Hyouka’s Rose-coloured Romance

Hyouka is one of my all-time favourite anime series, and it’s one that I’ve spent a lot of time engaging with. Among the community it’s held in very high regard. However, at any given moment you don’t have to look far to find someone complaining about the allegedly ambiguous ending, decrying it as a disappointing end that was merely ‘baiting a romantic conclusion’. And this is something I firmly disagree with, both in the sense that it wasn’t senseless teasing, and that it was indeed romantic in nature.

With how ferociously and vocally people ship Oreki and Chitanda it’s understandable that people may go into it with the wrong impression about its contents, but it needs to be pointed out that Hyouka is not within the romance genre. Obviously I’m not denying that there are romance elements in the show, but it was never the sole focus. Yes there is the romance subplot, but that is merely a component in the larger tale about Oreki’s growth. Hyouka’s rose coloured finale serves as a milestone in the story where you can very clearly see the culmination of all the little character progressions Oreki and Chitanda had both been undergoing through the preceding episodes. The duo’s development throughout the series is intrinsically intertwined at every layer, and the end of episode 22 is where we finally see their raw emotions laid bare.

Hyouka is a series of subtleties and silent developments, it’s a series about reading between the lines to approximate the distance between two people. This design philosophy rings as true as it ever has in the finale. It’s not a loud and direct confession, as something like that would go against Hyouka’s very nature. Rather than an outward declaration, it’s an inward affirmation of love from each individual that beautifully showcases just how far they’ve come from the start. Instead of just a regular confession, it displays an extra degree of literary prowess by being written in a way that ties in all of their development up to this point and delivers its message in a way that I think is much more meaningful and unique than a generic confession end would have been.

Oreki begins the show as someone who wanted nothing more than to be free of trouble. He prided himself on his laziness and didn’t really care to show interest in anyone other than his best friend Satoshi who was outgoing enough to carry his half of the friendship by himself. It isn’t long before Chitanda enters the picture and begins sweeping through his life like a storm, constantly pulling him along by the hand as he begins to move increasingly further away from his ‘energy-saving’ mantra. It is through her influence that his growth is catalysed and he eventually ends up at the point where he’s most comfortable when Chitanda is beside him. For someone who previously would have just shrugged off anyone who hassled him, Chitanda becomes the one person he can’t ignore. He doesn’t acknowledge it until the very end, but Chitanda is the key figure in his life that becomes the door to the rose-coloured world that he seeks. The way her presence has triggered change in him is seen continuously throughout the series, such as episode 19 comprising solely of Chitanda and Oreki alone in the club room just playing around bouncing theories off each other and illustrating how deep their chemistry runs. Another example is episode 21 in which Oreki does something that would have been unthinkable at the start of the series and becomes legitimately mad at Satoshi for getting Chitanda hurt in the crossfire of his relationship troubles with Mayaka. Previously in the series Mayaka even mentioned how he was so lethargic he wasn’t even capable of anger, and this creates a brilliant juxtaposition to showcase how far he’s come since the series began.

During the doll festival in the final episode is where he hits the point that he realises how he feels about Chitanda. Once the march begins and she emerges in her formal attire, Oreki becomes entranced by her. He falls into a haze of desperate longing as he walks on, able to focus on nothing else but his sole desire to see Chitanda’s face. From an artistic standpoint Hyouka is a series mostly comprised of dull, earthy colours. This dreamlike sequence is the only time the colours are ever so bright and oversaturated, almost sickeningly so. Contrasting the vibrancy of the cherry blossoms here in the final episode with the way they looked in the very first, it’s clearly meant to convey the message that Chitanda is the one bringing colour to his grey world.

Having finally acknowledged his adoration of her, Oreki carries these emotions with him into the vivd pink sunset that sets the scene for the end of the anime. The brilliance of his character development is in how subdued it is; for as different as his worldview is at the end of the series, he’s still the same person. He’s not someone who would have immediately been able to confess the precious feelings that he’d only just gained for the first time in his life. But the fact that he in no uncertain terms acknowledges his love for Chitanda displays just how much he’s changed over the course of the series with her influence. And that’s the key message of this scene, it contextualises his romantic feelings as an integral part of the broader story of Oreki Houtarou’s incredibly human character arc.

Obviously Oreki’s character arc is much easier to observe due to his status as protagonist and POV character, but Chitanda’s arc is by no means something that should be overlooked.

In a way Chitanda is almost like an entirely different creature when compared to the rest of the cast. Right from the very beginning in episode 1, she’s introduced as Eru of the Chitanda clan with her status becoming one of the first details we learn about her character. As the esteemed heir to the old and powerful Chitanda family she approaches everything in earnest, giving her best effort to remain optimistic with the knowledge that every action she takes reflects back on the standing of her family. She treats everyone fairly and equal, or rather she maintains a certain level of emotional distance from them all.

