Hana-saku Iroha a.k.a. Life's a Bitch: The Anime

This is my first attempt at one of these things so please, bear that in mind prior to the criticism. Do not expect great detail, but do expect just viewer thoughts. If you wanna give some advice for a nooblet blogger, please feel free to do so. Otherwise, here goes:

Hana-saku Iroha bears what seems to be a pretty good resemblance of what happens to families who's figurative shit hits the fan and said shit forces them to up and move.

Except instead of the parent being the responsible one and handling things as they should, they dump said child on another family member and tell them 'Your problem now', so to speak.

Our female lead, Ohana, is 16 years old. Upon being hit with the news that she's gotta up and get the fuck out of the apartment she shares with her mother so some deadbeat hit with a fuckton of debt can live there, surprisingly enough the girl takes it with stride. From what I got, it seemed 'anything' to change up what seemed to be a 'boring' life for her was welcome.

And she got what she was looking for, but not 'exactly' what she was looking for. Rather than land in the lap of some better off relative who can take care of Ohana, she ends up in the care of her grandmother at an Inn out in the country. Meeting various cast members, from her mother's younger brother to same aged co-workers, it becomes clear that this life is likely going to be significantly more difficult than the other. She's not just gonna go to school and live out her life, she's gotta WORK at her home as well.

Within the first 24 hours or so of being there, she manages to have one significant enough fuck up to encourage the physical abuse (mind you, it's just a slap across the face) towards her roommate and co-worker Minko, who's already expressed a hatred for her due to Ohana's unintentional pulling up of the wild garlic Minko was growing. Needless to say, if Ohana had a friendship meter for Minko, it would probably be a -30 in score right now.

One thing I want to note that I've gotten from this show so far is that it's managed to properly depict one specific thing:

Manual labor jobs, while exhilarating and satisfying in the sensation of accomplishment it gives you, are often monotonous, tough as fuck and require a slave-like loyalty to the customer. Essentially, anyone working a 5 days a week kind of job will easily find a sense of something to relate on here.

The visuals are nothing mind blowing, but they're consistently well animated and lack any sort of 'bad animation' in general, showing that perhaps PA Works has stepped up a tad thanks to the surge of potential sales revenue from Angel Beats!, thus leaving us with a 'cleaner' show.

But most people are wondering just what is the general way to describe it. Is it going to be a soap opera? Probably. But unlike the kind of soap opera's we're familiar with, it's more likely that it will be a 'dramedy' more than anything else. The level of humor is nothing revolutionary in terms of writing, but it provides a nice bit of comic relief and lighthearted/positive outlook on the current situation and often is just a bit of amusing commentary on the scene present.

Hana-saku is definitely going to take some time to get going. But for now, I'm expecting it to fall into either the drama or 'coming of age' sort of show. It's no forced drama either, but it's nothing too srs bzns yet. But for ya dramafags out there (and you know who you are), go ahead and give this show a watch, you'll probably enjoy it. At the least, this probably will take less time to 'get going' than Under the Innocent Sky will take to get on a roll.