Romcoms are like snowflakes.  Or something.  I just know they’re all different, and this season has a lot of good ones.  Skip to Loafer is certainly one of them, and as objectively as I can assess them, it stands toe to toe with the others in the top tier.  Past that and you start to get into “fit”.  Anime are not bespoke suits, we can only buy them off the rack (no tailoring offered).  Of that top tier this series probably fits me less than BokuYaba at the very least, and maybe Insomniacs and Clueless Transfer Student too.  But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate it for what it offers, and that my feelings about it can’t evolve.

I certainly connected with this episode more than the last one (which was just a bit boring if I’m honest).  And probably as much as any episode apart from #3, with which this week’s had a lot in common.  I do think for me even a show as fluffy as this one works better with at least a whisper of conflict.  If it fully embraced being a slice-of-lifer a la Satou Junichi I don’t think it would matter to me, but because S&L is a plot-driven series to an extent, I enjoy it when a bit of gritty realism creeps in there.  As it did in Episode 3, and as it did this week.

The thing is – and this is where the “appreciate” part comes in – Skip and Loafer (so far at least) doesn’t trade in drama for its own sake.  And that’s kind of refreshing, since romance series can certainly overdo it in that department.  Not everything has to be a crisis, but the characters do have to wrestle with crises sometimes.  I think Mitsumi may just be a bit too infallible for it to ever be her – she’s so resolute and generally unaffected that it’s hard to imagine her getting too bogged down over much of anything.  That’s not necessarily true of the supporting cast, which is why the series may click a bit more when one or more of them are in focus.

The news that her bestie Fumi is in love does set Mitsumi back briefly, but she plows ahead in her own implacable way.  She does worry about whether she’ll even know it when she falls in love (obviously, no), a perfectly natural concern for a 16 year-old, but when the syllabus for the upcoming semester finals hits she quickly shifts gears.  That is, until she discovers that Sousuke is absent and takes to worrying about his missing out.  She promptly messages him, but Sousuke doesn’t seem too worried (or sick).  Still, he isn’t at his desk when the bell rings the next day, either.

It’s not like I spent hours musing on the title here, but I always kind of assumed Mitsumi was “Skip” and Sousuke was the loafer.  But maybe the “skip” comes because Sousuke has a habit of skipping school occasionally?  For honor student Mitsumi this is shocking.  Shocking that anyone would skip just because of oversleeping (or rainy season) but all the more so because it’s the boy she’s totally not in love with, no sir.  The “fight” this prompts between them is as close as this series gets to conflict, I suppose, and it’s kind of low-key intense in a very Skip to Loafer sort of way.

“Who cares?” is not a phrase in Mitsumi’s vocabulary (though honestly, maybe it should be).  And when she scolds Sousuke about how term finals are important, he throws “maybe they are to you” back at her in a callback to the premiere.  It definitely comes off harsher than he intended, but I kinda throw in with Sousuke on this one.  Mitsumi is going to need to learn to accept people as they are, and when you’re as majime as she is, that means accepting that not everyone else is.  She’s fallen for Sousuke because of how he is – trying to change him is a bad look.

Again, this being Skip and Loafer all this is handled in a pretty low-stress way.  For the first time we see Sousuke one-on-one with one of his own friends, Chris (Nagano Yusuke) – who has  “Pomeranian Rhapsody” (Night at the Opera spoof) and “The International game Brothers” (Blues Brothers-Mario Bros. mashup) posters on his wall.  And he opens up to Mitsumi a bit about his private life – his absentee family, how he was in middle school.  Sousuke wants Mitsumi to see him as who he really is, but it seems like he’s still reflexively hiding a lot of that from her (and everyone else).

Sousuke is a lot more plausible as a candidate for real angst than Mitsumi, and as such there’s a bit more heft to these developments with him as the focus.  And of course this is a romcon, and we haven’t had much “rom” yet.  It’s been pretty obvious from the start that Sousuke was falling for Mitsumi – now, after he tells her she’s the “first real friend” he’s had who was a girl, the light bulb in her head clicks on like someone opened the refrigerator door, and Fumi’s words come flooding back.  “School is boring when you’re not around” isn’t exactly a confession, but it is enough to connect the dots in her head.  These were some interesting developments, and they set the stage for potentially many more.