Summary:

Because of their bet to see who can get a girlfriend/boyfriend first, Ootani shows up to school with a new hairstyle, but Risa messes it up. On the way home, Risa notices that Nobu and Chiharu have paired off with their respective boyfriends, leaving just her and Ootani as the unattached ones. Though she’s feeling left out, Risa does connect with Ootani on the one subject they both love: a band called Umibouzu. To Risa’s surprise, she later finds out that Ootani is actually quite popular among the girls since he’s on the basketball team, though she ends up making fun of the way he has his hair tied up with flower hair clips. Refusing to lose to him, Risa goes to a goukon, but finds it devoid of good guys. She’s quite depressed the day after, though Ootani manages to raise her spirits by presenting to her a ticket for the Umibouzu Christmas concert. Risa immediately starts arguing with him about having to spend Christmas with him, but she doesn’t have anything better to do without a boyfriend. On the way home, the two of them run into a girl who looks almost exactly like Chiharu. The girl goes on her way after a brief chat with Ootani, causing Risa to question who that was. She is thus shocked when Ootani reveals that she was his ex-girlfriend Kanzaki Mayu. Risa later learns from her friend Nobu that Kanzaki was the manager of Ootani’s middle school basketball team.

When she asks Ootani about why they broke up, Ootani reveals that he was dumped. It turns out that Kanzaki had someone else she liked – a 2-meter tall guy – and it was because of this that Ootani became self-conscious of his own height. Because Risa now understands a little more about him, she wants to let him be happy and cheers him on. After school, she finds Kanzaki talking with Ootani outside their school, inviting him to a basketball club reunion. Kanzaki mentions that she has something to tell him, so he has to come. It turns out to be on the same day as the Umibouzu concert, but Risa encourages Ootani to go to the party instead. The problem is that when the time comes for the concert, Risa finds herself heading there alone, surrounded by dozens of other couples. When she gets bumped into, Risa hurts her leg, and all of her depressed feelings come back to her: she’s worried about being alone without Ootani if he gets back together with Kanzaki. To her surprise though, Ootani shows up after all, claiming that he came because he had a promise with Risa first. This causes Risa to start crying, partly because he came and partly because her leg hurts. The two end up having quite a good time at the concert, and Risa forgets about her worries. Afterwards though, Risa is again shocked, but this time because a seemingly random guy comes up and hugs her.

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It doesn’t feel like much changed between the first and second episodes in terms of style or comedy, but for some reason, this show lost a lot of its charm for me. Maybe it’s because I got used to hearing the speech and have been doing a little reading of the manga this past week. Speaking of which, Haruka appears at the end of this episode, which is a bit earlier than I expected. I guess they’ll be showing the Haruka story and the Kanzaki story together. I also noticed that the karaoke song they were singing during the goukon scene was the ending to Kamisama Kazoku (thought it took me a while to identify the song since it’s been so long). In any case, I think I’ll need to see at least one more episode to decide if I’ll continue following this.

20 Comments

  1. Well, I’m not really surprise about Haruka. The first episode went through a lot. However, there’s a lot of story to this anime. However, I like how everything is going. ^^

    sento
  2. Watching this was a big enjoyment for me. I’ll definitely continue watching–but your summaries are a great guide for my terrible Japanese comprehension. Hopefully you’ll continue! They are zooming through the storyline a lot faster than I had anticipated. I really have no idea what the next episode will cover, but whatever it may be the humor definitely kills me. It’s great how dramatic and humorous this manga managed to be at the same time, I expect the anime to do the same (err… I’m hoping, at least)!

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