My Dress-Up Darling – 04 – Artificial Deadline

“The next cosplay event is in two weeks”…these words (I’m paraphrasing) from Kitagawa are assumed by Gojou to be hard deadline to complete his very first human-sized costume. He’s not sure he can do it, and that’s even before his gramps sees the fancy stockings he bought and the shock makes him fall and hurt his back.

Life happens, and Kitagawa would certainly understand if Gojou said “I’m not going to be able to get it done”—especially by his standards—in the limited time allotted. But he doesn’t. All he can think about is Kitagawa being sad and disappointed in him, so he presses on. The two exchange contacts, but he throws himself into the project without giving her regular updates.

Even more life piles up for Gojou when he and Kitagawa learn that midterms are imminent, and precious afternoon hours are taken up by an impromptu tour by someone who is only in town for one day. Kitagawa stops by the shop with dinner without confirming Gojou is there, and assumes, as she has this whole time, that he’s spending time with his gramps after school.

But he’s not; he’s putting everything he has into getting the costume done on schedule, which results in him suffering exhaustion and nausea and the messes of the apartment piling up. When he spots his Hina doll brushes and remembers how his gramps uses them every day to stay sharp. He’s initially doubtful he’ll ever be good at making Hina dolls, but his gramps also said “loving something doesn’t mean you’re any good at it.” That love just helps you tough it out when times are rough.

Gramps tells him it’s all worth it to see the happy faces of the customers for whom he makes the dolls, and Gojou thinks of all the happy faces Kitagawa has made for him. They fuel him to keep going, and he manages to finish the costume on time. It’s only when Kitagawa arrives and is totally shocked by his achievement that he learns the two-week deadline…was never a real deadline.

This was nothing but a good old-fashioned lack of proper communication, with Gojou not letting Kitagawa know about the progress and Kitagawa not letting Gojou know she was waiting for him to finish it in his own time, especially with midterms and his gramps to worry about. When she sees Gojou’s ragged, fatigued appearance, she begins to weep and apologize. Gojou apologizes too, but he doesn’t want to see her tears…he made the costume so he could see her smile.

When Gojou brings up his doubts about becoming a Hina doll maker, Kitagawa assures him that if anyone can do it, it’s him. Bouyed by her support, he helps her prep her hair and makeup, and then changes into the costume, both to see if any adjustments need to be made and to see his work in the way it’s meant to be seen.

When Gojou comes back into the room, he finds she has has been transformed into a perfect Shizuku-tan, in the flesh. Kitagawa flashes her biggest grin yet, and Gojou grins right back, so happy to have made her so happy. It’s a new beautiful, adorable, emotional high for these two, who I hope have learned a valuable lesson about staying in touch!

My Dress-Up Darling – 03 – What “Beautiful” is For

While he’s no stranger to the beauty of Hina Dolls, having a real-life woman in a bikini in his room, followed by playing the eroge she loves so much, was bound to be a shock to Gojou’s system.

Sure enough, he dreams about Kitagawa, in the completed Shizuku-tan cosplay, starting to act like the eroge character, resulting in Gojou waking up with a surprise in his pants that makes him ask his Hina Doll head to look away.

It’s a frank but fairly accurate depiction of how things might likely go for someone so poorly socialized if confronted with stunning beauty and sexiness in such short order. But up to this point, he and Kitagawa have interacted one-on-one.

He’s nervous about how others would see them together, even when Kitagawa greets him warmly and her stylish friends are perfectly friendly with him. She doesn’t tell them“be nice to this guy”—if he’s alright with Marin-chan, he’s alright with them!

Even so, all of the muttering and rumors he overhears causes Gojou to avoid Kitagawa the rest of the day, for what he deems to be “her own good”. When she finally finds him hiding and confronts him, and he mentions people saying they might be going out, she can’t help but tease him by asking “then why don’t we?”

Before that though, it’s clear Kitagawa is genuinely hurt by Gojou avoiding her, saying it “sucks”. Sure, she could be a bit more patient with someone with such poor social skills, but it’s also a good idea not to let him adopt bad social habits. As far as she’s concerned, they’re already friends—something he hadn’t even considered, but has no reason not to believe.

