Girls und Panzer/Tear Jerker

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • The Oarai student council bullying Miho into joining the new tankery club, with Momo shouting at her and the president threatening to expel her if she refuses. She specifically transferred to Oarai because it doesn't have a tankery club -- she still has nightmares of her final mission at Kuromorimine.
    • Saori and Hana standing with Miho and willing to be expelled with her, even though they'd only just met that day. (That's what convinced Miho to relent and join.)
    • And then the tear-jerking is compounded when we learn why the council was so insistent. They were acting out of desperation -- Oarai would be shut down unless it won the tankery tournament, and they needed Miho's experience.
  • When first shown, Miho and Yukari are both so shyly hopeful of developing friends — apparently for the first time in their lives, at sixteen. Miho's statement that eating lunch with Saori and Hana is like having friends....
    • In the manga's first volume, Yukari thinks, "I was alone for a long time..." and the next page is a flashback. The first four panels show her growing up:

1) Toddler Yukari, down on her knees playing with a toy tank, cheerily exclaiming "BOOM!" while a "voiceover" says, "I've loved tanks since I was a child. It was really fun back then..."
2) Yukari a bit older, maybe in grade school, standing with a toy tank in her arms and two more around her feet. Grayness is beginning to creep into the frame from the top. Voiceover: "But as I grew older, people began to distance themselves from me..."
3) Yukari's perhaps in middle school, standing with her hands at her sides, seven toy or model tanks around her in various positions. Downright blackness is drifting from the panel's top. The voiceover adds, "And I couldn't make any friends."
4) In the first three pictures, she faced towards the reader. Now, in high school uniform, she's turned away and crouching, head bent, beside one of twelve model tanks. Darkness takes up most of the panel, with a "spotlight" effect on Yukari and her tanks. "Boom..." she says, with no sign of zest. The voiceover repeats, "I was alone for such a long time..."

      • Thankfully, what comes next is Yukari first seeing Miho, being invited to join her team, meeting the other Anglerfish.... "And I am no longer alone."
  • When Yuki Isuzu confronts her daughter Hana over being in tankery, and delivers her ultimatum:

Hana: I'm very sorry, mother. But I just...will not give up tankery!
Yuki: ...Understood. Then I will ask you not to cross my threshold again.
Shinzaburo: Madam, but that's --!
Yuki: Shinzaburo, silence!
Hana: ...*bows* Pardon my intrusion.

And after she leaves (and finds her friends have eavesdropped), she says "Let's go home" -- they're already at her house, but she means to go back to Oarai.
  • Mako learning that her grandmother has been hospitalized. When told that the ship is underway, she starts taking off her shoes -- "I'll swim!"
  • A bit of apparently official art shows the Nishizumi family out on a happy picnic when Miho and Maho were small children. The girls are both cheerful (and adorable); there's a man in the near background, seen only from behind, who may be a servant or their father; and Shiho watches her daughters with a gentle smile unlike anything she shows in the anime. It's simply a Heartwarming picture, until you consider the contrast between this and the anime, and wonder what may have brought about the change....
  • The Kuromorimine Christmas party from Motto Love Love Sakusen Desu! is detailed in Funny. A little Fridge Logic, though, raises the vision of Maho desperately lonely and trying to recapture the happiness of past holidays she shared with Miho. Only she can't even remember how to sound cheerful as she shouts, "Merry Christmas!" and triggers a party popper. When her subordinates stare at her in shock, she assumes she needs to pull more poppers.
    • Maho's demeanor and her communications with her team are so strict that her sub-commanders all thought she summoned them to chew them out over losing the final match to Oarai. They have no idea what to make of her clumsy attempts at Christmas traditions, except to fear that she's building up to a horrible review session.
    • Eventually, Maho mentions off-handedly (!) that her parents were too busy to celebrate Christmas -- it's only ever been her and Miho, and now Miho's moved away...this finally convinces the other girls that she really does mean to have an actual party.
  • In Der Film, Oarai gets shut down. They manage to "misplace" their tanks and hand them over to Saunders for safekeeping, but everything and everyone else gets packed out to an old military training camp. The Discipline Committee completely goes to pieces (which is sad enough), and it falls to Momo to hold the students together while Anzu arranges a second chance match. And then Anzu comes back, and Momo finally gets to cry.
  • Though it's not at all canon, one fan artist imagined an incredibly sad alternative interpretation of the scene in Der Film when Miho returns to the Nishizumi estate and Maho tells Shiho, who's in her office, that the visitor is just a school friend. In this new version, Shiho is shown to be waiting in the office ... with a banner on the wall reading, "Welcome Home, Miho," and a large bag below it, apparently of gifts bought from the Boko Museum. Only "It's a school friend." Neither of her daughters any longer trusts Shiho enough to even imagine that she might have realized she was wrong and want to make amends.
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