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Forum - View topicHoney and Clover, Then and Now
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StarDango
Posts: 92 |
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Really sweet article and I do agree. I didn’t really get Honey and Clover at first, but after rewatching it recently I see it as a story that encapsulates that strange time in your early adulthood. Where you’re an adult who can make your own decisions but you’re still in school or doing minor jobs and finding yourself, so you don’t have anything to really commit too.
My favorite part of the series is when Yuuta just jumps on his bike and goes cross country. Because it’s then where he gives himself a chance to self-reflect and really figure himself out, away from the pressures of school and heartbreak. Because I actually do know people who did just that and I wish I was brave enough to do the same. It’s one of the things I appreciate about anime that choose to focus on college, like this one or Genshiken. Because the cast are usually a mix of people who have figured out their adult life and are moving forward, and those who are still stuck in “student mode” and unsure of what the future holds. And I appreciate more how the series handles different kinds of love, especially unrequited love. Not perfect or ideal for everybody, but I really like how it talks about how people cope with unrequited feelings. A whole essay can be written about that. |
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FuzzyDave
 Posts: 59 |
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Yes, very nice article! I always enjoy seeing older anime discussed, especially when it's something I haven't see like this one - added to my watchlist
David |
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all-tsun-and-no-dere
ANN Reviewer
Posts: 607 |
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Heh, I didn't incorporate into the article because it was after college when I was 25, but I also did a big month-long bike trip around the perimeter of Shikoku. It was more planned/less on impulse than Takemoto's, though. |
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Swissman
Posts: 768 Location: Switzerland |
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I saw Honey & Clover for the first time in my early thirties when I was still a university student, so I was more inclined towards the show's deep sense of nostalgia and the bittersweetness of unrequited love than the angst the different characters were feeling. It reminded me of my experience as an exchange student at a japanese university half a decade earlier when I was enrolled in a music club and bonded with its members.
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Dop.L
Posts: 715 Location: London |
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Honey and Clover is a show which will always have a special place in my heart as it was the first anime I watched which wasn't SF, Fantasy, or Horror themed, but it was the first show I watched about regular people (albeit Hagu and Morita being very talented) trying to find their way in the world, with the help of their friends.
While Takemoto's love doesn't really work out, it's still a vital part of his life and a fond memory he'll always keep, centred on that one time they all searched for a four leaf clover. It's a show I'll always come back to. |
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Shay Guy
 Posts: 2148 |
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And for me (mostly unfamiliar with H&C FWIW), this essay was a very strong reminder of that, because I couldn't help but think about how very different my own college experience was. I was assured beforehand that I'd be happier than in high school, but I never made friends. Not one. There were, I dunno, maybe two or three people I had more than one pleasant conversation with? My main social outlet was the anime club I was in for about four years of my time there, and that (A) was something that I could often spent a full meeting of without talking to anyone, (B) included more social aggravation than enjoyable personal connection, sometimes over things like the club breaking their own rules against showing fansubs of licensed shows, and (C) ended so catastrophically for me that I genuinely struggle to imagine a more cruelly humiliating way it could've gone. (EDIT: Also, I don't think I ever learned a single other member's name.) That "about four years" is out of seven, by the way, because even though I wasn't working, I never did manage to maintain a full course load for a full semester like a normal, competent, respectable student. That's probably my second greatest shame of my college experience, after the abject disgrace of failing to make it to my classes on time in the dorm and having to move back into my parents' house to commute. College destroyed my self-confidence, and it's never really recovered. At least I graduated. I guess there's that. Pity it didn't lead to something better afterward -- but then, college itself was supposed to be "something better". I dunno. I've mentioned before that "seishun" is my least favorite Japanese word, and I guess I've gotten weary of anime and manga's tendency to idealize adolescence and to a lesser extent the adjacent life periods, ultimately sending the message that nothing is more important than having a happy and fulfilling youth that you'll be able to look back on fondly later, and if you don't accomplish that, you've failed at life and everything else is just killing time until the end. Even reading real people's words about how fondly they remember those time periods, or casual remarks showing that yeah of course they have a functioning social life like any normal person their age, feels alienating. Last edited by Shay Guy on Mon Feb 06, 2023 11:37 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Top Gun
 Posts: 4603 |
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I'm not sure if it helps at all Shay Guy, but you're not the only person with that type of perspective on those years. I only had one or two close friends in college, along with a larger pool of general acquaintances, but I didn't really keep in touch with them for long after school ended. (I've always been abysmal at maintaining personal connections after whatever social/life-phase event brought us together ends.) I generally enjoyed high school and did very well in it, but even then I didn't have much in the way of what you'd call true friends. Like you, it took me longer than my four years on-campus to finish my degree, though in my case it was because of a gradual slide into what became some pretty significant untreated anxiety and depression. College demolished my self-confidence too, in that I watched what I dreamed of doing slowly crumble into dust in front of me, and almost fifteen years down the line I'm still trying to figure out just what I should be doing with my life. And I agree that anime's infatuation with romanticizing school years really starts to wear on you, though I suspect no small part of that is due to the traditional salaryman expectation of literally selling your soul to a corporation for decades. If that was what adulthood looked like for most people, I'd probably idealize the memories of that time in my life too.
Now all of that being said, Honey and Clover is a series I've been curious about for a very long time, despite it not being in my usual genre wheelhouse. I remember some online friends talking about it soon after I got into anime, and in a market oversaturated with "high school kids do X," series set in college or young adulthood are vanishingly rare. Lord knows I loved Genshiken for that. Honestly, my biggest stumbling block may be that I majored in the hard sciences, so I was about as far away from the experience of an art student as it's possible to get. 
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enurtsol
 Posts: 14795 |
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Half of the shenanigans we got away with in univ, ya can't get away with today since there's damn online cameras everywhere now!
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MumboToken
Posts: 1 |
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What a wonderful surprise to see an article on Honey and Clover. Thanks for sharing your experiences with this anime over the years. It's memorable to me for the reasons you gave. Homerun!
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