There's a little more going on in this episode than in the first one, but not by much. Still no blond kid. This episode focuses mostly on a freshman girl who Shun gives a flower-print band-aid to after she skins her knee. No, I'm not kidding about the flower print, but this is Shun we're talking about, so yeah. Anyway, this girl's natural reaction is of course to irrationally hate Shun and sabotage him in all kinds of random ways, including trying to trip him in the hallway and replacing his library books with porn. Eventually the group figures out that she's mad at Shun because she wants people to think that she can take care of herself, but then she throws a rock at one of the twins and all bets are off. I did really like how Shun handled the situation here, since everything she'd done before was just random harmless stuff, and escalating the situation into violence was uncalled for. However, all the tension is diffused when they find out that she'd been wearing the band-aid the whole time and was actually happy that Shun helped her. So they all end up being friends and it's all good. There's also another flashback throughout the episode to when they were kids and found out that tulips can survive through the winter. I'm not sure what that had to do with anything other than the fact that tulips were all over this episode. And there are still cats, but they didn't relate to the action as strongly as they did in the first episode. Once again, this was a really slow-moving episode. J.C. Staff's QUALITY animation was in full force here, with character eyes going off in random directions, hands looking like piles of mush and just general off-model animation while the cats were drawn as close to reality as possible. There was also a random focus on still images and panning shots towards the end of the episode. Why animate someone crying when we can just keep cutting back to an image of it, right J.C. Staff? The general complaint from everyone who watched the first episode about the boys not acting like boys is still true in this episode as well; Jun freaks out at the porn that the freshman girl stuck him with, and Yuki gets physically ill after accidentally walking into a room of third-year girls changing for P.E. The show says that he simply doesn't like the smell of makeup and perfume, but as someone who get headaches from perfume smell, I think that's pushing it a little. And now there's this poor freshman girl who very obviously has a crush on Shun, the most fabulous man in this show. Part of me wishes that the show would embrace that and have him come out or something, since this is a very fujoshi-friendly show for something that wasn't supposed to be yaoi. All nitpicking aside, the comedy still works for me and I do like the character interactions, so I'm going to continue watching and blogging this show. Apparently blond kid shows up next week. Let's see if that brings about the "change" the first episode hinted at. Images from Crunchyroll.com.
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