With that, Kitagawa leads Gojou by the hand to Ikebukuro to shop for the materials needed to make the Shizuku cosplay. Kitagawa is extremely impressed by Gojou’s schematics and attention to detail. I also love how into the nitty-gritty this gets, and how the project stokes Gojou’s creative fire.

Among the nice details: Gojou suggests a richer cloth to accurately depict the high-class school Shizuku attends, and while Kitagawa picks a plain black wig, he tells her she’ll look more like a real-life Shizuku if the wig is more on the deep purple side.

Needless to say, Kitagawa is really glad she brought Gojou on the shopping trip. Had she gone alone (or not made the effort to track him down when he tried to avoid her), she’d have made the same mistakes she’s been making while going the cosplay path alone. In effect, he’s helping her make the right choices for the best possible final product.

In keeping with the equitability of their relationship, Gojou’s sage artistic advice is rewarded with things Kitagawa can offer, like a peak at her garterbelt, and buying him dinner. Watching Gojou stand so awkwardly in the lingerie shop is just such a relatable moment, even when Kitagawa says everyone there will assume they’re a couple and not care.

After ramen, a woman in line for the restaurant spots the two high school kids and thinks how nice it must be to be young…then she and other adults overhear the two discuss the eroge in enthusiastic detail and conclude that high school kids are terrifying. But that’s a loaded word. I’d say they’re just very specific in the things they’re passionate about.

Another cute detail is when Kitagawa shows Gojou a bunch of photos of cosplayers on social media, and he notes that she’s into characters with black hair…to which she says “look who’s talking” with his Hina doll love. It’s also clear the pint-sized model and the girl cosplaying male roles is one of the two yet-to-be introduced characters in the show’s promo art.

When Kitagawa’s calling all of the models in these photos “beautiful”, then notices he seems distracted, she asks him what’s up, and he relays to her his preference only to use the word beautiful for things that truly touch his heart, like the first time his gramps showed him Hina dolls.

Kitagawa doesn’t judge his ideals about beauty; she tells him if that’s what he’s decided, it’s totally fine, and it’s important to have things you don’t want to compromise on. The quality of the Shizuku costume is one of them, and I have no doubt that when it’s complete in two weeks(!) in time for an event Kitagawa wishes to attend, she’ll be able to move his heart to the extent he has no choice but to call her “beautiful.”

Before they part ways, Kitagawa offers him an indirect kiss in the form of a bite of meat-wrapped onigiri, and then has a moment of self-consciousness when she senses he thinks she’s pigging out. But before she catches her train, she makes sure to tell him how grateful she is for all his help and advice, for actually playing the game she loves so much, and for just being there for her in a way no one else can.

It wasn’t an official “date” but it might as well have been one, and a good one at that! Both parties came away having learned more about each other and liking each other even more as a result. That two-week deadline is going to be tough, but I have every confidence that Gojou will get the job done, and done well.

Dororo – 08 – Black Skies Are Gonna Clear Up

There’s no shortage of accursed demons out there, and this week’s nasty customer happens to periodically terrorize a village by casting a giant black cloud of miasma and then threatening to eat everyone unless they provide it a “bride” in the form of a young woman…willing or not.

In this case, the young woman is willing to sacrifice herself for the rest of the village, but her “brother” (from another mother) Saru doesn’t agree. Dororo and Hyakkimaru agrees to help him deal with the monster, so they can free his sister, even though she’s already resolved to die.

When the demon, a giant centipede called Nokosaregumo, casts its black cloud, it presents a unique challenge to Hyakkimaru: the entire cloud reads to him as a demon, so he’s completely blind when he’s inside it. While he tries in vain to locate it, the monster goes after Saru, but his sister pushes him out of the way and gets swallowed up, defiant smile and all.

Saru is devastated; other than his deceased mother, no one other than his sister ever treated him with as much kindness. Dororo assures him he and Hyakkimaru will stick around, though due to the latter’s blindness in the cloud, the two boys will have to get the job done without the most skilled warrior.

