True Tears - Episode 1 & 2 (First Impressions)

true-tears-ep1-scr1 — This is not exactly the reaction he wanted from her.

For a while now, I wanted to watch True Tears, PA Works’s first production before they produced other anime such as Canaan, Angel Beats and the now airing Hanasaku Iroha. While the latter having a few similarities since Mari Okada worked on both series, the focus is primarily on the love triangle that slowly develops with Shinichiro and the two girls, Hiromi and Noe.

true-tears-ep1-scr2 — Hiromi's reaction to him walking in is completely unexpected. I thought she would have freaked out and call him a pervert as usual.

From the first episode, everything starts off gradually. Shinichiro Nakagami is an ordinary high school student who likes to draw. Since his father’s friend passed away, Hiromi, who he has knew her since elementary school have moved to live in the same house. Since then, she acted completely different from her cheerful personality and he starts to feel uneasy about it.

From the first glimpse of Hiromi, I think that living with the Nakagami’s is one of the reasons she behaves differently. She believes that she is part of the family and is unable to show the same feelings for him as she did from her childhood. This baffles me since they are not blood related and still feel separated. However, I believe that his somewhat broken relationship with his mother as shown with her opening the rejection letter from the publisher may tell something later on in the series. Nonetheless, she changes in the second episode as she interacts with him a bit more since he becomes friends with Noe and thinks that he is hiding something.

true-tears-ep2-scr1 — From the meeting, it's obvious that Noe and Hiromi aren't going to like each other.

When Shinichiro met Noe for the first time, she has shown herself as a fascinating girl. Sure she was a bit harsh at first because he teased her is beside the point. Compared to Hiromi, she is spunky, cheerful, and cute. She also has a fondness for her chickens that she even climbs up to trees just to get berries. Yet, she doesn’t have the ability to cry when a raccoon killed one of her chickens. This is because of something from her grandmother’s passing away as hinted with a picture of her in the second episode. To regain this ability, she gives him the task to capture the tears from someone special. While it looks straight forward, it’s actually more complicated than it looks. He needs to take the tears from Hiromi and not his own. Through Hiromi’s meeting of Noe, there is already a lot of tension between them from the start as they both have feelings for him. I foresee that this love triangle is going to make it increasingly difficult for him to express his feelings to the girl he loves. We just have to wait and see how this plays out in the end.

From the first two episodes, the development with the girls and Shinichiro will happen along the way. Besides that, the animation looks gorgeous even though it’s already surpassed with Hanasaku Iroha. Either way, it will be interesting how he will handle his feelings towards the girl he likes and hopefully the shippers won’t go up with arms from his decision (they already did, so no spoilers please).