Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
This week; festival stuff, beginning with the haunted house that was teased at the end of last week’s episode. Even in just this opening scene, we get a lot of interesting xx. Kaguya and her cousin Maki alike prove to be cowardly within the haunted house proper, and when we flash back to how all the spooky 3D sound (yes, 3D sound) was recorded in the first place—by subjecting Miko to it—and we get maybe the only Love is War! segment that might cause untoward awakenings in certain viewers. Seriously, if you showed some of these stills to someone out of context they would very much get the wrong idea.
Thankfully I’d never do that to my loyal readers.
More to the point, back in the present, Miko catches a couple making out in the haunted house and as a result the attraction gets separated into two lines; one for boys, one for girls. By coincidence, this also ruins Ishigami’s initial plan for getting an ideal opening to confess his feelings to Tsubame, so he has to do something else instead.
On the spur of the moment, while visiting a class cafe, he wins a gigantic heart-shaped cookie for her, with the intent that doing so would just be a nice gesture. Dramatic irony ahoy, he is unaware of the whole “eternal love” urban legend, singled out by the narrator as one of about 10% of students who doesn’t know about it. This leaves Tsubame a blushing, mess, and, flustered, she runs off screaming that she needs time to think about his inadvertent confession.
And friends, let me tell you, I am someone who is pretty sensitive to second-hand embarrassment. Ishigami accidentally(!!) confessing to his massive crush on Tsubame in front of her own class, a good 20 or 30 people, did not just make my skin crawl, it made my spine shuffle around like a deck of cards. I could feel my teeth conspiratorially whispering “get a load of this guy” to each other. My hair stood on end and metamorphed, Bayonetta style, into that one meme of girls at a college party looking awkwardly at the camera. The cringe is real, and it is inside of Ishigami. I have not felt this bad for the guy in quite some time.
Later in the episode, Shirogane and Chika wonder aloud about Ishigami’s chances. Shirogane is hopeful, admittedly because if Ishigami isn’t successful, it might ruin his ability to pull off his own forthcoming confession. Chika, meanwhile, says Ishigami “doesn’t have a prayer.” Comedic rudeness aside, she does think pretty hard on Ishigami’s chances, despite her initial assessment, including grading him on “points” and trying to put herself in Tsubame’s shoes a bit. This facet of Chika has always been pretty interesting to me. What she’s doing here—treating romance between two people as an object of amusement or for study—is fairly representative of someone with a para-romantic personality. If she’s seriously interested in any crush or anything of the sort of her own, we don’t hear about it here, and I’m pretty confident we never will. (This does have the unfortunate effect of sidelining Chika any time the anime starts focusing more heavily on its dramatic side.)
My armchair psychoanalyzing of Chika aside, she indicates that thinking on it more, she actually does think Ishigami has a chance, and it is always nice to see her being genuine.
Elsewhere, we’re reintroduced to Moeha, who you may or may not remember as Chika’s younger sister. She’s also basically Chika But Sadistic, although that angle of her personality is toned back here, since this segment focuses on her newfound crush on Shirogane.
Yes, Shirogane now has another girl who thinks his dead-eyed sleep deprived stare is the sexiest thing in Japan. There’s even a great moment where Kaguya, who is initially very hostile upon finding out about this, has a “could this be one of my people?” sort of reaction as the two gush about that very feature of his.
Before that, it’s Chika who tries to sabotage the relationship, by demonstrating how terrible Shirogane is at various things. She picks a pretty random task—juggling—and sets him to do it, assuming he’ll be as awful at that as he was at singing, rapping, playing volleyball, and however many other things. Naturally, because of the laws of comedy, he’s actually pretty fantastic at juggling. And the three or four other things Chika tries to have him do.
That particular segment ends with this, a casual reminder that Moeha has a particularly warped personality. But hey, at least she’s funny about it.
Post-credits, we find out that someone’s stolen all the heart-shaped balloons at the festival! Truly, an unprecedented crime! The heist of the century! Who could our culprit be?
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
The Magic Planet 