Again Dororo demonstrates his ease at making friends, especially those around his age, though after hours of casting rocks at the same spot, Hyakkimaru checks on the lads and discovers that both of them are crying in their sleep.

The next day, Dororo poses as a bride, tricking the Nokosaregumo and drawing it into an area of flammable gas that Saru ignites with a lit arrow. However, the centipede’s carapace protects it. It’s up to Hyakkimaru to take care of the rest, using arrows and then the sound of his and Dororo’s voices to locate the proper direction to rush at the monster and take out its eyes with his arm-sword.

With one of the heads destroyed, the second head on the other end snaps Hyakkimaru up whole, but he simply slices the guy clean in half from within, completing yet another imaginative, unique battle that required overcoming his inability to properly see while using his still-new hearing.

As an added bonus to the demon being defeated, Hyakkimaru gets his sense of smell back—just in time to enjoy the harsh stink sulfur. Saru’s sister also survived—they killed the monster before it could digest her—and the two decide they’ll live together in the village from now on, after both being alone for so long.

Dororo and Hyakkimaru’s payment may be modest—a small nugget of gold, some grubs, and a flower from the woman—but the flower proves quite the treasure for Hyakkimaru, considering he’d never smelled anything like it before. He’s so excited, he actually says Dororo’s name when he passes it to him, bowling Dororo over. Here’s to Hyakkimaru finally adding to the conversation on their future wanderings.

Dororo – 07 – Spiders Are People Too

In the wake of the loss of Mio and the orphans, Hyakkimaru isn’t really in the mood to talk, even though he has his voice back. In an effort to get him to cheer up, Dororo tries to tickle him, no no avail. Instead, they encounter yet another monster.

This time it’s a frightening spider woman, who is busy sucking the life out of a man she hypnotized into thinking it’s a much more pleasurable experience. Notably, the man is not dead, and once Hyakkimaru frees him, the spider woman runs off, and we later see she’s transforming into human form.

This form allows her to grab the immediate attention of the first man to come across her passed out in a bed of flowers. His name is Yajirou, and he offers his home and his food to nurse her back to health. She has no human name, so Yajirou names her Ohagi.

She’s not particularly friendly, but his human food is good, and he’s not like other humans, not even harming a cockroach in his house. He values all life, big or small. In the night, while hungry for a human snack, Ohagi decides to have more rice instead.

As Hyakkimaru and Dororo spend the next two days searching in vain for the monster they believe is kidnapping villagers in a valley quarry where life is harsh, Yajirou is worried that Ohagi is getting paler and weaker, and offers to smuggle out of the town, whose lord is very stingy about letting people leave; he’d rather they work themselves to death at the quarry, making him money. It’s another sign that war or not, life is particularly tough for the little guy in this time.

Ohagi takes Yajirou up on his offer, but they come afoul of Hyakkimaru and Dororo. To their surprise, Yajirou confesses to being the “kidnapper”—the people who are missing he helped smuggle out of the town for their own sakes. Ohagi, meanwhile, doesn’t kill if she doesn’t have to, preferring to suck just enough life out of people to allow them to revive. But the village guard shows up, ready to arrest Yajirou.

Ohagi attacks them and slips away from Hyakkimaru, for whom it’s become a habit to tear off his fake arms and attack red form in his vision. But Ohagi isn’t always red; an indication she’s not always evil or demonic, just perhaps more often than most. More importantly, she’s not trying to kill anyone, just survive, and Yajirou wants to help her.

While I thought Ohagi would eventually betray Yajirou (like the scorpion and the frog—due to her nature), my expectations were nicely subverted, as it seems theirs will be a more symbiotic relationship.

The guard catches up with them and puts two arrows in Yajirou just after Ohagi agrees to go with her and be her regular “prey.” Yajirou strikes out in anger, and Hyakkimaru once again intervenes as Ohagi takes her true spider monster form. But once again, it’s not as simple as Hyakkimaru defeating the demon and regaining a new part of himself.

