An entire episode devoted to the romance angle was not the queasy proposition I might have considered it a few weeks ago. It might be too much to say I’ve warmed to Ito-Gen but I’ve accepted it at least. It’s a development I wouldn’t have chosen handled in a way that’s both believable and somewhat dignified, and given its inevitability I don’t think I could have asked for more than that. A mixed bag in other words, but in the final analysis nowhere close to the deal-breaker it could have been in clumsier hands.

Hiroshima is an incredibly popular place for school trips, and it’s not hard to see why. Given its historical significance and how that can be a learning tool, its famous regional cuisine, and iconic places like Miyajima with its holy messenger deer, it has everything. Naturally Ito and Gen are in the same pod for the trip, and the other four members – the girls at least – do their best to use the trip to give things a push forward. That includes disappearing during free time so the happy couple would have the chance to be alone together. And getting recognized as such by a store clerk only intensifies the mood.

This sort of works for me largely because as presented, one can totally get where Ito is coming from. She has feelings which are perfectly realistic for someone in her position, and she’s extremely unnerved by them. Her hormones are pushing her in one direction and her common sense in the other. For all that she plays up the big sister routine it doesn’t change the fact that this guy – and his brothers – are people she only met a few months earlier. Gen is always a tsundere but he can’t totally hide that he’s being swept up in the vibe too.

It’s pretty funny that Ito managed to call Gen both a brocon and a siscon in this episode. But it’s not like she was wrong in either case – though neither was he when he slapped the former term on her. Their talk about their brothers does make me wonder if they just left Raku in charge, but I suppose if you think nothing of letting 16 year-olds be in charge of the house and kids a 15 year-old isn’t much different. Their brothers are the farthest thing from their minds when they wind up in Gen’s futon together hiding from the teacher on patrol (her insistence that her turning around would make everything safe was pretty ROFL).

That encounter ends with a kiss of sorts, which of course is all Ito is thinking about for the rest of the trip. So is Gen too probably, but it’s harder to read him. At least he’s self-aware enough to realize that his behavior has generally confused Ito more and made things worse. He even admits that he might like her more than he’d like to. But acknowledging their feelings is not the same as resolving them, and at this point neither of them seem to consider acting on them a realistic option. Given that the manga is ongoing it seems unlikely we’ll ever get a real resolution to this in anime form, though I’m not totally sure whether that’s a bad thing or not.