feels like one that probably should have occurred to him before things got this dire.

I don't like being this nitpicky about plot stuff since I don't think a story needs to have perfect logic to be effective, but this is such an outright bizarre resolution that it's hard not to. It feels way too simplistic for how messy of an issue the show was wrestling with, and while I was willing to give some benefit of the doubt when Kanata got over her yips condition in an equally convenient manner, seeing this overly neat solution here now has me worried that might have been a feature rather than a bug. Since all this wraps up without learning the details of what happened to Anna's dad, I want to maintain some hope that the show might do something more with that later, but even if it does, I'm not confident that it'll nail the execution. There's still plenty of time for this show to turn things around, so I'm not ready to write it off yet. But if this ends up being a sign of things to come, I'm not sure how much I want to keep cheering for this cheerleading show.

Rating:

Narenare -Cheer for you!- is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.