(Video includes audio. Be sure to unmute)
From the first episode all the way up through Ensemble Contest-hen, Oumae Kumiko’s journey has been one through reconciling her own feelings and trying to become more self-actualized. It’s been a long road getting from there to here, complete with many frustrations, contradictions, confusions, angsts, and apprehensions both from herself and from others that she is privy to hearing about or experiencing. Back then, she was just a student, mending her old relationship with Kousaka Reina and learning to appreciate just how much her senpai Tanaka Asuka meant to her. Here now, at Hibike! Euphonium season three, she fully assumes the role of her predecessors as the president of that band, taking on a new level of responsibility to the group to propel them to winning the gold at Nationals, the prize that has consistently eluded them.
With a new year and new leadership however comes new rigor—Reina IS an executive now, after all—and with that also comes new urgencies. It’s not just about winning gold; as Kumiko is so reminded by both her family and her teachers (if not also the occasional conversation with classmates), she’s a senior now, waiting on the doorstep of whatever potential and likely-collegiate future might await her, and needing to decide about such things. But not all decisions need to be made straight away; besides, Reina’s dream of performing with Kumiko at Nationals is only getting closer and closer until, of all things, a euphonium sound coursing through the air catches Kumiko’s ear. It’s only a little later that we learn who made the sound: a new girl transferring to Kitauji High School, sporting a navy-blue uniform and a silver euphonium of her own, Kuroe Mayu. Change isn’t on the horizon – it’s right there, as plain as the reflection on Mayu’s euphonium and Kumiko being taken by the sound that comes from it.
(Mayu’s introduction to the season as an unknown, and recurring mirror imagery and conversation employed throughout via Ishihara Tatsuya’s direction, parallels Kumiko’s own preoccupations about what awaits her in the future both as the club’s president and post-graduation)
If Hibike! Euphonium season three had anything that it could plant during the interim between Chikai no Finale and the first episode’s lead-up, it was that you could take certain things more or less as a given that they’d occur. The narrative has always followed Kumiko as the point of orientation (with the notable exception of Yamada Naoko’s masterful Liz and the Bluebird), and that much has not changed. But, with her now needing to assume greater responsibilities to the ensemble as a whole, it likewise necessitates a major shift in orienting the view of that ensemble. As a student, Kumiko was a participant in the exercises for marching and listening to Taki’s instructions on how to improve a practice’s performance. But in a position of authority, she must take a more centralized birds-eye view of the ensemble (and we, the audience, likewise follow suit), being the person that others would come to with problems and grievances and be expected to navigate through them.
That shifted perspective regarding the ensemble accompanies a shift in the music’s usage within the season. In-part because of the single cour’s truncation, there are not as many overt “performances” in the course of the thirteen episodes – there are decidedly fewer times that we see the band collectively working together either in practice or in actually performing before the listening audience, and likewise for the viewer. Hibike! Euphonium season three however understands that the performances themselves were never the actual attraction for the series. It’s not that they were outright unimportant or anything of the sort, but rather that they were not the point. The melodrama of the season serves as the ensemble’s true performance, allowing both discordant countermelodies and high emotion to come through as complements to the tone rather than the showboating they might have been otherwise. All of this is realized through its masterful visual-acoustic storytelling and episode directing from some of Kyoto Animation’s most important figures like Kitanohara Noriyuki, or newcomer to the directorial side Miyagi Ryou, who began their career on Hibike! Euphonium season one and now gets to take a driver’s seat role for its final act.
(First clip includes audio. Be sure to unmute. Unknown credit for both clips.
Kumiko’s new position as the president of the band likewise repositions the presence of music in the series – there is less “performing” directly and more an attempt to integrate in-universe music into the tone of the season rather than as events themselves)
But Mayu is the final, and arguably most important, ingredient to this general reorientation. Her euphonium playing and coming from a previous school known for its prestigious music program brings its own problems into the fore. Mayu heralds that Kumiko’s place as the “one true eupho” is on far shakier ground than she might have anticipated. It’s not just because she’s good, but rather also due to Mayu’s general demeanor of friendliness and wanting to not rock the boat clashing with the inherent approach that Kumiko has in mind. The prior experiences with the trumpet solo audition from freshman year and Kanade from junior year were signs of needed changes. Those changes manifested in the form of Kumiko and Reina working to make Kitauji’s band a place where, regardless of one’s status as an upperclassman or underclassman, the best performances reign and have the privilege to perform at the competition. It’s a doctrine that reads as the ensemble’s credo, and one that Kumiko especially believes is best for everyone.
