You got that damn right, boy.
This anime is not even in my blogging list this season, but I decided to make an exception and write a blog post particularly about this episode.
I often commented how I dislike the fact that most of our movies are “trapping” younger generations to some mislead assumption about reality. Just count, in all the romance movies you have watched, how many of them have this “poor person met his/her soul-mate, a rich and/or powerful one, and they live happily ever after”? This generic theme is particularly popular for Asian movies, creating (and preserving) the same understanding from generations to generations that if you live a miserable life, lots of tears, financially screwed, then your solution is to marry someone rich.
Or, try a different theme, “try hard, and work hard, then you can achieve WHATEVER your dream, no matter how high it is”. This theme provides the opposite direction of mislead belief. This will bring younger generations to think that all of them can actually achieve whatever they dream of by working as hard as they can. While in reality, in short, few of them will indeed manage to reach their dream while the other vast majority fail. When they do fail, many will stay crushed, cause those illusionary world they have watched since childhood did not prepare them to stand up again after a failure.
Why does it have to be one extreme or the other? Just get a rich spouse and all your problem will disappear. Or, work like crazy and you can achieve whatever your dream is. Why can’t we teach the younger generation the possibility of failure and how to stand up again after that failure?
While work hard will most probably get us somewhere, that “somewhere” is not always the location that we dream of. I am the type of person who believe in work smart rather than work hard. I believe that we should dream high, but should not foolishly stick into that one dream. We need to be flexible. Dream high, work smart, then measure ourselves to some realistic dreams, achievable goal, then strike to it. In the end, we get better chance of feeling the happiness of accomplishment.
Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo started off as an anime with lighthearted storyline. As they progress, they do a good job displaying the struggle of some young people trying to achieve their dreams. And this episode, we get to see how those dreams are NOT achieved. They fail, miserably. Despite years of hard work. And that’s just how the world really revolves. Unfair.
