Score: A-

Minami’s drama has passed, but there’s plenty more drama yet to come. As time passes the sisters are steadily coming to terms with their feelings. Arata is somewhat unaware of what’s going on, but even then he is slowly getting there. It’s going to be interesting to see which sister makes the most obvious move (besides Kotono). Once someone beyond Kotono makes an obvious pass at Arata that could cause things to spiral out of control!

The sports fan in me feels this

Once again I’m reminded why Ouka is my favourite character in this show. I love that her first scene in this episode is grumbling over that call in the tennis match. Because I totally get that. Even though there’s no point, it’s hard to just let something like that go. When a bad call happens it just sticks with you for a good while. Probably all the more so since it was a match her sister was in! It’s hard to deny that feeling of “that call was BS!” Sure on an objective level the important thing is Minami’s health and how she feels about the whole thing. But it’s kind of hard for Arata to talk about her having no regrets when we clearly saw that she had plenty of regrets over it!

Everyone else trying to be logical. Does no one understand the passion of a fan here!? Sure it wasn’t a professional level match so you can’t expect the officials to be flawless (though frankly I think some professional officials suck at their jobs) and Minami had to be able to roll with the bad calls and over come it. But still…come on!

This sums up Minami!

Naturally this episode hammered home that Minami has well and truly fallen! To a degree that’s a bit more than she can emotionally handle. All the different incidents have piled onto each other and just let it land home for Minami that she is well and truly in love. Naturally the issue now for her is processing that and determining if that’s alright. Can she accept that she’s in love and will she try to make her own moves? It’s a tough one since everyone did pretty much dismiss Kotono’s feelings and the realistic possibility for any of them to also end up there. But now Minami is at that point. I half expected her to be the one to approach Kotono to talk to her.

The adorable level of trust

Instead it was Ouka stepping forward for that chat. It’s fitting since we do seem set for an Ouka arc which I fully expect to be an engaging one. I love that Ouka was trying to step forward to hear Kotono out in a fair way. She didn’t rush in there with the intention to dismiss her feelings, which showed a level of acceptance. But she did want to reach out and understand why she’d have that outburst right now. And naturally it means having her conversation with Arata thrown in her face! That came along with the realization that basically everyone knew she’d said something like that to Arata and had been discussing it!

Naturally she did try to waive the whole thing off. Not like she was lying about how Arata interpreted their conversation. And the game room thing was just a mishap. Although…I will say that an accident doesn’t at all dismiss how charged that scene was and how both of them were fairly affected by it! But it wasn’t an intentional romantic confession I suppose. But the tough thing came with Kotono’s pressure. It’s one thing for Ouka to lie to herself. She is effectively the tsundere of this group! But it’s another thing to lie to Kotono. Someone looking with such a level of trust and earnestness is harder to feel good about deceiving. And that realization that she would be deceiving her seemed to leave Ouka stunned for a moment. She did still lie in the end, but Ouka was clearly aware that she wasn’t being honest.

That’s one way to keep someone quiet!

While Ouka’s time is coming, we still got some nice Banri moments! This show does a solid job trying to cut between the various characters enough to keep them from being left out. Well minus Shion who is not considered valuable to the story since he has a girlfriend already! I do feel for Banri since the fear of the supernatural is understandable. Fear doesn’t play nice even if the fear is of something that likely doesn’t exist. Sorry Arata, but there’s no getting away from those breasts! Banri is probably the most effective at getting Arata to face his actual attraction to the others. When she’s on her game she’s a great tease, but when she’s afraid she’s extremely clingy!

Thank goodness that guard wasn’t good at his job! You’d think pointing the light directly around a corner would be a given! On the positive side it did a great job of really giving Banri a scare! That was some effective skinship. I did appreciate that they slipped in her reasoning for getting into nursing. That was a sweet flashback and motive. You never know what kind of impact you can have on another person in terms of directing their path.

Ouka, don’t leave us!

I’m looking forward to seeing how things go with Ouka. Understandable that she’d be shaken up by seemingly bombing her mock exam. But to straight up go missing is a step further than I expected! In theory they know (in general) where she went, but she left three days before anyone would think to look for her. And Arata being the last person she saw before going should motivate him to get on the hunt! A safe presumption is that Ouka’s feelings for Arata are distracting her and she just wanted to get away in order to reset herself. But it’s a worrying thing that she didn’t come back after the long weekend! I presume the only way to get her to relax and focus again will be to sort out her romantic feelings.