Review of Hyouka

So... imagine you're watching The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Except you get rid of all the supernatural elements and make the characters incredibly generic. That's what this show felt like. A "mystery" show about a class club that goes to the ends of the earth to solve the world's most mundane and nearly nonexistent mysteries, all because... well... the girl "just had to know"... A lot of the mysteries involve Japanese wordplay and writing structures, so its very difficult to follow along if you don't know the language. But even then, the answers just sometimes get pulled out of nowhere, so it's never really ashow like Conan where you can follow along and come to the conclusion before the characters do. You just sorta have to sit and watch the characters monologue for 30 minutes on how they figured it out without showing you. And like I said, the mysteries are very inconsequential, so it all sorta amounts to nothing at the end of each episode. The romance side of this show isn't that compelling either since Okeri is so aggressively determined to spend as little energy each day as possible for no explained reason to the point where he just snaps at anyone for engaging with him who wants him to... take part in the plot. It was just such a nothing sandwich with no memorable characters or interactions to speak of. The slightly longer run time for each episode only lessened my enjoyment, overall. I had no idea what to expect of this one, going into it. Kinda sad with what the end result wound up being.

4/10