Isshuukan Friends – 07-08

Best beach episode ever!

Damnit, Isshuukan Friends! You went to the trouble of having a beach episode, so where are the swimsuits and the fanservice?!!

Progress

Gossiping about guys? Yup, they’re friends.

The first thing to take away from these last two episodes is that Kaori is continuing to become more sociable. We already saw her starting to make more friends besides Yuuki and co., but apparently she’s now on talking terms with the rest of the class as well. Which is just dandy for her. In addition to her social life, Kaori’s condition is also slowly but surely improving. She still loses her memories every Sunday, but it seems she is now able to instinctively recognize Yuuki (and possibly her other friends) almost immediately on Monday just from reading her diary. That’s pretty impressive when you consider that these friends should be as foreign as complete strangers to her at the start of the week. All this is very good progress, and I have no doubt that the whole situation will eventually be completely resolved by the end of the show.

A Budding Romance?

My heart was not ready for that blush.

Moving on, Isshuukan Friends starts shifting the focus increasingly on the possibility of romance between Yuuki and Kaori. So far it’s been him just one-sidedly crushing on her while being in denial about it. Now, it is suggested that she reciprocates his feelings, though neither of them appear to be aware of their mutual attraction. Which, you know, makes for some pretty face-palm worthy moments. Now, at this point I should add that there is a fine line between acceptable denseness and annoying denseness. And I would say that the show has not yet crossed the threshold into the latter. That’s right, despite Yuuki being possessive and jealous, he hasn’t ruined everything yet because of his inaction. All he does is bitch about it to Shougo instead of actually prevent Kaori from reaching out to others. So that’s OK. Plus, I think his attitude has gotten considerably better after the brief “fight” between the one-week friends, so he should be growing in the right direction.

This was the perfect setting for a confession too.

Anyway, we already knew about Yuuki’s feelings and his ulterior(?) motives. What’s new is that Kaori is starting to develop an attraction to him as well (or it’s possible she’s always been attracted and is only now starting to show it). And her way of dealing with it is to randomly spout lines that might suggest romantic feelings, only to stop short halfway and change the subject. Which is not nearly as aggravating as Yuuki’s behavior, because in her case she hasn’t actually realized what her true feelings are just yet. Now, I understand that not recognizing one’s feelings can potentially be much more annoying than being in denial about one’s feelings. But in this circumstance I am much more comfortable with Kaori’s innocent attitude than Yuuki’s whiny one. That’s not to say things will remain this way forever though. My evaluation of Yuuki is slowly improving, and if Kaori’s ignorance gets dragged out for too long, it can be easy for her to become the main source of annoyance.

So far so good with Isshuukan Friends‘ recent turn of events. I know I said I face-palmed at Kaori’s aborted one-liners, but those have been cute failures for now. They can serve to either highlight her inexperience with the concept of love or suggest some previous trauma that caused her to forget any experience with love that she might have had in the past. The latter is tantalizing thought, and one that I would not have considered before now since the show has only presented her amnesia as being linked to just friends. But I’m thinking the guy introduced at the end of episode eight is going to be strongly linked to Kaori’s past, perhaps being an old friend of her’s who was on his way to becoming more than just friends before the accident happened. Now that would certainly be a juicy development, and also provide Yuuki with a very real threat in the form of a rival.

A new challenger?

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