Episode 12 – “The Pervert Prince and the Outside of the Memories”
There are moments in anime, albeit they’re very few and far between, and that make me go “oh my god” (in a good way). It usually happens when there’s some big revelation that I wasn’t expecting at all. Today, it happened while watching the final episode of Henneko, when we discover the truth behind the discrepancy in the memories of Youto and the Tsutsukakushi sisters. It was such an obvious reason and yet amazingly well presented.
It turns out that young Youto sacrifices his long term memories and gives them to the sisters via the cat god. Not only does this give them all the memories he’s had with Tsubasa, but voids him from retaining memories for the rest of his life. This explains why he doesn’t remember any of his encounters with the girls or Tsubasa. What I wonder is whether young Youto would have done that had older Youto not been there? Maybe it’s the absolute timeline theory where older Youto was destined to go back in time to influence his younger self into making the wish.
Another interesting aspect about all this time travel business is how Tsukiko doesn’t even think about trying to prevent her mother’s premature death. The whole point of the time jump was to discover the truth, even though they may or may not have inadvertently altered the past. Then again, it’s mostly the absolute timeline scenario where history is already written out with their temporal excursion in mind. To make things even more mind-boggling, the original wish to go back in time was actually Youto’s and not Tsukiko’s. Time travel is always trippy business.
With that, Henneko comes to an end, but I feel like there’s so much ground left to cover. As shown at the ending, there are plenty of characters and possibilities to explore. Plus, we still need to find out if Tsukiko will ever get her emotions back! Also, we now know that Youto doesn’t have the ability to retain long term memories anymore, which could make things very interesting. What I think I’m trying to say is, I definitely wouldn’t mind watching more of this.
B.W.
Mahou Tofu 
After reading your thoughts on the last Henneko I realized that I’ve just left the “I totally agree” region and hit into the “geez, I’ve should have written that”. That’s the max’ed-out level of agreement, since you’ve even wrote a few little points I wouldn’t realize I’d write about before I’d actually started writing. However, certainly, you’ve watched this several months before me :)
Ah, nice! I’m glad someone else thinks similarly to me because this series surprised me in a lot of good ways.