With Kirino safely stashed away in America for now, we’re free to turn out focus onto all things Kuroneko. We get a taste of her struggles to fit in at Kyou’s high school, her new club – joined at Kyou’s insistence – and her budding relationship with him. We also get a group of new characters at the club, along with a healthy dose of excessive coincidence.

Kuroneko may be setting some sort of record for subtle little facial expressions. Problem is, they’re all adorable, and each one more so than the last. That little smirk she has down pat, and it really should piss me off – but it just makes me love her more. They could give me 28 minutes of here laying on Kyou’s bed and that’d be a great episode. But bigger things are indeed happening – Kuroneko is turning a bit tsundere, it seems. Some of that may be simple hard-to-get, but she plays a good game at resenting Kyou’s concerned interference in her school life. In the end I’m not fooled – she obviously want him to be her first, but she has some competition there.

Concerned for her social pariah status, Kyou accompanies Kuroneko to the Game Developers Club – an oddball little group headed by the guy whose bike Kyou borrowed to get home from Akiba with Kirino’s game. The second huge coincidence is that another member of the club is Akagi – younger sister of Kyou’s friend, and a great lover of hard-core yaoi. In fact, at Kuroneko’s goading she even confesses that she dreamed about Makabe – the always smiling shota who recruited her and the others to join the club – being gang-raped by the other members. Makabe, sadly, is traumatized by this – but the budding of an interesting rivalry with Kuroneko appears to be forming.

I suspect from her actions that Saori is interested in Kyou as well. This was a new side for her – we really haven’t seen this much emotion from Saori as we did this episode. In reality it looks like all the female cast members – including the sister, unfortunately – would like to jump Kyou’s bones. Kuroneko certainly seems like the betting favorite, but it’s an interesting struggle. I love poor Saori but I just don’t think she has a chance. The osananajimi can’t be counted out either, and as for Kirino – well, she is the only girl referenced in the title. Anything but that for me – though I’d be happiest with a Kuroneko end, I guess. She’s a marvelous creation – the sexiest and funniest girl in anime this year, maybe.