I prefer tonkotau, myself…

That was certainly odd. Junichi invited Ai to a new amusement park, to which he was given tickets by a strange court jester who spoke Japanese with a bad accent. While in the haunted house he’s apparently sprayed by some sort of psychedelic gas from a mummy’s mouth and hallucinates all of his “alternate life” girlfriends in odd guises. Oddest of all, by far, was current squeeze Tachibana as a… bowl of Miso Ramen. Miso ramen? I don’t know whether the next sequence was erotic or unsettling, but it was undeniably bizarre.

While ostensibly a romance series systematically riffing on genre cliches – indeed, clicking off the amusement park this week fits the bill – Amagami SS has shown an occasional nod to quirkiness before, with varying success. Still, that whole sequence in the haunted house felt totally out of place. The rest of the episode was fine – Ai remains a fairly interesting foil for Junichi, who’s fairly likable in this incarnation. I’m not all that concerned about her swim team troubles – really, that’s trivial stuff by any standard. But that’s not really what this series is about, and what it is about is progressing acceptably in this arc.

How interesting that the two weirdest scenes in the series have both involved ramen. While the first, in the Haruka arc, was more straightforward and quite sensual, this one was just creepy. Ramen fetish, maybe?