It’s kind of ad nauseam at this point, but I really think GoHands deserves some credit for not messing this up (much).  I mean if we’re honest, these character designs are closer to the manga than BokuYaba’s are.  And they’re really doing well with the faces (that was a big theme this week).  And all without excessive doses of GoHands weirdness and vertigo.  It’s almost as if those seizure-inducing first three minutes were kind of a reverse bait-and-switch – fooling us into thinking we were getting chicken sashimi (yes, they do that here) when in fact we were getting properly-cooked yakitori.

This episode is very much the follow up to the last one – something that should be a given but isn’t with anime comedy.  Things always progress in SukiMega, which I’ve trying to tell the impatient new viewers out there.  Mie-san is definitely the driver of events here.  She’s quite refreshing as a romcom lead – so direct and honest about her feelings.  She clearly doesn’t totally understand those yet, but she knows she has them – Komura-kun occupies a different place in her world now than he did before the museum incident.  She knows what she wants, and she asks for it.  She doesn’t understand the full implications (or the impact on Kaede) but that doesn’t stop her one bit.

The funny thing is, of course, that Kaede is obsessed with “protecting” Ai and with how others see them, and she doesn’t care a whit and others see the pair of them exactly as they are.  Someya-san may have been wrong about them kissing, but really, that’s the only misunderstanding in the episode.  Everyone knows the score here, Ai is far too artless to really care what anybody else thinks, and it’s only Kaede who’s worried about it.

Taking Ai’s actions this week as a whole, to me they speak volumes.  She tells Komura-kun that she wants to see his face up close every day when she forgets her glasses.  She asks him to put her hair up for her (they may as well choose the rings with that one).  And I mean, if you’re going to have a guy tie your hair right in the classroom in front of everybody, you clearly have no self-consciousness about the relationship whatsoever.  I don’t think Mie-san fully grasps how that act looks to everyone else, but she certainly knows that it makes her very happy.

The kicker, though, is what she says afterwards – “it would be nice to have you do this every morning”.  “At school?” he asks, and she replies in the negative (even throwing in a “someday” under her breath).  That sounds pretty damn self-aware to me.  In series like this the guy is often the last to know, so Kaede’s denseness is not unusual.  But as with Ai, I think he knows more than he lets on.  He just can’t quite accept the fact that Ai is actually interested in him – his self-image won’t allow it.  But he’s cracking.  And stuff like Ai following him to the deserted art room for her facetime makes it harder to deny reality.

I know this much – if the adaptation doesn’t get to the point in the story where Kaede’s Mom and Ai’s parents (especially Dad) come into the picture that will be a criminal shame, because that’s when everything really levels up.  There continue to be signs that Suki na Ko is doing well in Japan – aggregator sites rank it highly, and we’re starting to see stuff like pop–up cafes and other merchandising.  But this season will wind up using more than half of the manga – and given that the manga just ended, I’m not even sure how a theoretical second season would work…