With Blue Box, you just have to take the bitter with the sweet. For me, the bitter is the healthy side dish of romcom tropes this series serves up. Well, that and I find Hina to be incredibly annoying. There’s a lot of sweet here too – an excellent main couple and some good side characters. But because this is a formula romcom in structure if not necessarily in execution, just who the main couple is has to be a tease over an extended period.

Sports is still important with Ao no Hako even when the focus is romance, and vice-versa. The regional qualifiers come to an end with Taiki finishing second (to an annoying sempai from his own school). Hina is on-hand to offer her usual buffet of snarky left-handed compliments and outright digs, but for a first-year placing second is a very good result (remember, he only needed top 16 to move on to prefecturals). And most importantly in the short-term (more so than Taiki yet realizes) he defeated Kishi-kun and protected Chinatsu’s privacy.

After Taiki gets a text asking him out to Sunshine City aquarium the next day, he’s naturally flabbergasted. When Hina – quite logically – asks “when did you two get so close?” Kyou feels like he has to do some damage control and cop to having set this up himself. That gives Taiki an out to not believe Chinatsu actually wanted to do this, though Hina insists on calling it a date. Once she leaves the boys side, though, her true feelings show through on her face. And so the drama begins…

Taiki oversleeps (tropes, check) and is a bit flustered when he arrives in Ikebukuro. But despite having no way to know just what this “date” means, of course he gets swept up in the moment, Eventually Chinatsu gives him yet another excuse to indulge his self-doubts – she apologizes for her comments about going to nationals as a first-year not being that big a deal. So is that the whole reason for this outing, to apologize? Logically it’s obviously not – and an older person with a bit of experience would probably get that. But Taiki is in his first semester out of middle school and is anything but experienced, and looking for reasons to disprove something that seems impossible to him (that Chinatsu actually likes him).

Later, Hina and Chinatsu cross paths at the osteopath (a big anime coincidence, though it’s certainly not far-fetched for teen athletes to frequent the same local clinic). Hina goes back into her act, teetering between wingwoman and saboteur, and trying to feel out what Chinatsu-sempai’s deal is. Chinatsu leaves first but forgets her phone, which is the perfect pretext for the beans to be spilled about living arrangements. If that comes as something of a shock, well – you can’t blame Hina for that.

Of course Hina was going to find this out sooner or later. It’s not realistic to keep that sort of secret from the whole school in the long term, really. And because this is a triangle, there’s going to be attendant drama with this development. YMMV on that but it is what it is. Putting oneself in Hina’s shoes, this has to be a pretty baffling sight. She can’t imagine that Taiki and Chinatsu are “living together” in that sense. But what the hell is going on here, then? I’m not her biggest fan (even her smallest one) but watching Hina puzzle that out is going to be interesting, I have to admit.