I’m afraid the three episode rule simply isn’t going to be enough with Iroduku Sekai no Ashita kara, because I’m still very much on the fence with this show.  If I divorce myself from my hopes (Kakihara Yuuko original series with Chiba Shoya as the male lead) and go strictly by experience, I’m fairly ambivalent so far.  And there are a couple of things that are flat-out problems:

• Ishihara Kaori is doing that breathy, perpetually surprised thing to the max as Hitomi.  It’s a seiyuu style I find particularly irritating and it’s getting more so with each passing episode.
• Kawai Kurumi checks pretty much every annoying character box there is, and she was heavily involved in this episode.  She’s insufferable.

On the other hand, there remains a lot here that I really like.  The choice of Nagasaki as a setting for a series about the agony of not seeing color is a stroke of genius.  Like San Francisco, it’s a city that visually grabs you by the collar and won’t let you go.  And the general notion of achromatopsia as a premise is a pretty clever one by Kakihara – it has traction both as a metaphorical and literal plot device.  As well, I really like every scene between Hitomi and Yuito.  They’re when Iroduku loses most of its cliche teen drama baggage and feels most authentic.

For the most part, this series so far seems mostly formulaic with a few interesting twists.  In other words, the very definition of a bubble series.  As such I think an awful lot is going to depend on how the arrival of “Grandma” is going to impact the story.  The teenage Kohaku has been hyped so much that it’s clear she’s going to arrive like a cyclone, for better or worse, so it’s entirely possible that the series is going to stand or fall based on how she holds up as a character.  I’m anxious about that, to be honest, because my gut feeling is Kohaku is going to be a lot to take.  But there’s no point in trying to make that call now when she’s going to be a part of next week’s ep anyway.

As for the specific events of this week, they’re not too notable apart from having moved the story along in predictable fashion.  Hitomi clearly wants to join the art club, if nothing else to get more chances to see colors through Yuito, but her initial foray is a bit of a disaster even as it reveals her untapped magical prowess.  Yui’s suggestion that she join the photography side because of the potential in black-and-white projects (that occurred to me, too) pushes the idea of a potential romance with Shou, though there was no acknowledgement of the ending of last week’s episode’s significance.  We’re just marking time until the arrive of Typhoon Kohaku – all we can really do is see how the landscape looks after she blows through it.