Thanks to Hyakkimaru’s hearing, he can hear both Yajirou’s pleas not to kill her, and he stays his blade, allowing the two to escape without further incident. Provided Ohagi has a willing source of life force in the person of Yajirou, Hyakkimaru can be confident she doesn’t pose a threat. For once, Hyakkimaru and Dororo aren’t walking away from a complete bloodbath; there’s hope for this couple.

While we’ve had a human serving as the instrument for a demon blade, we haven’t yet had demon who wasn’t just pure evil all or all about killing. We here at RABUJOI are all extremely pro-spider. They do humans far more good than harm as devourers of house pests, and aren’t really interested in hurting us unless threatened.

Thus it’s only fitting that the first demon to have a more nuanced, dimensional character takes the form of our scary-looking but generally beneficial eight-legged friends. The final scene—in which an initially-spooked Dororo spares a spider leading to Hyakkimaru’s first laugh—was pitch-perfect. Even better than having a diversity of foes is when some of them turn out not to be foes at all.

Steins;Gate 0 – 23 (Fin) – Fortune Favors the Foolish

With Amadeus deleted from history, Rintarou ends up in a slightly different present, in which Leskinen never succeeded in fully brainwashing Kagari. Moeka subdues Leskinen when he pulls a gun on Rintarou, and the two head up to the roof just as Mayuri is successfully stopping Kagari and Suzuha from killing each other, by badassedly positioning her head between their handguns. Mayuri and Suzu are able to board the time machine safely after receiving the blessing of a Rintarou who’d just arrived in that time.

All the times the time machine was wiped out by a missile from a helicopter gunship, it was only seconds away from disappearing into the spacetime either, so a few extra seconds is all Mayuri and Suzu needed to get away safely, and they do, in an extremely thrilling scene that pays off all of the failure and heartache of previous attempts.

Better still, Hououin Kyouma is able to lustily gloat to Leskinen, Stratfor, DURPA and the Russians for having foiled their plans to acquire the time machine. In the timeline where Mayuri and Daru await the return of Rintarou and Suzu, two time machines briefly appear on the rooftop at once, and Mayuri gets a call from…the other Mayuri, convincing her not to let Okarin give up when he returns in the depths of despair.

Mayuri and Suzu aren’t able to stay in that timeline long lest they cause a paradox, and with the time machine all but out of fuel, they soon lose the ability to choose their next destination. But both of them seem to take their descent into temporal oblivion quite well, all things considered.

Back on the rooftop, Suzu and a defeated, blood-stained Rintarou return, and he gives his little speech about everything being hopeless and deciding he’s going to give up. Then Mayuri remembers the words of the other Mayuri, recalls when Kyouma was “born” (when he hugged her to comfort her at the cemetery) slaps Rintarou, her Hikoboshi, and convinces him not to give up.

Soonafter Rintarou receives a video D-Mail from the Rintarou in the future, and we switch to his point of view, as we watch his grainy recording unfold where and when it occurred. After sending the message, Rintarou’s next operation, Operation Altair, consists of him “deceiving the world”, as well as himself, by travelling back to another point in spacetime in the first version of the time machine to be built by Daru & Co.

Deceiving himself and the world, it turns out, is the only way to reach the Stein’s Gate. He thanks his noble, trusty Lab Members, receives a hug from Maho, and sets off to locate and rescue Mayuri and Suzu, who were lost in time but can be found thanks to something called a “Kerr black hole tracer”, the nature and operation of which are not specified (which is probably for the best).

Suffice it to say, in his experimental but still brand-new and fully-gassed time machine, and with the Kerr thingy, Rintarou successfully locates Mayuri and Suzuha, who by their perspective had just arrived themselves in the year 18,000 B.C. in a dark and stormy wasteland.

They seem ready to accept their fate with grace, but the bright light of Mayuri’s Hikoboshi appears, and from that light, Okabe Rintarou—AKA Okarin, AKA Hououin Kyouma—emerges triumphant; perhaps his most badass moment yet.

