Going into the final two episodes for the second season of Gin no Saji, and there has been a good amount of serious and seriously funny moments in the season that stick clearly in my mind. After the cliffhanger that was episode 9, it is always a pretty jarring experience to be greeted with a far more peaceful moment of Hachiken and Mikage being dropped back off at school. Although there was an actual reveal of what happened between the Mikage family and Hachiken, it was an interesting approach, timeline wise, consider the context clues that left the viewer predicting what happened -- I actually thought the event might of been much worse, but that was stomped pretty swiftly; and we never got the real answer until the end of the episode, which is more interesting than just continuing it in a linear fashion.
Before the reveal, what we did know was that the horses would be sold regardless, and Mikage was starting to take on studying to get into a university. So the focus was Hachiken helping Mikage in her efforts, as he has stated in previous episodes. The more interesting bit about this is the fact that Hachiken finally has learned to not spread himself so thin and focus on the more important things first.
Usually in the case of an event like someone asking for a favor that no one is willing to do, Hachiken would just eventually cave to the pressure of feeling back. In this episode, that is not the case; we saw Hachiken simply say no because he wanted to help Mikage to the best of his abilities and the senior, who asked, accepted his answer like anyone would with no real backlash. Really, it's the more subtle moments of character development that always feel the best, especially if it's the one personality trait that bugged you the most; plus Hachiken ends up being more helpful in the long run if he can just commit to a single task wholeheartedly, compared to overexerting himself like before.
The other thing that Hachiken did that he wouldn't normally do is ask for help from his family. Knowing that his brother is the one that actually did get into university, it would be helpful to Mikage to have his brother's notes as references. So, for Mikage's sake, Hachiken begrudgingly called up his brother and ended up getting told that his notes are back at home; this is where the lead into the next episode becomes more interesting. Hachiken is once again pushed into a situation that doesn't sit right with him, and it is up to him to actually do something about it. So in the style of his own personality, he goes and pushes to get it over and done with.
With an episode that seemed pretty focused on assisting Mikage in her dream -- and really just the real world versus dreams centric couple of episodes -- it touched a lot on a simultaneous character development of both Mikage and Hachiken, but mostly Hachiken. And it was all just grounded in trying to do something risky and seeing how thing go from there. Rather than just trying to predict what might happen, the characters are trying their best to do something for either themselves or their friends.
With the previous episode displaying Hachiken's development more implicitly, this final one was far more explicit. Right at the begin of the episode, Hachiken bumps into his middle school classmates and basically explained what his school life is like in a high school that focuses on agriculture. You could say that those kids, who explicitly said how much Hachiken has changed since middle school, are almost the same knowledge-wise as his own parents since the day he moved into Ezonoo -- considering how little Hachiken actually talks to his parents.
When Hachiken does return home, and grabs Shingo's notes, he gets greeted by the very familiar angry face back in the hospital -- his father. Soon enough this leads into a rather awkward dinner between Yuugo and his parents.
One comment from Yuugo's father quickly escalated, rightfully so considering his father just basically said that if you fail once you are marked as a failure forever. And once again, Yuugo showed his improved self off by actually standing up to his father. Yuugo handle himself well and what I basically got out of it is similar to what episode ten presented, you can't give up after one fail, considering a fail is just a marker of where you need to improve.
And on the note of Yuugo's father; I was one that, prior to actually getting a feel for what kind of character he was, gave him a lot a slack. Lets just say that after a second go around, he isn't one to hold punches and it feels like Yuugo's father does this almost as his own twisted way of motivating people. It isn't the best method, and probably just ends up getting people to stop in their tracks, but based one his attire I would say this is how a strictly business-oriented man would deal with most types of some problems -- very rigidly and emotion free.
Really, it's just hard to believe that a character could be that uncaring for no reason whatsoever. That is just my best guess, it might be wrong and that just fine, but I think Yuugo's dad is more playing a villain in order to push his son to what he believes to be the correct path.
Getting back to school, Yuugo's mother ends up making a surprise visit and Yuugo ends up up show her around. Like I said in connecting his middle school classmate with his parents, Yuugo's mother never knew what he was doing in the agriculture school -- even after him being there for about half a year. If anything, this was a turning point between Yuugo and his mother, just like how he stood up to his father. Plus it was déjà vu of how Yuugo reacted when he first entered into Ezonoo and thought every food was great and fresh, even the ones he eventually found out how it was made -- for example the eggs and now the yogurt.
To wrap up this episode, and the full season itself, going into it I had quite the list in my first impressions and it felt like the anime touch on a majority of them. So the season was really satisfying for me, from finally learning about Yuugo's parents to Mikage and Yuugo deepening their relationship together. Even if both seasons end up being eleven episode, it just felt like that is the right amount of time needed to get the point across. The new anime smell has worn off a long time ago for Silver Spoon, but this is still one of the anime I've enjoyed just watching in quite awhile, and I am looking forward to the next season for sure.
