As I originally suspected the second season of Chuunibyou (Crunchyroll) was sort of unnecessary. Strictly from a story-telling standpoint it didn’t add much to what had been said in the first season (Crunchyroll).

But if something is funny enough, that can be it’s own justification–and the second season is indeed very funny. I applaud the ability of the writers to keep the show laugh-out-loud funny for two seasons. That isn’t easy to do.


At the end of the first season they toned down the comedy with a heart-warming but tear-inducing sequence about how Rikka used fantasy play as a way to deal with the death of her father. But since at the end of that story she seemed to come to terms with her father’s death, might we not expect her to give up the fantasy stuff, or at least to compartmentalize it? (Yuuta and Shinka can turn off the chuunibyou more or less at will. For them it’s more like a hobby.)

Rikka remains in full chuunibyou mode and I think I understand why. It’s because she’s more than a few steps along the Autism Spectrum and finds it much easier to communicate about feelings using the language of heroic fantasy than using ordinary conversational Japanese. This causes problems because the language of heroic fantasy isn’t well-suited for that purpose. (Though actually conversational Japanese is even worse.)

This puts Yuuta’s behavior in a different perspective. If we don’t accept that Rikka is autistic then Yuuta’s indulgence of her childish behavior is probably bad for her. On the other hand if she is autistic then Yuuta is just recognizing that she has special needs and adjusting his communication style to accommodate her.

This isn’t the only anime series in which a high-functioning autistic girl gains a circle of friends who understand that she is special (without ever mentioning terms like “autism” or “Asperger’s Syndrome”) and act to help and protect her. Think of Chihayafuru or Nodame Cantabile. (But where are the shows about autistic boys?)

I get the impression that the anime is funnier than the original light novels. The characters who appear only in the anime (Kumin, Tooka and Dekomori) seem less realistic than the characters taken from the light novels–but they provide most of the really big laughs.

If so that’s an example of Kyoto Animation’s ability to get the most out of their source material. I don’t necessarily like everything that they do but they are a class act: a small studio that does only a few shows but tries hard to do a first-rate job on each one. If all the studios were like that we would have fewer anime series, but a lot more really good ones.