You know? If anything, I actually felt pretty bad for Yukimura for a majority of this episode. He really didn’t do anything wrong, he was just caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. And there was no way he was going to make it out of that confrontation alive. To be honest, I thought they were going to take a sciencey spin on their argument – and they were definitely accomplishing that with Yukimura’s approach – where they would just throw out studies and statistics until they came to their next grand experience, but instead it played out like a typical lovers quarrel in dramatic media.

At first, I wasn’t really into this premise. But as the episode progressed and got aggressively more dramatic, the more I enjoyed the episode because it was just so over the top. I’ll get it out of the way to say that I’m personally not a fan of drama that bubbles up from jealousy especially in media. It gets predictable and usually seems pretty unnecessary. But RikeiKoi committed to their decision and played it up a lot! I thoroughly appreciate that Yukimura stands his ground and still takes the science approach! If he had been in a fight with Kanade, she would have just destroyed him physically, but here he’s really just acting like himself trying to figure out where he went wrong. And he’s not apologetic about it because he’s looking at it from an empirical perspective! Was he kind of a jerk in the whole thing? Yeah, he doesn’t really have good people skills and he doesn’t really care about having them either so it isn’t really a surprise that he comes off as  a emotionless jerk sometimes. But everyone’s come to recognize this trait about him to the point where they recognize that he’s not trying to be a jerk, but is still really bad at not being a jerk. 

I’m glad that Kanade decided to confront Himuro about the whole situation and Himuro acknowledged that she didn’t want to be fighting and rather that it just sort of ended up that way. I can definitely understand that – things blew up and it’s just hard to put all the pieces back together for an apology. If they keep fighting, they aren’t going to get anywhere in their experiment, which means that the whole trip was pretty much a waste for them. So Kanade wins best friend of the episode again because she offers to help the two make up. Of course, it doesn’t really go as planned when Himuro tries to give him the gift on the beach. The anime definitely makes it seem like the manga artist sabotaged the make up, but let’s also remember that Himuro straight up face planted and threw the glasses case out of her arms. If anything the manga artist was like “oh nice! content for my manga!”

I’m going to backtrack a little bit and talk about Himuro’s “boldy beautiful” back story. Had this been in a different context and perhaps a different anime, I would have probably felt more emotion during those scenes. Instead I found myself just going, “… okay” and waiting for the plot of the episode to move forward. Yeah, the bullying was bad! Being ostracized in her class is bad! But being a science-type doesn’t justify all of her actions. I wasn’t able to sympathize with her in these scenes because of all of her actions leading up to this point. It feels like one of those “I’m not like other girls moments”, but uhhh… her reactions to many situations are very much like other girls. But I get it, conflict and drama really play up a romance, so diving head first into conflict makes a lot of sense.

And so the act of making up failed, but at the very least they have science to rely back on as Himuro runs away devastated by the whole situation. But thank fully her thesis made its way into Yukimura’s arms so now they have a chance to make up with one another. Again, I really don’t think Yukimura is at fault. In my opinion the fight wasn’t super necessary, but there’s not much I can say about it now because the anime already committed to it. So now knowing that Himuro wants to stop fighting, Yukimura has the chance to make up and this silly feud can come to an end.

Quietcupcake

I live up to my username, but I hope we can be friends!