「ハプニング・イン・サマー」 (Hapuningu in Samaa)
“Happening in Summer”

I thought I was prepared for Tomoe taking the wheel of a vehicle and putting other people’s lives in her hands. Boy was I wrong though, after seeing the state of what was formerly known as a car spark up and explode. What a way to start their summer vacation — with a bang.

As horrid as that sounds, Sumika meets a much more unfortunate fate after deciding to help Azusa with the yuri festival. Not only does she end up writing fifty pages for the doujinshi, she’s also stuck folding and binding hundreds of pages together. She initially tries to finish up quickly so that she can meet up with the others for the rest of their beach trip and witness Ushio’s bikini accidents (a.k.a. “happening”), but the discovery of a spelling mistake in her writing bothers her enough to reprint and refold all those pages. To make things worse, Azusa’s printer runs out of toner, forcing her to run around to various convenience stores to photocopy more pages. Despite having to do so, her determination remains unfazed.

That of course is until she trips on her way back into Azusa’s room. With some split second thinking, Sumika opts for crashing into the bed over a chair, scattering pages everywhere in the process. Asuza’s mother comes by with drinks shortly after and slips, leading to the slow motion death of their work. Seeing Azusa in tears and giving up on finishing in time, Sumika gives up on going to the beach and buckles down to put together however many copies she can. Unbeknownst to her, Ushio and others had their trip cut short and are already on their way back after Tomoe got an earful from her parents. The next day, Ushio heads to the YuriFes by herself to pick up a copy of Azusa and Sumika’s “Sunflower” doujinshi, and tells the latter she rushed back just to see her. She runs into Tomoe, Miyako, and Kiyori there, but keeps what she said to Sumika a secret.

 

Well there goes my idea of Sumika attending both the beach trip and the YuriFes somehow. At least I was able to anticipate her mindset in all this. Speaking of which, Sumika’s almost like a lecherous teenage boy with how she fantasizes about Ushio all the time. Spending the summer together with everything leading up to a kiss is understandably yuri, but dreaming of Ushio’s bikini top falling off is another story. In any case, I originally wanted to see more Sumika x Ushio screentime, but the time they spent apart made the scene at the end a lot more meaningful. I’m sure Sumika felt so anyway.

Aside from that, watching the drinks splatter everywhere in slow motion was absolutely grueling, especially after seeing how Sumika and Azusa painstakingly hand-folded each and every one of those pages. I’ve been there, staying up all night working on reports/papers back in university, and it really feels like someone’s out to get you when things go awry during the final stretch. I’ve also had WordPress crap out on me due to connection failures and lost entire posts I had written up, which was more disheartening because I had to write everything from scratch again. In short, I could definitely feel their pain in that scene. Next time, it looks like they plan to follow up this semi-beach episode (if you can even call it that) with a pool one. We’re in the last quarter of the season now, so I’m glad to see things finally going in Sumika and Ushio’s favour.

 

Preview

14 Comments

  1. I think in the manga Sumika is actually a bit horrified of the thought of the “accident” because she imagines Ushio being the victim of a prank done by Miyako and Tomoe.

    And yeah, the dynamics are a bit strange. It’s more pronounced in the anime than the manga (and maybe partially just played for laughs?), but they seem to have the characters set up where Ushio is supposed to be the “woman” and Sumika the “man”. Kind of frustrating.

    Sam
  2. Sam said:
    It’s more pronounced in the anime than the manga (and maybe partially just played for laughs?), but they seem to have the characters set up where Ushio is supposed to be the “woman” and Sumika the “man”. Kind of frustrating.

    I think that is more for laughs like that scene “my honey!” XD but i do think in part like you(sorry for my bad english)
    but still, sumika is a cute girl with boobs and long hair ^^ XD

    lol
  3. I too know the pain of losing work due to a computer failure. Thats why i use google docs now. Accessible from any computer with internet, so no forgetting USBs or laptops. Everything is saved to the cloud and thus is safe from being erased easily. Not to mention it automatically saves drafts for you every couple minutes. Google is just awesome.

    kwantum0

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