And that, folks, is where Steins;Gate 0 ends things. We don’t get to see Steins Gate, or learn whether Rintarou is right that it does exist. All we know is that they’re in a good position to reach a world line in which both Mayuri and Kurisu can live.

It took a lot of gumption, guile, teamwork, sacrifice, trauma, math…and downright foolishness, but the gang is headed in the right direction. It’s a positive, hopeful ending; an ending full of promise and excitement for what may come next for all of these kind, brave fools—even if we may not get to see it.

Steins;Gate 0 – 22 – Another Logical Sacrifice

Thankfully, the latest setback does not shatter Hououin Kyouma just as soon as he makes his triumphant return; more importantly it does not rob Rintarou of his will to keep trying. It only forces him to jump back two days into the past and come up with a new plan. But first, they must determine what exactly is causing the convergence; it may not be the time machine itself.

Rintarou works it out with Daru and Maho. They know how to foil both Leskinen/Stratfor and DURPA, which leaves the Russians. When Nakabachi defected to Russia, they made the connection between his research and Kurisu’s. Thus, in order to prevent WWIII from occuring, they have to prevent that connection from being made.

The only way to do that is to eliminate Amadeus and all of the associated data. Without Kurisu’s memories, brain patterns, and research in digital form, Russia will never be able to complete the time machine, the war will be averted, and both Kurisu and Mayuri should be saved.

So the path to Steins;Gate requires yet another Kurisu-related sacrifice. As Amakurisu states more than once, she’s “just a program”, but it’s still unsurprisingly difficult for Rintarou and Maho to even consider deleting “her,” so similar she is to Kurisu, and yet also an individual personality in her own right.

Amakurisu has Maho send her to Rintarou’s phone, and the two enjoy a stroll together, that lasts through the night into the morning, with Rintarou showing her the city she doesn’t know and judges to be beautiful and worth saving.

Unlike her dead human self, Amakurisu live in a world where only things with a purpose exist (much like The Matrix). Her purpose is to cease existing so a better world can be unlocked. Like Kurisu, she’s ready and willing to assume that cost…but also like Kurisu, there’s a hint of sadness behind her reassuring smile.

Thanks to Daru’s improvement of D-Mail, the D-RINE (like the real-world LINE), Daru can send a save message only to himself telling him to break into VCU’s server and destroy the Amadeus AI data. Maho sends the necessary key and patch as an attachment, the Phone Microwave is fired up, and Amakurisu says her goodbyes.

When the sparks stop we end up with the divergence number of 1.123581—the Beta World Line, tantalizingly close to the 1.048596 of Steins Gate, yet not quite there. We’ll see how well Rintarou & Co. fare in the finale, which I suspect might run double-length (since there’s no episode 24).

Steins;Gate 0 – 21 – Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Lab Members

Thanks to Maho’s improvements, the time leap machine can send Rintarou back 336 hours instead of 48. It’s truly a case of Salieri surpassing Mozart. But he’ll still need to make three thousand such jumps to return to 2011 in order to foil Leskinen, Stratfor, and Durpa and get Mayuri and Suzuha safely off in the time machine on the roof.

That’s a lot of jumps, but Rintarou is committed. Nobody in 2036 particularly likes how things turned out (Rukako has bought it, and soon all of them will), so they’re all for him changing the world if he can. The first jump goes well, but it and many many more after it will require that Rintarou wake up after a long coma.

He gets better and better at convincing Amadeus that he’s indeed from the future, and each time, his friends send him on his way. He even gets to see Lil’ Suzuha! Eventually, he reaches the time where two weeks earlier he’ll no longer have Valkyrie HQ to rely on to time leap.

It’s the day he’s captured, tortured, and allegedly killed. However, things go differently this time, as Amakurisu suggests he uninstall her program and ditch all other tech the enemy is using to track him, while all of his friends act as decoys.

The Leskinen of that time knows he’s lost this round, while the Daru of that time and everyone else sees Rintarou off as he…well, he kinda runs all the way back to 2011. Not sure how that happened, actually, but I’m assuming he didn’t actually run back in time, but managed to escape the enemy and find another means of time leaping.

