Here I go, reviewing another Slice of Life show that doesn’t really have much of a plot to spoil. The idea of Blend-S is that a girl, Maika, wants to get a part-time job so she can save up the money to study abroad because she loves everything foreign. However, her employment chances are hurt by her meek demeanor and intense resting death glare. Despondent, she visits Cafe Stile where the manager, an eccentric foreign goofball, at once falls head over heels for Maika. Even once his other employees knock a little sense into him, an offer of employment still stands, because Cafe Stile is a character cafe, where the waitresses act out particular types, and Maika’s absolutely withering unintentional glare makes her the perfect call to become the cafe’s new character: a vicious sadist! Which is, of course, about the farthest thing from what she really is.
And, to an extent, that’s the show. We
meet the quirky cast of Cafe Stile including Kaho (Tsundere on the
clock, kind of bubbly gamer girl off it), Mafuyu (The imuto/little
sister character who looks the part but is actually a sour, jaded
woman past twenty) and latecomers Miu (The onee-san/big sister
character who plays things maybe a bit too provocative because she’s
an erotic doujinshi author) and Hideri (the cute Idol character who
is actually a boy). They even eventually adopt a big friendly dog
and name it Owner. Along the way, the Manager tries to strike up a
relationship with Maika (at what’s a kind of creepy age gap if you
think too much about it, but he’s not really portrayed as
substantially older), Maika tries to come to terms with the fact that
her sadist character means bad service is good service, Kaho and the
chef have a cute budding thing, and we get plenty of incidents of
Maika usually inadvertently torturing the customers and the customers
loving it.
Some highlights are a competition to
make a new menu item where Maika produces a massively screwed up
parfait with all the wrong but right-looking ingredients (salt
instead of sugar, hot sauce for berry syrup, and so on) but her
customers, gluttons for punishment that they are, love it enough to
carry her to victory. The cafe staff goes to the beach, because you
can’t have a low-key sort of anime like this without a beach episode.
Mafuyu tutors Kaho and actually forms something of a positive bond
unlike her normal sourpuss ways. The crew goes skiing and there are
high hopes for a Manager-Makia relationship upgrade that doesn’t
happen.
Not since Flying Witch have I had a show with so little of a plot. The closest thing Blend-S has to a real sense of progress and motion is in the relationships, the obvious one between the Manager and Maika and the more low-key but very well done implications between Kaho and the chef. But the Manager’s romance is played entirely for laughs. She gushes over foreign things, he gushes over her and her beautiful black hair, both of them miss anything resembling a point, rinse, repeat.
The beta romance (though it is worth
noting it is never referred to as such or made explicit that there is
anything or any intent of anything there; they just have excellent
chemistry that does at times feel romantic rather than simply
friendly) is more artful, setting those characters up with a number
of quiet scenes divorced from others where they get a chance to talk
and the fact that they really do seem to understand each other when
no one else does shines through. But it is a very second-string
implications-only sort of thing. As good as the chemistry can be, it
wouldn’t surprise me at all if they didn’t end up being made a thing
at any point, just because of how the treatment goes.
Without getting into the nitty gritty
of every episode, which is not something I generally want to do, I
think I’ve said my piece. There are just a couple other topics to
address.
The first is the humor. Blend-S walks
a thin line between the cartoonish and silly and the common and
relatable in terms of what it makes funny. Most of the interactions
between the staff are more on the reasonable end, while the ones with
the customers or Maika’s family are more on the wild and zany end.
In some ways, scenes from Blend-S remind me of Monty Python sketches;
they’re funny because they’re absurd, and defy conventional reason
while still having their own accurate internal logic. And like
Python sketches, they usually if not always just sort of start and
stop on their own, rather than having a comedic setup and a
punchline. They aren’t telling jokes, they’re showing us something
that happens to be funny.
That said, Blend-S is naturally more
restrained than Monty Python, having a specific cast of characters,
continuity, and a well-defined earthly setting. This isn’t exactly
wrong, but it does clamp down on the possibilities. People in
Blend-S can be a little on the weird and wacky side, but they can
never go to the full lengths of moon logic that Python characters
can. For instance, after it’s revealed that Maika’s hair is very
thin and delicate and she’s somewhat embarrassed by how stringy it
can be if let down, the Manager gets her a bottle of nice conditioner
from overseas that should help. Maika is entranced by the bottle,
given that it’s foreign and covered in foreign letters and all, and
it’s later revealed that instead of using the conditioner, Maika had
the bottle placed in her family shrine so it could be preserved and
admired (an act that comes off as somewhat similar to putting
something on the mantle in western societies). The Manager,
deflated, asks her to please just use it normally, and the scene cuts
to something else. This is somewhat absurd, but it’s absurd like a
kid pledging to not wash one of their hands after their crush touches
it. You can kind of accept that while not particularly sane, it’s
something that could happen in our reality.
Contrast that with the famous Cheese
Shop or Dead Parrot sketches. While these take place in settings not
dissimilar from the cafe of Blend-S (the Cheese Shop in particular)
in that they deal with customer interaction, the scenarios that occur
are not just ones that would be kind of weird, but ones that would be
downright insane, that we wouldn’t accept as actually happening in
our world and thus wouldn’t care to see out of something with
consistent characters the way Blend-S has consistent characters.
Blend-S’s way is more appropriate for what the show is, but it still
doesn’t stand quite as tall.
Speaking of characters, they’d be the
other topic, because I feel like a lot of the characters are kind of
painfully single-noted. The Manager and Maika, despite being the
leads, suffer the worst from this. The Manager has one gag: he’s a
Japanophile with a particular love for black-haired Japanese girls
like Maika. That’s it. He doesn’t really get much if any other
serious development. Maika has two gags: she has her death glare,
and she geeks out over anything foreign. That’s honestly all you
need to know about her character and all you learn across the vast
majority of her scenes. We don’t get a lot of little moments with
her, or heartfelt moments, and it’s a shame because she is the main
character and could use a little more love. Hideri and Miu are
pretty similar, where we never really explore them. Kaho is better,
showing at least a little dimensionality, but I think the award for
best character in the show goes to Mafuyu of all people, despite the
fact that she only really opens up in the episode where she’s
tutoring Kaho. She’s the only character we get to see a legitimate
other side to, even if only for a bit. This despite pretty much
every character having their “work face” as well as their private
selves.
On the whole, since this is really a
Slice of Nothing show like Flying Witch, it makes sense to grade it
Pass-Fail like Flying Witch. I guess I was entertained for a whole
season worth of the thing, so it’s a Pass… but I don’t think I
recommend it as strongly as I do Flying Witch, because we understand
and explore less in exchange for getting some mild and kind of
watered down comedy. Blend-S is not a bad show, but it’s not an
impressive show in any regard. Take from that what you will.