hayate the combat butler 3
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Tagged: hayate the combat butler
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Anime is all about knowing your audience. It’s a trap! Oh wait…
With books, TV shows, movies, music, blogs, anything meant for entertainment consumption, the number one rule is “Know your audience.” I can’t stress that enough. Hayate the Combat Butler knows its audience. It’s plugging along delivering the same brand of low impact comedy that made the manga popular. Nothing spectacular. You’re not going to get massive amounts of parodies or cheap sight gags. Most of the humor is driven through the interaction of the characters, and everything delivers.
Hayate is the overwhelmed everyman. If this series were a live action show, I would cast Ben Stiller as an older Hayate, and if he turned down the role, I would have just given up on the project. Hayate always has this cheerful complexion, even if his body is being ravaged by a tiger (thankfully, not the Ichi the Killer tiger) or if Nagi is putting him through the ringer.
Nagi is the wrathful loli, but she is perfectly in character for a sheltered rich wrathful loli. She’s naive, innocent, and, well, if you know where this is going, you probably know the audience that she’s intended for. Anyway, besides eye candy for some people, she’s in this to provoke Hayate… both as part of her curiosity (how much punishment can Hayate take?) and part of her puppy love for him.
Maria is the straight one. The one who looks normal compared to the roving freak show (and, yes, the freak show will expand soon) around her. She’s also overmatched, but instead of flowing with it like Hayate, she takes a step back from it. If the chaos around her is a river, she doesn’t swim against or with it but instead views it from the beach.
This episode introduces Tama, who is tiger and protector of Nagi. He/she/it (I can’t remember) just wants to be left alone for the most part.
As a whole, the group extracts the humor from their interactions. If you see a scene where Hayate and Tama are fighting, you just know that Nagi is probably egging them on, and the one who will dish out pain and punishment in the end is the angelic Maria.
Highlights
“I’m so nervous living under the same roof as a beautiful girl.”
Ouch! Honestly, I’d “touch” Maria too, but he was dumb enough to say it to the wrathful loli. Big mistake. At least the anime is finally playing up to the Nagi who wants Hayate who wants Maria who just wants peace and quiet love angle.
The “tiger” rant. I LOL’ed.
(If I were in charge of the animation house, I’d sneak in some in jokes in this scene like have Nagi be reading Hanaukyo manga or Calvin and Hobbes.)
Why does Santa Klaus hate Hayate so much? Sometimes when someone bashes another as badly as Klaus is doing now, it means that he himself is inadequete in something. If this leads to a very special Hayate OVA where a very, very, very, very drunk Maria tries to seduce him and fails beacuse he’s got erectile dysfunction, thus leading to his hate and jealously of every young man, maybe it’s for the better.
As an electrical engineer, I can’t let this slide. The conduction difference between stainless steel and silver is very slight. It won’t matter how the robot (I’ll call him “The Ocho” for now) is impaled to the floor (which did flashback recent Ichi memories… my oharuhi-sama, I hope I’m still not talking about Ichi when I toss up Nagasarate 3), the amount of conduction would be the same. That’s a minor detail. The major detail is that Maria and Nagi are also standing on the same soaked wool carpet. They’d be shocked too!
(Though from this angle, it doesn’t look like what Hayate’s standing on is wet. Honestly, I have rubber shoes with external grounding at work just because I work with high voltage stuff sometimes, and Hayate, being a combat butler, should have the swiss army knife of shoes.)
Onsakumaru, please tell me that this would be the last DBZ reference. Ever. Thank you.
18 Responses to “hayate the combat butler 3”
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On the same level of pointlessness as Nagasarete, with half the entertainment. I dunno how the manga was for this but all I hear is great stuff about this series yet it fails me greatly. Anyways I was thinking the same thing when Hayate was talking about the robots’ metal, the rest of the series does not make sense so I guess that can slide as well.
I dunno… my main motive for watching the anime adaptation was to see Maria in action, and they have been cutting out her scenes left, right and centre (leaving me with a “wait-a-minute” feeling everytime I watch an episode). Hina-fans are ecstatic because they are skipping straight to her introduction in Ep04, while the Izumi-fans (do they even exist?) got reamed.
Hmm…
Sorry. The number of “cut out” Maria scenes has been fairly low so far (exactly one from chapter 2, where Hayate going after kidnapped Nage was expedited, the rest were only transition changes), I honestly can’t understand the whining about it. Skane: Please elaborate what was “cut out left and right”.
Sure there are Isumi-fans, they along with Sakuya-fans will be served next episode, when we obviously jump back in time again. What the director did was push out Hinagiku much faster, because it’s very hard to introduce a _credible_ romantic rival around episode 12. Very smart decision in my opinion.
Jason, I’m not quite sure if your typo-zation is 100% on the mark. What I like about Hayate is that it does NOT adhere to these types so strictly. Nagi is too caring by nature to be brushed off as “wrathful loli”, and it’s definitely unique to have a character like her twistedly head over heels for the male lead openly. Whoever is going to arrive isn’t an entirely brilliant new idea, but made of ingredients we know. Nevertheless, and this is where I agree with you, it’s the interactions between them which makes the show work.
The show isn’t ONLY a “light-impact comedy” as you put it though, especially in the later chapters we get some pretty delicate and well-narrated romance developments to go along with the humor.
For now, what we have is an action comedy which I can easily watch in one go, without the stickiness and repetitiveness after 2 episodes already (!) of Nagasarete, which I still enjoy enough to watch it, but which needs at least 2 sessions per ep to finish.
Dude, I thought it would be fairly obvious what I am talking about. Off-hand, besides the conversation between Maria and Hayate during their first meeting, I can think of the bath-scene, the lecture by Maria toward Nagi, the punishment of Klaus by Maria after the Tama incident, the sighting of Hayate’s capture by the Yakuza, etc…
I’m not even straining my memory to recall all this.
Can’t I air my grievances as a Maria-fan? I didn’t even slam the show for Pete’s sake. I was just expressing some of my disappointment. Did I say the anime series was bad? Did I say the anime was terrible?
No.
I just said it was not what I wanted, and you can’t tell I am not entitled to that opinion.
That is all.
^ “can’t tell I am”
–> “can’t tell me I am”
no comment on how much that tiger is like that crocodile from himm?
Nagi isn´t a wrathfull loli she wants to be. A small but important difference. Important and hilarious. Read the Titanic arc in the Manga again and you will know who the real Tsundere is.(Im laughing just remembering it XD)
“It’s a trap!” :)
Ah, what I would give for a Sausuke/Onsokumaru cameo…
Yeah i’m actually in my third year of college studying to be an electrical engineer
> As an electrical engineer, I can’t let this slide.
OMG, now look what you’ve done!
>> Yeah i’m actually in my third year of college studying to be an electrical engineer
Same here
I thought the silverware’s effectiveness had more to do with the fact that it went through the robot’s waterproofed exterior than any claim of superior conductivity.
> Same here
Yeah, me too.
Does anime attract EEs? :P
>Does anime attract EEs?
I dunno, but my aptitude tests said I should go into EE, but I said “Bah, what do they know!” and became a bureaucrat instead. :-/
Wait, isn’t Steven DenBeste also an EE? I’m starting to get creeped out here…
EE here also. *high five*
Cybernetics here. Oddly enough, about half my local anisoc are EE/cyb/CS students.
Jesus christ its a tiger, get in the car.