Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
And we’re back, just like Akira walking to school.
I feel that, over the course of my coverage of Call of The Night so far, I’ve painted the show as a sort of choose-your-love interest dichotomy for protagonist Ko. Nazuna, the vampire, and a very literal child of the night on one hand. And Akira, who is comparatively normal, is more straightforward as a person, and is also, you know, actually Ko’s age, on the other.
This isn’t entirely wrong, I don’t think. But it’s also not the whole picture, and “Isn’t This a Tight Squeeze?” complicates that dynamic in some interesting ways. It’s also probably, by only just a hair, the show’s most suggestive episode so far. But as in the premiere, these plays as conventional sexiness don’t really scan as such. (To be fair, I’m not the target audience here. I feel the same about any number of romance-oriented pop songs.)
The episode opens on a short introductory scene, where we see Akira attending school. (Once again, the series adheres to its loose rule that she’s the only one who gets to spend any time in actual, full-on daylight.) There, a teacher lectures a student on the importance of a proper sleep schedule. Maybe a bit on the nose, but it does bring this episode’s central twisting of the dynamic to the forefront. Because the night after that schoolday ends, Akira finds herself unable to sleep, and joins Ko in hanging out with Nazuna after dark.
But we’ll get back to that. Ko himself is in a bit of tizzy given the events of last week’s episode. He spends the first third or so of “Tight Squeeze” replaying them in his mind. He and Nazuna kissed, and he can’t get that kiss out of his mind. Does this mean, he wonders, that he’s already in love with Nazuna? Is there really any way to be sure? There’s even a faintly ridiculous scene in here where he catches sight of a couple kissing on a small walking bridge and freaks out a bit, howling that it’s the first time he’s ever seen two people kiss before. (This seems very dubious to me. Not even his parents? Not even just….other random people while he’s been out and about before?)
One person, at least, is of the opinion that he’s overthinking it: Nazuna herself. She does bite him, of course—Nazuna rarely seems to pass up an opportunity for a sip—but nothing happens. When he spills the beans about what’s been on his mind, Nazuna suggests that he’s probably not in love, just horny. That much is probably correct, but her follow-up to that, where she says that thinking about love and lust seperately is “unhealthy”, is absolutely hilarious coming from her. Reflective, I think, less of any real assumption the show is working off of, and more of a truly stunning lack of self-awareness on Nazuna’s part, given her love of sex jokes but inability to handle actual romance talk without getting flustered. (In fact, Nazuna mentions that their kiss last week was her first kiss, too, despite waving it off as just something “friends do.”)
We meet back up with Akira the following night—which seems to make that introductory bit a flash-forward, you don’t see those too often—unable to sleep and deciding to hit the town at the bright and early hour of 11:30PM, with the rather silly notion in her head that she’ll just stay up and go to school when it opens. (There’s a very interesting, but extremely blink-and-you’ll-miss-it bit of environmental character building as we see her get out of bed. Namely, the space under it is tiled with those foam puzzle piece tiles you see in kindergartens sometimes. Indicative of an inner childishness, perhaps?)
Or perhaps she just likes the texture of foam. You decide!
In any case, she obviously meets up with Ko, who of course takes her to hang out with himself and Nazuna. There is an abrupt smash cut from his invitation to he and Nazuna raging at each other over actual, no-trademark-avoidance Street Fighter II. The sheer contrast is hilarious.
The remainder of the three’s little sleepover is interesting. The show again makes a not-great joke about how Ko doesn’t like to be, ahem, bitten in front of his other friend. They also play a dating sim, where, even in the confines of a very primitive virtual world, Nazuna can’t bring himself to go to school, which leads to the tsundere character getting testy with him. At another point in the game, a quiet busty girl shows up, to which Ko has a much more positive reaction. Nazuna rags on him for this, and it’s pretty funny.
The real telling moment near the end here, though, is when the three of them are all laying down together. A weird experience for Akira, to be sure. But the conversation the two have here is legitimately sweet, with Akira essentially accepting that Ko prefers hanging around with Nazuna at night to going to school during the day but promising to still try to get him to go now and again.
Somewhat amusingly, as the two talk about studying, the framing of the shot seems to really strongly imply that the only thing Ko is studying at the moment is Akira’s legs.
Someone on the show’s production put their entire soul into this sequence.
That note is probably the first time in a while that Akira has really felt like a viable romantic option for Ko. But, at the same time, they could also easily just stay friends, too. The question of who he’ll end up with seems less important than ever as the episode draws to a close. The real value here is in the little moments.
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