In any case, when he returns, he’s indistinguishable from the Rintarou of that time, so Maho and Daru think nothing of him showing up in the lab. However, he demands that one of them punch him for being such a whiny little bitch for so long, and Daru does just that.

Daru had no way of knowing what his right hook (or whatever; not a boxing expert) would lead to…the Awakening of Hououin Kyouma from a deep slumber. It took twenty and a half episodes, but we finally get to hear that ridiculous mad scientist laugh. It’s a sight for sore ears.

Not ten seconds after awakening, he’s giving Maho a nickname (“loli girl”) and a weird alternate name (“Safina”). He also dubs her Lab Member 009 and calls an all-hands meeting of the other members, who are just as happy as Daru that their Fearless Leader Kyouma is back.

Maho eventually gets it too: this “Kyouma” fellow has charisma, and rather than dragging everyone and the mood down, he’s galvanizing it. And yet, the same old Rintarou dwells within him, it’s just that he’s done running and cowering, and whining. It’s time for ACTION.

After meeting with the lab members, Kyouma talks with Ferdinand Braun downstairs and makes a number of arrangements roughly a half-hour before Akiba became a war zone in the other timelines. This time, the woman in black with the helmet isn’t Kagari, it’s Moeka, who is on Kyouma’s side in this World Line. Talk about an awesome reveal.

Yep, it sure looks like Hououin Kyouma was the missing variable in the formula to foil Leskinen’s plans and ensure Operation Arclight went off without a hitch. It’s a triumphant, righteous moment. It doesn’t last long.

Even though Mayuri and Suzuha get in the time machine and set off far earlier than previous times, that damned attack helicopter still peeks out from behind a building, launches its missile, and destroys the machine in front of Kyouma and Moeka.

Apparently, not enough conditions were met to avoid the convergence. Clearly it’s not enough to neutralize Kagari and Leskinen; something has to be done about the helicopter. I feel bad for Rintarou having to start all over again right after his grand awakening, but no one ever said changing the world was easy or pleasant.

Koi wa Ameagari no You ni – 03

Quite disappointed the words she worked so hard to say to Kondou didn’t give her the response she wanted, Akira becomes so preoccupied by Kondou and her feelings for him she seems to float above everything else with little interest.

She reconsiders asking her classmates for advice, and we kinda see them through her eyes. She knows how they’d respond if she mentions someone she likes, and especially if she tells them his age. So she doesn’t bother. When two track kohais lure her back to the track to watch and offer tips, it feels like a gross imposition, and an insensitive one at that.

Upon watching one set a new personal record, she regrets having been lured. When she goes, the girls consider going to her restaurant, she snaps: “DON’T!” That place is her world. Hers…and the manager’s.

As if mimicking Akira’s darkened mood, the heavens open up and a steady rain falls. Akira has no umbrella or coat, so she get soaked. She doesn’t care; she’s too lost in thought.

This rain reminds her of the day she injured her ankle, having felt something but simply taped it up and practiced in the rain anyway. We see everything from the injury, the doctor visit, and the isolation she felt upon being knocked out of action…and it’s frikkin’ heartbreaking!

Mind you, all of that ends with her getting a free cup of joe from Kondou and BOOM, it’s gone from the rain to…After the Rain. Great title, that. When she arrives at the restaurant in the present, soaked head to toe, she meets Kondou there, having a smoke.

He beckons to her to get inside, but she isn’t there for a shift. She’s there to repeat her words, and phrase it so there’s no mistake: I like you. Then she leaves. Kondou, bless him, gets the message, and it causes him to space out at a green light. Was Akira’s confession just a dream; a mirage in the rain?

After it rattles around his aged cranium, Kondou determines that it is not a dream, but a prank Akira and the other young staff members are pulling on him, because there’s no way she’d seriously be into him. He’s SO SURE of that he curses himself for almost falling for the prank!

