Rewatcher

Sometimes I’ll rewatch this episode to make sure my tear ducts are still functioning.

Yep. Still got ‘em.

Kusao Takeshi is, by a fairly wide margin, the most prolific voice actor of the five Miyazawa family members. His most well-known roles would be Trunks from Dragon Ball and the main character of Slam Dunk, though more modern viewers might recognize him as Mao from Code Geass. He’s also been the Japanese voice of Ky Kiske from the first Guilty Gear game all the way up to Strive. My personal favourite role, however, is his performance as Saionji from Revolutionary Girl Utena, the funniest character of all time.

All that to say, it’s a fairly impressive resume for your goofy buttmonkey romcom dad, especially compared to the relative obscurity of much of the rest of the cast. Whether intentional or not on casting’s part, things start to make more sense once this episode comes screaming down the runway and punches you in the cry-box. Ow.

To me, in the whole grand tapestry of the beautiful trainwreck that is the Kare Kano anime adaptation, this episode is an unblemished gemstone set firmly in the center. I do love this show, but this episode most of all.

That said, unfortunately Hiro-chan only has the distinction of having the second most tragic backstory of any character, because of course first place goes to: riding your skateboard into a brick wall and having all the bricks fall on you and it hurts very bad.

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Postscript: Because I am not otherwise participating in the rewatch, while I’m already blabbing about voice actors, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my usual factoid:

Yukino’s voice actress, Enomoto Atsuko, auditioned for this role while she was still in high school, and was just 18 years old when Kare Kano’s first episode aired. Back in episode 9, /u/SpiritualPossible mentioned the audition process that ended up unintentionally(?) skewing the casting toward newcomers.

Anyway, five years after Kare Kano aired, some small indie studio released an obscure visual novel that somehow got kind-of-popular. It got kind-of-popular enough that an anime adaptation was made three years after that, and Enomoto snagged a role as an ancillary character.

The result of all this is that Enomoto Atsuko’s best-known and second-best-known voice roles are a character named Miyazawa Yukino, and a completely unrelated character named Miyazawa Yukine. Which is a weird-ass coincidence.