English Dub Review: Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun “Hanako-kun of the Bathroom”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Hanako, Nene, and Kou notice activity that seems to be coming from the First Wonder, the Three Clock Keepers.

OUR TAKE

Alright FINE, dammit, I’ll watch the show itself! After a couple handfuls of comedy shorts that I had to review with no context for the source material, I have now been assigned the main show’s second season, so now watching the first season was basically mandatory. Thankfully said first season was pretty short at only twelve episodes (like this second will be) and, to a bit of a surprise, actually pretty decent, balancing both fun and creepy and sometimes sad. So, now I am all caught up with Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun and have seen the dub premiere of this new season. And it is…okay. As in we’re pretty much just jumping back in, presumably into a toilet, like almost no time has passed and going straight to the next storyline. In this case, we’re on one that starts getting into another one of the Seven Wonders, spirits that possess the school that Nene and her friends attend. Hanako himself is the seventh, and we’ve met the second, fifth, and third over the course of last season. Heck, we technically met two thirds back to back near the end through some odd means I still don’t fully understand. That just leaves the first, fourth, and sixth to meet.

So, now we’re finally meeting the First, or at least one of them, as there are apparently three: one of the past who reverses time, the present who stops time, and the future who speeds up time, so kind of like a Tivo remote. And we already know the identity of one of the mysterious keepers: The Keeper of the Present is Akane, the bespectacled lover boy who is always hounding after Nene’s friend Aoi. He’s never really been a big part of the show so having him get promoted from glorified background character to now somewhat of a principal character makes sense I suppose. But what exactly does this mean for the school if things are going so haywire temporally? Well, it’s kind of hard to say since somehow all of these crazy supernatural antics are happening just inside this one school but there doesn’t seem to be any impact on the outside world. Regardless, I’m actually kind of glad to be caught up now so I can actually cover this series properly, and not just having to do guess work while covering a bunch of self-contained comedy shorts, so I guess we’ll see what happens next when this arc concludes next week!