Unlike many of my peers, I didn’t find High School to be a hellish experience. It certainly had its downs as well as its ups, but on the whole I’d consider those years to have left a positive mark on my life. Even with that perspective, though, Anime High School seems like an idealized dream. Even when the students aren’t learning to be super-powered fighters of some sort, they’ve got busy social calendars and, of course, the charm of club activities.
Not every character, however, fills out some after-school time meeting with like-minded friends, however. Some are members of the “Going Home Club”, and are thus cheerfully inclined to depart at the closing bell and return to their residence posthaste. This is what main character Natsuki Andou thought she was getting into when she said she intended to join the Going Home Club…
We meet our main character with the ahoge that will pierce the heavens on the first day of high school, right as clubs are recruiting. Talking with a friend, she utters the fateful line to said friend’s horror and another nearby student’s joy, thus finding herself roped into a club called the “Going Home Club”, which is full of bizarre eccentrics: Two halves of Meiya Mitsurugi in the forms of crazy fighting girl Botan Oohagi (who looks the part) and crazy rich girl Claire Kononoe, the club president Sakura Domyouji who seems normal other than being mad enough to be part of this, and our new recruits – Natsuki herself and fellow first-year Karin Touno, the super-girly one.
The Going Home Club’s activities are stated to be having fun, and seem to be cute girls doing cute things, taking random detours on their way home, surrendering all sanity, and making fourth wall jokes. The show is a collection of mostly pretty short vignettes.
And, honest to Haruhi, that’s the show. Constant disconnected skits making use more or less of the strong girl, the rich girl, the ringleader, the girly girl, and the comedic straight-man with no real continuity, held together by addressing the fourth wall (sometimes even for entire sketches) and cameo appearances by the Eggplant Seals from Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle. There’s a degree to which I could cut the summary part of the review at that.
There are some more involved sketches, like two thirds of an episode parodying Yugioh, or half of an episode pitching retools for the series in case it doesn’t catch on as a comedy show (recall, fourth wall jokes are pretty constant here). Later, they spend about half an episode on a heartwarming story about how Sakura and Botan met and formed the club, with no jokes other than lampshading it right at the end. Sure. The final episode even goes all out, doing a rapid-fire round of even smaller sketches than normal, from 3-ish per episode to north of ten.
There are some running gags, but by in large there’s no real plot or continuity to speak of. Sure if you happen to see any of the returns of “The Demon King” before being first introduced to the girls riffing on the Schubert piece, you might wonder why, but in terms of actual logical satisfaction you could pretty much watch the middle ten episodes in any order and be more or less fine, because there’s not any real progression or character growth, as befits its nature deploying constant gags.
This does give me an opportunity to address Fourth Wall humor and say… I’m not against it. Fourth Wall jokes are some of the most destructive stuff to add where they don’t belong, but in this show? It’s entirely stupid stetups and quick retorts, so there’s nothing that’s lost or broken by the characters acknowledging that they’re in a show. Instead, it just adds to the surreal nature of it all.
So, what’s our breakdown? The girls are cute, they do cute things, the staff makes admirable use of what was clearly a shoestring budget (they even mock their own budget saving at various points), and some of the setups are even a little funny.
Even though I did it, because I’m a reviewer, I feel like this isn’t a show to just sit down and watch the whole way through. It’s something to poke at when you’re feeling in need of a little levity. I rarely felt the urge to laugh, watching it… but it will make you feel better, just indulging in a little comedic lapse of common sense for about half an hour.
In a lot of ways, I see this as comparable to Magical Sempai. Now, that was one of my older reviews, and it did have play that Chronicles of the Going Home Club doesn’t have. It had fanservice in the extreme and a little pathos, while Chronicles just has Cute Girls Doing Cute Things and Fourth Wall jokes aside. But the idea of taking several short gags and just stringing them together without much rhyme or reason works in both cases.
And, on the whole… I think Chronicles of the Going Home Club is a little bit better. It’s more true to the essence of what it’s trying to be, which is a straight-up gag comedy. It revels in its plotless nature, and expands its joke horizons to all sorts of odd parodies and setups. Sempai is more focused and takes itself more seriously, which would be a good thing if it weren’t for the fact that it can’t really deliver all that much that Chronicles doesn’t.
All the same, I gave Sempai a C+ and while I feel like Chronicles is a little bit stronger, it’s not enough to promote it into a different grade bracket, so C+ is what we get here as well. I almost thought to put it down as a Pass (grading this one Pass/Fail) but I’ve been trying to avoid doing that except in really flagrant situations.
While I normally do Spoiler reviews, I do them primarily so what I have to talk about can be understood, and secondarily as proof of work. There’s no reason for me, faced with this show, to go through every little sketch they do. If you’re at all interested, go ahead and check it out. It’s not much, but it’s honest comedy.