The final OAV is done from the view point of both Eba sisters, Yuzuki and Rin. It takes place in the time period when Haruto and Yuzuki have broken up due to the strain of continuing their long distance relationship while Haruto is working away from Tokyo. We find Yuzuki, on the path to being an old maid, teaching her students poetry. Through the poetry she works to try and console a student who finds herself in a similar situation Yuzuki was once in; a love triangle involving someone with a terminal illness. At the same time Rin is having conflicting emotions relating to a senior employee she works with at a marketing firm. Both women have to figure out if they can be true to themselves and act like they want to when they haven't always been honest and forthright with their actions before.
With all the hate I spew on KNIM, and it does degenerate a lot throughout its looong run to recycled and pandered bullshit, this final OAV was really well done and offered a fresh vantage point to the entire series. It made me re-imagine the series in a new way. I think it could have been a really well done series if it had followed the feel and idea of this OAV, from view point of Yuzuki instead of Haruto. Unfortunately in order to understand what’s going on in this OAV you would of have to have, at a minimum, watched the anime then picked up the manga from that point and read it until the end, which still seems like a waste of my time, even though you skip out on 80 or so chapters with the anime. It made me think in what way the entire story could have been better. So here it goes.
Take the way they crafted flash backs into the anime to fill in the gaps left by skipping the first 80 or so chapters of the manga. Flesh out the important points of the entire series, cutting out whole arcs that tended to be useless. Essentially every single throw away female character that shows up for a small arch as a point of drama between Haruto and Yuzuki when they are adults can be removed. Like the overtly sexual next door neighbor, the college student/manga artist and the girl who was competing with Haruto in the hunt for employment. You can cut out the continuous back and forth between Nanami and Haruto in the first half of the manga, some of that was just a waste of time as the original point was already in place with their relationship and only needs to be visited once or twice. Do the entire thing from Yuzuki's perspective instead of Haruto's. Have her internal dialog be a center piece. I think this way you build a more solid drama dealing with her feelings as opposed to Haruto's incessant indecision and waffling.
This could either be done as a feature length film or a short TV/OVA series and could be really interesting and mature. But, I understand that KNIM was designed for the adolescent male audience and therefore the story was driven from their point of view. But with this last OVA we saw that Seo-sensei is capable of a well done and mature romantic drama.
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