Farewell to the coziest anime of the season. I really hope Yuru Camp will get a second season.
This was my second favourite anime of the season, after Sora yori mo Tooi Basho. It captured the experience of low tech camping perfectly, as far as my own experience going camping can tell. Especially the last episode reminded me of when I went camping at the Clarecraft Discworld Events, in a field somewhere in the darkest interior of Suffolk around the turn of the millennium, though there wasn’t a hot spring nearby then. No, we had to make do with just two toilets and a cold water tap. But it was the first time I saw the Milky Way and a sky that had more than a few dozen stars struggling against Dutch light pollution. Seeing the girls standing around the breakfast table at some ungodly hour I can almost feel the cold myself.
Being faithful to the reality of camping is one thing, but what really sets Yuru Camp apart is friendship, which it does differently from most slice of moe/four girls start a school club together series. Usually, you either have a group of girls who are already friends, or there’s one central figure that all the friendships revolve around. Not so in Yuru Camp. Rin (second left) and Saitou (far left) are already friends when the series start, but quite content to do things on their own. They know the Outdoors Club duo, Chiaki (second right) and Aoi (far right) from school, but they’re acquaintances rather than friends. Rin grows somewhat closer over the course of the series, but she doesn’t join the club — nor does Saitou — and they remain some what casual friends.
Nadeshiko functions as the catalyst that brings this group together. She meets Rin in the first episode, but doesn’t immediately become friends with her. Instead she joins the Outdoor club and easily does become friends with those two. Once she runs into Rin at school again, that’s when she becomes friends with her as well and at least on nodding terms with Saitou. She’s the type who wants all her friends to meet and become friends with each other too, but she isn’t the central figure in the other girls’ friendships with each other.
When the series started, we met Rin as somebody who’d rather go solo camping than with friends, contrasted to the far more outgoing Nadeshiko, teaming up with the Outdoors club. The usual course of things would see Rin mellow out, join the club and discover the joys of communal camping. But this didn’t happen: the epilogue in fact sees Nadeshiko try a bit of solo camping herself. That’s what I like about the series, that it respects everybody’s way of camping, rather than having one true way of it. And it’s fitting that it ends with Rin and Nadeshiko meeting up one final time, each having gone solo camping to the same spot where they met in episode one. It confirms the bond they have.
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