Just like Oreki realised his feelings in episode 22, Chitanda becomes aware of them at the end of episode 18. Episode 18 entails Chitanda and Oreki going to the local library at Oreki’s behest to research a hunch he had about one of his middle school teachers, an act that was uncharacteristically active of him. After they leave the library and are about to part ways at the intersection, Chitanda queries his motivations with his answer leading her to see a new side of Oreki, and she feels something she’s never felt before, something she can’t put into words. For someone who had always treated everyone with a uniform equality, to find someone that she felt was different or special from the rest was something completely unfamiliar to her, something she needed time to understand and reconcile with.

This notion that Chitanda is constantly feeling the weight of her responsibilities as heir to her household bearing down on her is supported by the short story Even Though I’m Told I Now Have Wings, a piece taking place at some point after the events of the Hyouka anime finale. What I’m about to say spoils it a bit but I’d still definitely recommend reading it anyway since it’s probably my favourite part of Hyouka thus far.

Like I said, Chitanda always keeps up a constant front because of her family’s reputation, but in Even Though I’m Told I Now Have Wings she goes through a period of uncharacteristic pessimism and melancholy similar to the way she acted in the anime finale, for the first time failing to fulfil her obligations when she runs away from the county cultural festival that she was supposed to sing at.

After Oreki chases her down and finds her hidden away in a family friend’s shed a short bus trip away, she opens up to him once more and poses the question to him, “Even though I’m told I now have wings, what am I supposed to do?” In this short story Chitanda is told by her father that she no longer has to accept the position as family head if she instead wants to choose her own future, an event that completely shakes her world. For all her life her family had been like a cage binding her fate, but at the same time it was a place of refuge. With her father’s words, everything she had held as resolute was now beginning to crumble, and she was drowning under the suffocating weight of freedom.  Echoing what happened in the finale of the anime, when she takes a step back and thinks of herself not as the Chitanda heir but as a regular highschool girl then her energetic, optimistic vice fades and her anxieties about her future rear their heads anew.

And once again, the person around her when she lets down her emotional walls is none other than Oreki. Even Though I’m Told I Now Have Wings supports the previously mentioned idea that Oreki becomes the one person special to Chitanda. While everyone else in the story is foisting their expectations of a good performance befitting her family onto her, Oreki is the only one who actually pays close enough attention to her to notice the subtle, downcast change in her attitude. As a result of their visceral heart to heart conversation in the finale of the anime they close the distance between them just a little bit more, and this creates a tangible effect in Even Though I’m Told I Now Have Wings when Chitanda once again displays that the only person she’s willing to be completely open with in her moments of insecurity is Oreki.

With that in mind then, the significance of her role in the final scene is that she allows herself to be vulnerable around Oreki, when traditionally she was someone who internalised her individual worries. For someone who always had the air of a mysterious princess from the moon in how she carried herself so differently compared to the rest of the cast, the final scene of the show underneath that rose coloured sky is the first time she gets brought down to earth. After realising her feelings in episode 18, the following episodes show how she has become more romantically conscious of Oreki. In episode 19 she invites Oreki to come visit her uncle’s grave with her, and she gets embarrassed about having her face so close to Oreki’s despite never previously caring. In episode 20 she invites Oreki to visit the shrine together because she wanted to show off her kimono to him, and in episode 21 she admits to him that she would have given him valentines chocolate if not for her family’s traditions. In episode 22, this smorgasbord of fleeting feelings boils down to her one, simple wish – “I want Oreki to look at me”. This sentiment drives her actions in the finale, momentarily taking down her emotional walls in order to show Oreki everything that she is. Not as the Chitanda successor, but as Eru the normal girl standing before him. Not as a confession, but as an affirmation.

With all that said, I think the ending sequence is the pinnacle of the Hyouka anime, and one of the strongest endings I’ve ever seen in media in general. It’s the moment that best captures the true essence of Hyouka in all its totally mundane extravagance, weaving together every interaction the pair had during the series to create a brilliantly understated dialogue about how they’ve helped each other to grow beyond the confines of the person they were at the beginning. The claim that it’s just unfulfilling and inconclusive teasing is one that I think severely fails to truly understand the complexity and depth of the deuteragonists throughout the series. Put simply, the rose-coloured finale is Hyouka in its purest form – both extraordinary and extra ordinary all in the same instant; meekly reaching their hands out in pursuit of the rose-coloured world –  like little birds remembering the warmth of spring.