The following post will be infinitely more enjoyable with a pair of these.

Summary: In the first half, Yuno and Miyako recieve the assignment to design a poster for Yamabuki’s annual cultural festival. In case you couldn’t guess already, Yuno considers this to be a Very Big Deal, whereas Miyako mostly just goofs off. In the second half, Yuno meets up with her old senior Arisawa, which gives her friends ample opportunity to make a gazillion lesbian jokes.

Happy homosexuality week! Psycho-Pass gets groovy with macabre MariMite parodies, From The New World gets its fair share of loving from both sides and Hidamari Sketch cuts the lesbian subtext like carpaccio. La romanza vecchia à la Ume Aoki seems business as usual for Hidamari Sketch, but the subtle as a shotgun self-awareness really rocked the both in an episode that saw little Yuno in a near-permanent state of lovestruck blushing. Fan favourite saviour of cell phones Arisawa returns for a second raid on our clumsy protagonist’s heart, and the results are as charming as they are hilarious. Business as usual, in other words.

This doesn’t look like a girl looking forward to meeting up with an old friend.

What was especially striking is how this episode made Yuno’s development as a character all the more explicit. In earlier episodes, she was clumsy, insecure and cripplingly shy, and while she still retains some of these traits, the lion’s part of that role has been taken over by Nazuna. The new Yuno is a bit of a dork who awkwardly tries to look cool in front of her juniors; a cheerful, excitable ingénue who easily gets lost in thought, and an insecure dreamer who absolutely loves every slightest bit of praise. This episode marks the very first time Yuno actually gets proper praise for her efforts, and her reactions are utterly adorable. After four seasons of worrying and being forced to compete with her lazy genius best friend, she honestly deserves to have her art put up all around town.

This is Ume Aoki’s idea of what a college student looks like.

Her winning the poster competition, and the newfound determination to go to an art college kindled by Arisawa’s reappearance served as an excellent episode within Yuno’s coming of age, and a lovely contrast to last week’s heart-wrenching second half. Over the last few weeks, Honeycomb has seen Nazuna confronting her parents, Nori and Sae getting some much-needed screen time and Hiro questioning her future, so overall, this fourth season of Hidamari Sketch has been doing a splendid job at fleshing out its great cast of characters.

And the ending card, in 3D of course!

Random observations:

• Nazuna and Nori really seem to be quite troublesome for the writers: either they are the focus of an entire episode, or they share one scene which has nothing to do with the episode at all.
• This episode loved to remind us of the fact that Yuno’s dad is a massive creeper really loves his daughter.
• AI AM VERI HAPPI!