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Hidamari Sketch is over.

Yes, the most recent season is over, but in a more broad sense I’d posit that we won’t be seeing a fourth season in the style of Hoshimittsu. Shaft seem to have said about all they can with this.

Episode 12 of Hoshimittsu essentially wrapped up everything I proposed in my previous HS post. Nazuna and Nori have become part of the Hidamari Apartments in-group: they are treated by outsiders (Yoshinoya and the landlady, most obviously) as a contiguous part of a new group of six, and the cinematography reflects this. Most telling is the number of shots of the six of them intermixed during this episode, with very little to divide them from the other four outside of the pairing with each other that we see equally with Yuno/Miyako and Hiro/Sae.

If, as I proposed before, season 3 was a response to seasons 1 and 2, that statement has been made. Continuing the series any further in the style of Hoshimittsu would serve no real purpose. Granted, the show could always be expanded in some other way, but I think most of the questions left to ask that Sketch is in any position to broach would be better-addressed by other franchises - for example, Sketch has already commented in passing on the issue of seniors graduating and leaving their juniors behind, and K-ON!! has already primed itself to engage that dilemma at length, so a fourth season focused on Hiro and Sae’s departure would be uncharacteristically redundant.

The series as it stands simply works so perfectly as a beginning-to-end statement that I have trouble imagining any way that tacking more manga-adapted gags on to the end could improve the franchise as a whole.