Our lovely group of girls aiming to be the top Kouka star return in this week’s episode to come back to their usual school life and all the pressures of competition that come with it. While some of them are happy to be making incremental progress, others are satisfied with where they find themselves in comparison to their peers. Someone finds a passion they want to pursue; someone else starts tunneling into a pit of extreme self-criticism.
How do all these conflicting scenarios unfold?
Let’s find out!
We open this week’s episode in a refreshingly upbeat fashion with Sarasa’s classmates, especially Sugimoto, being left dumbfounded to know that she isn’t familiar with any other drama performances apart from Rose of Versailles. They all then go to see the troupe actors perform Romeo and Juliet live and expectedly Sarasa is enamored by the performances. But what’s more surprising is how affecting the live act is for Ai, as up until then she seemed to have been simply drifting by during her time at the academy, scoring respectably high marks but rarely ever being as invested in the art form she was trying to pursue. Though, even while having less academic proficiency than her, Sarasa is the one who ends up memorizing the actor’s monologues after only seeing them perform just once. It’s a nice reminder that sometimes pure talent is difficult to quantify via mere pen-and-paper assessment.
The first half of the episode also features some charming subversive gags like Sugimoto getting a nose bleed upon meeting one of the performers of the troupe, Ai’s continuous inability at being able to call Sarasa by her first name or her not accompanying Ai to the washroom when she publicly announced her immediate trip to the loo. It’s nice, subdued comedy and fits the show really well.
But as always, where the show really shines is in the way in which it explores the darker troubles which plague these girls’ lives. This week, the spotlight shines upon Ayako Yamada. Though granted how much she’s been suffering by having her shortcomings pointed out for all to see, the last thing she would want is to take center stage. After the incredibly direct criticism of her physique by the music teacher and upon judging her own looks in comparison to her classmates, we find that she has developed an acute case of Bulimia. The whole incident damaged her self-esteem severely making her form a distorted body image of herself and the inability to match up to her peers only contributed to her misery. It seems that she would binge eat to get a short dopamine high that’d help her escape her negative thoughts but after the realization would dawn on her that all that food would make her even more fat and un-ladylike, she would forcefully vomit all that food out.
The sheer psychological toll of such a vicious cycle can break the best of people.
Every passing day Yamada would feel lonelier and even more out of her own depths. It’s funny, ever since we’re little, we spend our whole lives under the care of our parents who refuse to see our flaws and are always there to tell us how special we are but the moment we venture out into the outside world, society doesn’t miss a beat to remind us how ordinary we all are. How there’s always someone better than us at just about everything we do and how most of us would never measure up to the expectations forced upon us. It’s really easy to forget in such times all the effort it took to get to here.
And that’s exactly how Yamada would feel on days she would look at herself in the mirror. How ordinary she was, how underwhelming. How mediocre. She would miss her home, her mom, her sister, her father, because she would feel they are the only ones who think of her as in any way, special. And that’s exactly where she would have run off to if not for the decorum-breaking plea from her Kouka-girl-at-heart music teacher to help her realize the flaw in her thinking. To help her remind herself that she had earned the right to be here just as much as everyone else.
It’s not a grand gesture or the reaffirmation of some earth-shattering fact she didn’t know about herself. But sometimes we just need to be told what we already know. So, we could all remember how to sing again.
Armitage, I noticed that Ai grew out her hair a bit this episode, so she’s well on her way of being the long-haired Ai that we know she will be at the end of the show.
Yes! They’ve teased that look of hers in the OP too. She looks like a completely different person with longer hair. 😁