(If Kitauji’s meritocracy is to yield results, it must by necessity run counter to the idea of everything going swimmingly and people’s feelings not being hurt. Kumiko’s attempts to assuage worries and keep the ensemble from having members drop out is one of her chief tasks as president)
Mayu’s behavior thus makes for a rather ironic response to Kumiko’s own perception of Kitauji’s meritocracy. The entire notion of competing in Nationals means, in-part by virtue of how audition processes work and having only a finite number of players allowed, that not everyone can be satisfied or be having fun. Mayu’s reticence to replace anyone expressed early in the season serves as a challenge to that meritocracy ideology, questioning its legitimacy and whether everyone sincerely feels that way, and her continued insistence provides a point of consternation for Kumiko who just can’t realize how to respond to this peculiar obstinacy. It’s not that Mayu doesn’t want to win gold at Nationals, because she does – otherwise, she’d never have voted to do so. Yet, it’s a heightened form of Kumiko’s own desire to not have anyone drop out that she’s essentially confronting, a reflection of the passive version of herself from previous seasons that she thought she had moved beyond, but now has to confront from a new angle. Confronting Mayu’s insecurity means confronting Kumiko’s insecurity, creating one of the major thematic threads for the season.
Mayu and Kumiko’s perspectives are thus each chasing a metaphorical rainbow that run parallel; they may be headed in the same general direction, but they can’t cross. Because of this fundamental inability to see eye-to-eye, they cannot connect as easily. Mayu’s apprehension is just as despairingly resolute as Kumiko’s belief that what she herself believes in is the truth of how she honestly feels. Yet as each episode progresses and we see that perhaps Mayu’s apprehension seems all-the-more to be coming true, it gives dialogue and entire sequences a particular weightiness to each word and interaction. Emotions run higher and tensions run thicker not just because the stakes have increased for the main cast with increased auditions and graduation drawing nearer, but rather because the ensemble collectively is carrying this sort of held breath every time, with confidence wavering in confusion. I mentioned before that the melodrama within the band is the true performance of the season, and it subsequently manifests in inner-band friction both collectively and between individual members that is true Hibike! Euphonium spirit.
(Mayu’s reluctance to perform if it means someone else loses a spot in the ensemble is a double-edged foreshadow – it hints not only at why she has this outlook to begin with, but also reflects the attitude that will actively clash with both Kitauji’s meritocracy policy and Kumiko’s own self-reckoning)
And that spirit of conflict always has its inverse; that of optimism and understanding. Between Kumiko’s presidency, Mayu’s apprehension, Reina’s perfectionism, the new freshmen, Tsukamoto providing insights of his own, Kanade’s own rounding out of her edges, and everything else, Hibike! Euphonium season three is juggling a lot of ideas within its thirteen episodes. It would be easy to assume that it would crumble under the weight of it all, yet like magic, it doesn’t. The endgame for the season is more or less a surefire conclusion, but the route it takes to get there walks the twilight between crushing and soaring (even if it might change entire details of the original source material to achieve that). No matter how much it may pull out some brutal pathos punches or moments of sheer deflation, it never tries to leave its characters out in the cold forever; there will always be something to pull them back from the precipice.
That may just be its most optimistic message of all for its audience, and one that the series has been comfortingly saying since the very beginning with that flashback that started it all – there will be hardships and times when you have to come face-to-face with your own disappointment, inability, or uncertainty. Sometimes, it may seem cruelly unfair, or you may feel like you’ve taken two steps back for every one step forward. But underneath it all lies the tenderness of love and friendship, bonds worth holding onto no matter how late they may have been forged. If this is indeed likely to be the final installment of this franchise (I imagine Kyoto Animation would want to move on to other properties to develop and see what lay within their imagination), then it could not have chosen a better way to finish. Its characters left Kitauji High School better than when they came in. They bettered themselves not just musically, but personally.
That’s the true finale that the series had been building to since the beginning. All the desires to improve, all the tears, all the notes, all the drama, all the smiles, and all the goodbyes – season three is the culmination of everything Hibike! in the end.
