The third non-blogged series I’m watching in the summer is Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu a.k.a. The Secret of Haruka Nogizaka.
This one is about, shockingly, Haruka Nogizaka, the quintessential perfect girl in the school - rich, good grades, great looking, good at sports, etc., etc., etc. Meanwhile, there is Yuuto Ayase who is kind of your average nerdy boy, but more in the mold of Ike from Shakugan no Shana in the sense that, yes he’s a nerd, but he isn’t really a loser. Yuuto also has just about 0 interest in girls, largely thanks to two girls who I’m not totally sure what their relation to Yuuto is who live at his house and basically do nothing but drink.
One day Yuuto finds out Haruka’s secret hobby - that she’s an otaku. She’s afraid that he’ll tell everyone but, of course, he’s too nice of a guy to do that (unfortunately she runs away from him for a while, making everyone else think he’s done something horrible to the queen of the school). She is largely afraid of being picked on “again,” which makes me think that she’s become this super-girl person in response to bad teasing, which I’m sure we’ll get into later if that’s the case.
I think this series definitely has potential, since the “queen of the school” type girl is a huge otaku, and I can see a lot of laughs from that, though Haruka seems to be a little too ditzy to be one supposedly so good at everything, but maybe we’ll be shown otherwise later.
I also get strong vibes that this is going to be in part a parody otaku series. First off, the ending theme and the name give out vibes of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. I’m sure the OP made fun of several shows, many of which I’m not catching, and I’m sure the same is true of the Clumsy Aki-chan cartoon from the beginning.
And especially since this doesn’t seem like a series which is going to rely on fan service for most of it’s laughs (at least based on the first episode), this series definitely looks like it has some potential.
This was a “I’ll wait what I hear about it first” show, but enough people recommended it on various websites that I decided to check it out, especially since I ditched Strike Witches.
Name: MoonPhase
