Karin – 03

Short Summary:
Having learned that her preference is unhappy people, Karin realizes that erasing one of the written characters of unhappiness creates the word happiness. And so, she wants to make Kenta happy, but unfortunately, she can’t come up with what happiness means or what she should do. Karin and Maki try to do some research, using the internet and looking at a bridal shop, but they don’t really learn anything. The next day, Karin loses her appetite, so she offers her boxed lunch to Maki. Maki, in turn, hears Kenta’s stomach growling and gives the lunch to him. After work that evening, the manager wants Karin to walk home with Kenta, and Kenta uses the opportunity to return the lunch box and say that it was delicious. When Karin gets home, she realizes that Kenta was really happy to eat her lunch. She decides that happiness is in boxed lunches, and prepares to make him another. Meanwhile, in the Usui home, Kenta, after watching a vampire movie, notices that his mother has two holes on her neck. He starts to question if Karin might be a vampire, though he’s pretty doubtful of it.

This episode turns out to be a lot more boring than I had hoped. The whole unhappiness/happiness aspect just seemed to drag on, so I was fairly unimpressed. The storyline is not completely different from the manga, but at the very least, it’s been radically changed. Basically the only things they kept in were the boxed lunch part and the Kenta-starts-to-think-Karin-is-a-vampire part. And even those scenes weren’t anything like how they were shown in the manga (for example, in the manga Karin gave Kenta lunch because she made too much, not Maki giving him Karin’s entire lunch because Karin didn’t want to eat it as they did here).
So I’m disappointed with this episode, but not enough to change how I feel about the series overall by too much. The animation this week is again consistently good, and I’m beginning to see more and more influences from the Mahoraba team (like the omake style when Karin is trying to think of things that make her happy). Anyway, I hope the story picks up again next week.