More than anyone else in the cast, Ayano was horribly underutilized last season. That couldn’t be helped. Her next major appearance is a ways away and it just so happens that the Laid-Back Camp anime doesn’t get to the respective manga chapter by the end of Season 2. Be that as it may, it felt wasteful at the time to not do anything else with the character after introducing her. It’s about time that the show rectifies this.
This episode rewinds a bit from the post-credit scene of the season premiere, showing Ayano dip her toes into camping prior to her contacting Rin. Here, she drives to a couple of different vistas and lounges there for a couple of hours. Apart from the motorbike that she already has, Ayano lacks any gear though this soon changes when she decides to get something to keep her drink warm and later, a tent for herself. It’s in this moment that Ayano meets Laid-Back Camp‘s recurring antagonist: budget. This joke never ceases to amaze me. I particularly love the part where Ayano settles on a really cheap tent and the show immediately cuts to Chiaki, as this is the same exact stunt that Chiaki and Aoi did back in Season 1. I guess cheap minds think alike.
While Ayano waits for her tent to arrive in the mail, we see the Outclub camp out in Ena’s backyard while Ena cuts Chiaki’s hair. After that, they have a barbecue and take Chikuwa out on a walk. You know, I’m surprised that it’s only until now that the Outclub decides to camp at someone’s backyard. Given their funds, you’d think this would have been their second “campsite” after the school field.
There’s some good comedy from this “camping trip”. When Ena asks Chiaki for a reference, she pulls up pictures of hairstyles that are far from what Chiaki has in mind and she has Nadeshiko and Aoi retrain Chiaki so that she can cut Chiaki’s hair. During the barbecue, Chiaki decides to make her own sausages but before doing that, she and her friends pretend that her stuffer is a gun. Chiaki “killing” her friends in cold blood is funny enough but then her friends take it up notch by pretending to be zombies. Even Chikuwa plays dead and undead; the fact that Ena trained him to do all that is very on brand.
For the barbecue, the girls use the alcohol stoves they made last episode. And yeah, my prediction from the last post ended up being wrong. I still question the long term use of the stoves however as the girls find their effectiveness a bit lacking. Given Toba-sensei’s warning last episode, I thought for sure that one of the girls would accidentally knock one of the stoves over and cause a fire to spread but that ultimately doesn’t happen in this episode. That said, we still get a screw-up of some kind in this barbecue. Turns out, Chiaki screwed up with her ingredients so her sausages don’t turn out very well. Sometimes, I wonder why Chiaki still bothers with her DIY endeavors, apart from the show doing it for the viewer’s amusement I mean.
I really appreciate the amount of screentime for Chikuwa this episode. The poor boy didn’t have a lot of that last season. I particularly adore the scene where Nadeshiko holds Chikuwa while she and the gang are chilling, with the doggo occasionally poking Nadeshiko in the eyes because he’s a dog so don’t question it. That might one of the most cutest visuals in Laid-Back Camp and that’s saying something. Also neat is Ena finally showing off the fancy and expensive tent she bought for Chikuwa back in Season 2 Episode 4. I love how the best tent in the girls’ possession might actually be this one, the one for the dog who has barely gone camping so far. It’d be even more hysterical if Ena still doesn’t go camping with Chikuwa from this point on. To be fair, Chikuwa is a cute dog so of course he deserves the best stuff.
Going back to Ayano, we see her try out her tent for the first time and contacting Rin, bringing us back to the previous episode’s post-credit scene. As I said last time, it’s amazingly on point for Rin to ask Ayano who she is. Ayano invites Rin to go biking and camping with her, to which Rin accepts. The two then invite Nadeshiko, who opts to do some solo camping on her way to the rendezvous point. I’m really looking forward to this adventure. All three bounced off of each other really well back in Season 2. Nadeshiko’s first solo trip was a lot of fun so I very much want to see her go on another one. Rin has never traveled around with a fellow motorcyclist so there’s a potentially unique angle to this trip compared to previous ones. My one concern with the trip is the amount of planning on Ayano’s part. Ayano asks to camp around Oigawa as it’s within equal distance for both her and the others but that’s as far as her planning goes. I sure hope she does more research than that or else it’ll end up like the near death experience Chiaki, Aoi, and Ena had last season.
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