It’s a hot October morning, so much so that both Nishikata and Takagi arrive at school early, and find themselves the only ones there. When Nishikata proudly whips out a fan and starts fanning himself, I knew it would only be a matter of time before he was fanning Takagi.
First she asks him straight up to fan her. When he won’t, she makes up a game to see who can move her eraser across her desk further with the fan. Nishikata, like a dolt, furiously fans the eraser, causing it to move…a few millimeters. In the process, he fans Takagi. Then Takagi beats him by pushing the eraser further than him with the fan.
That said, Takagi repositions herself for his fanning so that a.) he gets a bit of the cool air too, and more importantly b.) she can be closer to him!
Takagi’s desire to be closer goes beyond physical proximity. She knows Nishikata and his friends love a new baseball manga, so she baits him with a ping pong ball, then uses a broom to play the role of hitter to his star pitcher. Nishikata allows the fantasy of the manga to wash over him, with the rest of the cast playing the roles of other characters.
Takagi swings through the first pitch, but Nishikata isn’t even able to get her into an 0-2 count as she belts his next pitch “over the wall” for a homer. She said she wouldn’t tell anyone what she saw if he struck her out, and he couldn’t, but when he asks again nicely for her not to tell, she says fine; in exchange, lend her the baseball manga. She wants to know as much as possible about what he likes!
After an interlude featuring the three girls and a supposedly stuck fat cat who turns out to just be fluffy (and I loved that cat’s design and voice), the final segment—simply called “Rain”—has Nishikata in the driver’s seat. Before class is out it starts to rain, but he forgot his umbrella. Moments after the bell rings, he rushes to the lost-and-found and is in luck: there’s one umbrella left.
He heads home alone with the borrowed pink umbrella, eager not to miss a minute of the baseball/soccer anime crossover where the two teams play kickball. But in his haste to secure an umbrella for a dry walk home, Nishikata neglected to ask Takagi if she had one, and concludes that he can’t be sure she didn’t forget her’s—especially when it’s happened before (back in 2018!).
Sure enough, Takagi is waiting out the rain by staying at school and doing her homework, when Nishikata enters and is surprised to find he didn’t worry needlessly: she did indeed forget her umbrella again. So Nishikata, blushing like a tomato the whole way, manages to ask her if she would “like to go together”. We only see the bottom half of Takagi’s face when the sides of her mouth turn up as high as they’ll go.
Takagi teases him about wanting to “get cozy” under his umbrella again, but checks herself, seeing as how he was kind enough to come back for her. She even knows he missed his special anime episode for her sake, and when he asks her how she knows that, she replies “that’s easy. Because I know everything about you.” She then plans to forget her umbrella next time it rains, too.
The title card parting shot of them walking together under the umbrella is a snapshot of where they stand right now as a couple: Takagi is all-in and having a gas, while Nishikata, all flushed cheeks and elusive gaze, can’t quite temper his self-consciousness. But he’s under the umbrella—this time of his own volition. He went back for her! He put her before anime! I tell ya, the kid’s learning.
RABUJOI - An Anime Blog 