But as he’s an adult, he doesn’t make a big deal of it. Kids will be kids, and sometimes kids are awful, both to each other and to their elders. He shrugs it off, though not because he isn’t irritated. Those punks!

Akira’s behavior upon returning to work seems to back up his theory, at least for a time. But when her casual talk immediately turns to I’ve told you how I feel; what’s your response, all hope that this was something “shrug-off-able” disintegrates.

Kondou is very careful with how he proceeds. He offers Akira a ride home, since it’s still wet out and she’s still recovering from her ankle tweak. He’s direct about his response: he can’t give her a proper one, because he’s 45 and she’s 17.

Akira immediately disputes the relevance of their age gap, and when Kondou persists, she repeats her confession so loudly and strongly he puts the car in a skid. This isn’t something he can shoo away with what he thought was common sense and social conventions. She’s resolute!

Sensing both of them could use some air (and that continuing to operate a motor vehicle could be hazardous at the moment), the two go to a park. Kondou follows a respectable distance behind Akira, who surely wishes he’d walk beside her. They come to a tree where there’s shelter from the stray raindrops that linger.

He asks her why she likes him, of all people. We already know she has plenty of reasons, and isn’t just interested in him because he “saved” her when she was at her lowest—when the proverbial rain was at its harshest. She’s come to like him even more since getting to know him more. He’s hard-working, honest, kind, fair, and a good father.

And he makes her laugh; indeed, when he insists she reconsider, as he’s a 45-year-old boy with no hopes or dreams, that right there makes her smile and laugh in a way he’d never seen, because she’s hearing him talk in a way she’s never heard him talk before.

Akira doesn’t care that he’s 45, or that she’s 17, or how low an opinion he may have of himself, and she doesn’t list any of the reasons I mentioned above. Instead, she questions the very notion of liking someone requiring a reason at all. And she’s right; you can cherry-pick whatever reasons you happen to brainstorm when explaining why you like or love someone.

But the reality is perhaps closer to Akira’s particular philosophy at this time: that love is ultimately a mystery. You may never know for sure why you feel it for someone; but you can never let that lack of answers frustrate or discourage you.

Being pursued in this way is a strange feeling for Kondou, and a nostalgic one, since it’s been decades since he’s felt it. But he has felt it, so he knows what it’s like better than most. He remembers being Akira’s age, and for a second, we see him like that.

When Kondou jokingly challenges Akira to go on a date him, and find out just how short a time it would take until she finds it creepy, Akira takes it to mean We’re going on a date? We’re going on a date! Kondou dare not correct her, at least not then and there. So, at least for now, on a date they shall go.

Koi wa Ameagari no You ni – 02

Yoshizawa takes a job at the restaurant where Akira works, but never gives him the time of day, nor should she feel obligated to. If, indeed, he only got the job there to get closer to her, he’s barking up the wrong tree! He’ll have better luck with Yui, who considers him more her type.

Speaking of Yui, on a slow day, she and Akira engage in a game of telling one another what makes their hearts flutter. Yui lists a number of tasty foods, while Akira names things like pansies, shoes with ribbons, black-and-white cats, lotion, etc…obviously without mentioning the person who makes her heart flutter the most.

In addition to the work small-talk, we also get a momentary look at the change-making register of the restaurant. I for one love the little touches that make the restaurant setting feel so realistic and cozy.

When a customer forgets their phone and leaves on a bike, Kondo thinks he’s SOL, but Akira takes the phone and bolts, showing Kondo the form and speed that once made her a distinguished member of the track team. Kondo, for his part, is very impressed, as well as happy to see another side of his employee. And Akira is impressive.

However, her ankle injury flares up, and Kondo has no choice but to help her up into his car so he can take her to her clinice for evaluation. Little does he know Akira is absolutely loving every moment she gets to spend alone with the manager, in addition to him demonstrating once more what a kind and caring fellow he is.

Against a goofball like Yoshizawa, you can’t really fault her for developing a thing for Kondo. And of course, she isn’t fazed in the slightest by all the evidence of his son in the backseat; they got along just fine, after all.

