Sakamichi no Apollon 08 – 09

…and 45 years later, men have made no progress.

Hello. I’m back to blog about Apollon some more. I’ll be a bit more to the point with some thoughts on these couple of episodes, focusing on the two main romantic interests which have developed quite a bit since anaaga covered episode 7 in my absence.

By the time these two episodes were done with, the love pentagon had lost 3 of its lines and became two straight lines. Which way do the arrows point and who’s the odd one out?

Jun x Yurika

Recap

• Sentarou likes Yurika
• Yurika likes Jun
• Jun liked Yurika for a bit
• Jun tries to make Yurika not like him

A couple that I thought had the makings of “not destined to be” for a moment turned out to be our first real couple in Apollon. While “Depresso” Jun wanted to keep that downward spiral going, Yurika’s persistence is what saved Jun’s life. Jun wasn’t ever a bad guy like I had thought for a brief moment, he just lost himself to the depression of his college situation which led to drugs and booze.

Jun would later return the favor by saving Yurika from an arranged marriage situation. While there’s no guarantees of what wil happen with the job Junichi is taking up, hearing her parents call out for her lit up enough of the exclamation mark over Jun to grab her before the train took off.

On the subject of Jun doing some student activism work. If you don’t watch Hyouka, they actually touch on the subject of students going on strike against their own school. While Apollon’s focused on how Jun became affected by it after his buddy got injured and couldn’t play saxophone anymore, the Hyouka kids go at it from a case-solving perspective while looking at student unrest. Heck, Hyouka takes place in current day (I assume) and the events they discussed happened 45 years ago. They even talk about a character named Jun.

Guys, Jun is Eru’s uncle.

And that’s enough of me being dumb 😛

Kaoru x Ritsuko

Recap

• Kaoru liked Ri’ko
• Ri’ko liked Sentarou
• Ri’ko rejected Kaoru
• Ri’ko withdraws feelings for Sentarou
• Ri’ko likes Kaoru

Hey look at that. We’ve reversed the feelings in a span of 7 episodes (and however exact months have passed since then). Smalls signs in episode 6 showed a development, but a girl-to-girl talk with Yurika finally made Ritsuko accept the feelings she has for Kaoru. The gloves in the piano is the sweetest way of hinting Kaoru, but let’s hope that Kaoru doesn’t need Ritsuko to spell it out for him. I can see Kaoru understanding what the gift means, though how he acts on those feelings we’ll be the one scene I’ll be waiting for in the next episode (or two).

Somewhat to a fault, Kaoru has been trying to play matchmaker to Ri’Ko x Sentarou even in spite of his own personal interests. The more he tried to push them together through the hinting, he tried to detach himself from his feelings when he was really lying to himself. While we would all love for Kaoru to have reach that moment of realization sooner, if anything, his hinting had further fueled the feelings that Ri’ko has developed for him. Ri’ko has cleared that hurdle, but now Kaoru needs to get over his own mental blocking.

With this OTP, Sentarou is out of the running of any kind. It was a really nice scene how Sen and Ri’ko reached an understanding without a direct “no”. It wasn’t her rejecting him, more like just making him believe that he was just misunderstood; expertly crafted, Ri’ko! I initially came up with the crazy idea that Kaoru should reject Ritsuko if she ever did confess, but how smoothly that moment was between Ri’ko & Sen makes me completely ignore myself.

Sen-bo vs. Jun-ni

A proper closing to the Sentarou/Junichi storyline in the anime.