Mayonaka Heart Tune Ep.03 - Iko's time to shine. Her smile was precious!
Episode 3 of Mayonaka Heart Tune (真夜中ハートチューン) continues, as expected, with an episodic approach, tackling each girl one at a time to build a relationship of trust between them and Yamabuki. Following last week's focus on Nene, the girl at the center of this episode was Iko, who is the VTuber of the group.
Yamabuki analyzed all her streams and videos (that is quite some dedication) and found the reason for her lack of popularity. Well, it was kind of obvious, to be honest. Regardless of the situation, she was always using a deadpan avatar model that showed no emotion whatsoever.
That, combined with the fact that she is not good at showing emotions in her voice either (due to stage fright), made her streams become boring in the long run. This caused her to lose viewers and popularity. The solution Yamabuki proposed was to build a new avatar that could show emotions more freely.
This solves at least the "material" part of the problem, but the emotional issue remains. To address that, Yamabuki does something I think I have seen done in other series in the past, which is kind of a staple of this type of situation. He fakes disabling the microphone during a stream, lulling her into a false sense of security, and then starts provoking her to extract more natural emotions.
Well, it was a success with her viewers and, in turn, makes Iko the second girl to fall for the protagonist so far, as seen from the call she made near the end of the episode. She doesn't seem aware of it, though; it is more of a "why am I unable to look him in the face" sort of reaction.
I almost forgot, but we got another segment with Yamabuki working part-time to gather money to buy equipment for the club. Apparently, he doesn't want to rely on his family's money and instead wants to earn it himself. This was discovered by the girls in a quite embarrassing segment for him. It is not every day that someone works part-time to buy one million yen worth of equipment for you...
My bet for next week is that we will focus on Shinobu Uzuki and leave the more "main heroine" (at least aura-wise) of the group, Rikka Inohana, for last. What method will Yamabuki devise to stop Shinobu from fumbling her words while making announcements?
Mayonaka Heart Tune remains one of the series that, despite the terrible animation quality, continues to entertain me every week. I really need to start the manga, though; I heard the quality of the art is stunning there...