At the clinic, Kondo suggests having Yoshizawa bring her things, since he’s her boyfriend at all, causing Akira to emphatically correct that gross misunderstanding (causing the doctor to apologize to his other patients, the same way Kondo apologizes when his staff is rowdy or breaks something).

It’s when Kondo starts staring at Akira’s foot before she removes her sock that she sends him off to take care of the restaurant. But when she comes back later to grab her uniform and bookbag, she catches a glimpse of Kondo in the window and is momentarily spellbound.

Back home, she lounges on her bed, remembering how it felt to be held by Kondo, and then receives a call from an unfamiliar number…which turns out to be Kondo’s! He calls to makes sure she’s alright, and to tell her she can call him anytime if she needs anything. Yes, now Akira has his number. She’s very happy about that.

The next day, feeling a bit cooped up, Akira heads to a konbini on her crutches, and who should she encounter on the sidewalk but Kondo, searching for her house so he can properly apologize to her parents. Her mom (note no mention of dad) is at work, so Kondo treats her to a parfait at a local restaurant instead (and I really got a kick out of Kondo checking out another restaurant’s displays and setup).

When Kondo catches a glimpse of her pink toes (painted last night after his call to her, and perhaps the reason she didn’t want to show him her foot at the clinic) and wonders whether it’s due to the blood pooling in her toes. She simply tells him it’s a pedicure and laughs at his misunderstanding.

Then, quite suddenly, and even to her own surprise and shock, she confesses to Kondo she likes him, right then and there. And Kondo takes it exactly the way you’d expect a decent guy of his age to take it: as a compliment, while also expressing his relief she didn’t hate him like he feared.

Obviously, he’s taking her “I like you” to mean “as a manager, colleague.” Having either dodged a bullet or struck out, Akira merely sets to work on her tasty-looking parfait, while Kondo, happy to hear his employee doesn’t hate him, orders more food.

Owarimonogatari – 09

After escaping the trap of the snail by going over the rooftops, Koyomi and Kanbaru encounter a crab-monkey hybrid. Once they deal with it (and as a fellow left-hander I feel for Kanbaru mixing up directions), snakes emerge, which Shinobu grabs, then lends Kokoro-watari to Koyomi to finish the demi-apparition off. All of the animals that afflicted Koyomi’s girls are coming back, and all seemingly in service of the samurai.

After lying under Shinobu as she swings—revealing a small sticker with Gaen’s location, the shrine—Koyomi heads there with Kanbaru and Shinobu. When Koyomi describes what the samurai was after (and imitates his laugh all too perfectly, another clue as to who he is), Shinobu is incredulous. The minion she created, from whom she took Kokoro-watari…she watched him burn up in the sun and die 400 years ago.

He can’t be back, she insists; This is all some kind of lie or trick. But when they meet up with Gaen Izuko (introducing herself as Oshino Izuko to Kanbaru and Shinobu, who seem to buy it), and Koyomi tells her everything that happened, Izuko disputes Shinobu’s assertion the first minion is dead.

While her scenes are primarily exposition, she inhabits a variety of interesting environments as she provides it, eventually whipping out “game pieces” of all the Monogatari characters. She makes connections between the first minion and Koyomi, the second minion, and describes coincidences that weren’t coincidences, like the fact that the first five animal apparitions infected five of his female friends, and later phoenixes and cats and tigers.

She then takes things all the way back to four centuries ago, glossing over Shinobu’s story (because Shinobu already told it, and beautifully so) and focusing on the first minion, who became so after Shinobu drank his blood. He came to loathe what he had become, but that loathing couldn’t change the fact that his immortality was such that even burning up in the sun would not kill him, only disperse him into a cloud of ash.

Over 400 years, exposed to the elements and through trial-and-error, the first minion resurrected, not necessarily because he wanted to but because that’s just what happened. And the final reveal, that the minion was finally successful in coalescing fifteen years ago, leads us to wonder if he’s someone Koyomi already knows…the fifteen-year-old Oshino Ougi, for instance.