Ao Haru Ride – 05

Futaba keeps finding ways to snuggle Kou

Leadership Training Camp continues, will the members of the group start to get along any better?

 

Orienteerin-gu!

Yeah, it doesn’t match the title, but Yuuri and Futaba are getting better together

It’s more what I’d call a kind of checkpoint obstacle course, at least they way they handle it most of the time. And that gets them into trouble at the end, because while they have made good time and they are scoring a lot of points, they don’t know where they’ve been, which means they can’t figure out where to go. So much for winning! I think we have to give Futaba credit for trying to get everyone to look at the map at least somewhat, but she could also have been just figuring out where they were going on her own while the others did the checkpoint finding. Overall just a big fail for the group.

Running Into Issues

Were the birds singing too, Yuuri?

So while they’re trying to figure out where they’re going, the group actually does get closer together, with their differences disappearing into shared effort. It isn’t too bad of a setup, and they’re starting to lean on each other, especially when the bad things start to happen. Yuuri gets scared of the river crossing, and Futaba injures her foot, and in both cases Kou saves the day. Of course, this is going to cause a little bit of trouble for Futaba, because Yuuri takes the opportunity to fall in love with Kou, because he’s a nice guy.

Sunrise

Finally acting like a group

The team building continues when Futaba and Kou decide to wake everyone up to see the sunrise that they were up to see. And it’s probably the dawn of their group being a cohesive group, especially with Kominato quoting Kou’s made up reason for shared activities. Kou’s also getting closer to Futaba, without trying to act like it, like using a cat as an excuse to stay with Futaba. And she’s finally realizing what the current him is like, and falling for him as well.

I wonder how much it helped the group dynamic that Futaba started to ask Yuuri about what she and Murao talked about, but then stopped. I think that’s the kind of thing that should help, but who knows what Murao would really think. And Yuuri does a good job changing the subject to not bring it up again. And yes, there’s a little bit of a love triangle developing, but I really don’t think that Yuuri will ever mean more to Kou than just being a friend, and he’s in the process of falling for Futaba anyway, so I think that OTP is here to stay, with Yuuri’s feelings being mostly jealousy and unrequited love. Plus, it’s hard to think that she’s fallen that hard for Kou because she barely knows him.