Neither do I Rei. Neither do I.
- Recap of Episode 9 – Festival episode! Yay! There’s squid, Nagisa and Rei dressed in yakata and of course – Rin. Nagisa goes to great lengths to keep Haruka from seeing Rin at the festival. Haruka tells them to stop being dumb. The boys find out that Rin will be swimming against them (again) as part of Samezuka Academy’s medley relay team. Drama bomb.
There’s a joke in there. I just don’t see it.
- Summary of Episode 10 – Time Travel Episode! We get a glimpse of the guys (except Rei) as children and see how they met in school. Back in the present time, Coach Sasabe (or “Goro, The Demon”) has begun coaching the swim club to help them get ready for the next tournament. Later, Coach Sasabe has the guys, Kou and Ama-chan over for a hot pot and team bonding over food, sparklers and a very familiar swim suit model named Marin-chan, who looks a lot like Ama-chan… Rei’s emotions boil over as he just doesn’t understand what the issue is between Rin, Haruka, Nagisa and Makoto. Haruka gives Rei some backstory but it’s not enough to satisfy Rei who skips swim practice to talk to Rin face to face. Woah!
You guys. Seriously. Little kid Nagisa was so cute. It kinda hurt.
Nice distraction. Yup, totally subtle.
Yeah Nagisa! That was a pretty dickhead thing to say!
I swear I heard the “Theme from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” when I saw this. (Ask Google sensei if you don’t know.)
- My Take – It’s like Rei has read my notes and understands my frustrations and feelings and… **ahem** I mean – yeah! You tell them Rei! Seriously though. You work your butt off and spend all this time with these guys and they can’t even tell you what’s going on! Honestly, I felt like this episode was written to discuss many of the issues I have had with the series – What’s the big deal with Rin? Why the hell should we care? Why isn’t anyone talking about it to Rei? Yes, I get that it’s mostly fan service. Trust me, I completely see that. But if a series is going to attempt to have drama or be serious in any way, at least attempt to not do it half-ass. Because when that happens, there really isn’t any amount of fan service you can give that can get rid of the frustrations of some of your viewers.
- OK, that’s a lie, let me try that again. Doing so makes it harder to appreciate the fan service fully. (How’s that?) I’m actually happy to see Rei take matters into his own hands and talk to Rin face to face. I get that if he would’ve done this at the beginning of the series, we wouldn’t have had a series. But you can only delay important story points like Rin’s back story for so long.
- Can you believe we only have two more episodes left? Can you? Can you? I can’t. I’m rather sad about it actually.
- I do try super hard to watch the show as soon as it’s posted to Crunchyroll so if you watch it around that time as well, make sure you say “howdy!” You can find my user profile here.
So. Freaking. Cute.
