Thus we hit the end of another arc and admit it wasn’t a particularly interesting one due to not much being at stake. The characters helped keep it from getting boring but the main conflict was obvious from the start and the solution even more so. So to get things in perspective, Koga and Sakato got stuck in a time loop due to Koga not being able to let go of her feelings after their fake relationship came to an end. Thus she pretended that she had no knowledge of the loop in order to delay the inevitable in a vain hope that maybe Sakuto might change his mind and not dump her ass for the main heroine. Sakuto was being unusually dense at the beginning of this arc but once things started looping he caught on fast as to what was really happening. This arc in particular falls flat in that when compared to the previous arc, it just comes across as low concern. Last arc had the danger of Mai literally fading from existence while this arc has the danger of…Koga falling out with her crappy superficial friends? Indeed the trigger to all this is Koga not wanting to lose friends who would drop her faster than a hot potato if she failed to answer a text message.(That makes the second girl who could get ostracised just for not answering a text message. Jesus life is stressful enough without having to micromanage your friends.)
I suppose we also have the predictable conclusion of her falling for Sakuto after playing pretend girlfriend so long which is a kind of consequence but it’s hard to truly feel sorry for her when she set herself up for failure in the first place. So this arcs ends with all of it getting rewound so it never happened and Koga learning to get over Sakuto while dropping her superficial friends for real ones. I can’t be the only one here who feels like this girl did nothing but waste everyone’s time, well at least the viewers time. Besides her addition to the cast I don’t think this arc added much of anything and we could have started from this episode two episodes ago without much having been lost. It really is thanks to Sakuto that this arc didn’t bore me as his interactions with the other members of the cast is still gold. Really I actually like this cast quite a bit so it made a less interesting arc still engaging because I genuinely cared about the characters on screen.
I have heard people argue about the superficiality of the supernatural elements with Science girl trying to explain them with scientific theory but I feel that the supernatural element was never meant to be that much of a focus but rather a narrative tool. I mean it’s literally a joke that the whole reason Sakuto could see that time was looping was due to him and her kicking each others butts in the first arc. Honestly as I mentioned in my Erased posts, you have two ways to go about this narrative. Either you go full Primer and spend a large amount of time fleshing out the mechanics of it(Though at the end of primer I still have no goddamn idea how the hell the time travel worked.) or you just hand wave it off. Though this series puts forth theory in an attempt to explain that mainly seems to be just a method of contextualizing the phenomena other than actually explain it. After all Laplace’s Demon isn’t really what’s going on here as Koga isn’t predicting the future, but rather rewinding it. The only real problem I see here is that they seemed to suggest that Koga has a degree of control over the power at the end despite them openly saying that she does so subconsciously. The way in which Koga rewinded time back to the first day doesn’t seem like a subconscious decision but rather a purposeful one. And does she still have this power? I don’t think it was ever made clear whether puberty syndrome stops when said girls problem is fixed as his sister still does seem to be under the effects of it. Wouldn’t this mean that Koga has the power to rewind time whenever she wishes? For that could really mess up the stakes for future arcs. Anyway it seems we are not down with time travel foolery just yet as Sakuto seems to have encountered the girl who helped his sister and him while also being his first love. Yet she appears to be younger than him and doesn’t recall him at all. Some Haruhi vibes are afoot here.
I think you miss the part when Sakuto said everything so far has been a simulation, so there’s no time travelling.
I did catch that but admitly I am having a hard time getting my head around it. So I basically demissed it as a offhand comment. Because that would suggest that Koga stuck them in some dream that simulated all those months. Which causes many questions to arise like wouldn’t this mean that she started it all before the trouble with the guy asking her out?