Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun is almost never not great. But this is the second real cracker of an episode already this season, right there with the series’ best so far. The worse anime looks as a collective whole (and 2025 is shaping up as a really bad year, potentially) the more this show stands out. It just happens that both seasons have aired in the midst of very down cycles, which I guess just makes me appreciate them all the more. This is the sort of story you’re only going to get in anime and manga, the sort that made me fall in love in the first place.

The MacGuffin here is quite obvious – Hanako-kun is in Nene’s class (1-A). Or rather Yugi Amane-kun, as everyone (but her) calls him. Plainly something is very off here, and Nene seems to be the only one that realizes it. Instantly one’s thoughts turn to the end of Episode 4 and little Amane’s Tanabata wish, but there’s no obvious thread connecting that to this. Amane seems quite normal – cheerful and popular. Aoi-chan calls him “a catch”, even. And he and Nene seem quite close – which makes him all the more perplexed at the strange things she says and the strange things she does to him.

Eventually Nene notices something else odd – a weird, Lewis Carrol tower suspended above the school building that everyone else says has always been there. But daily school life seems resolutely normal. Amane proves himself to be quite the athlete on top of everything else, and quite concerned that Nene should witness his exploits. Eventually he confronts Nene about her weird harassment and when she denies she hates him, he asks if she likes him. After which he promptly invites her to a screening of “Hamster Wars (in Space)”, which – as Aoi points out in no uncertain terms – is a date.

After a brief cut-in to a girl (Kanazawa Hana) painting, seemingly in the tower (and dissatisfied with her work), we learn that it’s not just Nene who’s having a weird day. Kou-kun is too, and for similar reasons. Mitsuba-kun is a student in his class. And he too is acting completely normally – well, normally for Mitsuba. And as with Hanako, no one seems to find this remotely strange. But in contrast to Hanako, when Kou presses the issue Mitsuba gets quite defensive about it. But he bleeds like any other human – Kou sees the clear proof of that.

The real pathos here – as in the matsuri episode – is in seeing Yugi Amane as happy, normal, living boy. And Mitsuba’s presence just magnifies that, because he too has the air of tragedy surrounding him and in his case, it persists even more palpably in the afterlife. When Amane tells Nene that she’s promised to help clean the pool she’s aghast for obvious reasons. But when he adds that Minamoto the younger is going to be there too, she seizes on it as an opportunity. If anyone is likely to understand that something is off it’s going to be him. And indeed, Kou is just as happy to see her as she him.

Almost as happy, in fact, as Nene is when she finds out she can get wet without her mermaid curse kicking in. With everyone – including Amane and Mitsuba – enjoying their carefree youth, it’s so easy to get swept up in the moment. After all, isn’t it better this way? And isn’t the reality they think of as reality much stranger than this one, and therefore much more logically a dream? It’s alluring to be sure – that is, until Akane Aoi and Aoi Akane literally fall to pieces in front of them and no one else is upset about it.

It’s clear that the strange girl Kou and Nene saw sketching by the pool is the one behind all this. This is Shijima-san of the Art Room, the girl in the tower. A girl who loved art, and died before she graduated. Her parents, it seems, forbade Shijima-san from pursuing art after she graduated – so she killed herself before that happened. Now she paints the things and people she loved to paint, and her pictures become reality. They can make even impossible wishes (like a ghost coming back to life) come true. But once you enter her reality, you can never go back to your own. That sounds like the power level of a School Wonder to me.