Recap: Not ready to accept her circumstances, Rikka runs home early with Yuuta in hot pursuit. Back in town the two are forced to spend the night alone, bringing them closer together than ever.

Jel’s Thoughts: I was expecting some tear soaked, conflict-resolving drama to kick off this episode but I have to say this solution (or lack there of) probably made more sense at this point in the story, as well as in context with the overall theme of the show.

Yuuta sums up the point in his speech early on: you can’t just tell someone to accept reality which, as Touka points out, is what it means to be an adult. It has to happen naturally with time and experience, neither of which Rikka has had up to this point. Contrast that with Yuuta and Nibutani, who have been trying to flip some kind of magical switch to speed up the process. As we’ve seen throughout the show, that doesn’t really work either. So if Rikka had simply broken down and fell into Yuuta’s arms at his point, would anything REALLY be resolved? Rikka knows and understands the facts, but is still in too much pain to accept that that’s all there is to it. Her search for that answer, no matter how extremely off track and exaggerated it may be, is something only she can do for herself. She just needs more time.

Perhaps to show how perceptive Rikka actually is, most of this episode is focused on our other titular delusion, love. I can’t argue if anyone felt it was a bit of an awkward transition (bad time for the OP!) from death and reality to Teenage RomCom hijinks, but considering Rikka’s feelings for Yuuta are stemming from his support during her troubles I suppose it fits well enough. It was probably a good time to show her watching the romance movie and getting all flustered about a boy like any normal girl her age, just to remind us that she’s not totally insane. I guess the title’s more literal meaning (Regardless of My Adolescent Delusions of Grandeur I Want A Date!) doesn’t just apply to Yuuta.

Looking forward, I do wonder if and how they will revisit Rikka’s past. There are still a few episodes left so imagine we’ll have some comedy first, but I don’t think they’ll totally abandon the issue without some further development. I would guess Rikka will open up over time as she gets more comfortable with Yuuta. But I also thought last week we were just getting a silly beach episode, so no more predictions for now.

Dragonzigg’s Thoughts: I’m in agreement with Jel when he says that it would have been a bad idea to resolve the conflict at this point, I still think this episode feels like a major cop-out. It must be said that might be due to personal belief – I’m generally in agreement with Touka’s ‘grow the hell up’ philosophy – but it’s also bad dramatic construction. Rikka doesn’t confront her demons, but nor does she make any sort of progress towards doing so. Instead, she’s running away from them, back to a land of la-la and make believe, something I increasingly find myself frustrated with. All I need is a glimpse, a glimpse of an actual person under the facade of dark spells and incantations, but it’s something that still eludes us.

She’s not the only one running either – the show itself is running away from the heavy themes it unearthed, and retreating back into the safer ground of gentle romance and comedy. It’s an awkward and unsubtle shift and there’s almost an audible clunk as the team change gears back into ‘cute and funny’, leaving all the potential drama they’d built to fizzle away. And while there’s some decent resonance in the sequence where Yuuta describes his own struggles with reality in the past, setting it against a cloying piano led ballad instantly makes it the corniest thing ever. I felt like I was being drowned in treacle all the way through.

Fortunately, if there’s one thing KyoAni can do, it’s teasing romance, and the second half of the episode is where it scores its points back. There’s a wonderfully charming awkwardness to the interaction between Yuuta and Rikka, and it’s nice to see a male protagonist who’s not totally oblivious to the possibility of romance, even if his potential date is madder than a sack full of snakes.  Rikka gains back some charm points with her delightfully innocent reaction to the romance movie and while the anticlimax joke is pretty much the easiest thing ever to see coming, that doesn’t make it less funny really. Meanwhile the interplay between Isshiki and Kumin is utterly irrelevant to the plot, but also extremely funny and perfect in encapsulating both of their characters. It’s a shame Nibutani and Dekomori have been mostly sidelined – they only show up here for some vaguely fanservicey sequences. I hope we get some more from them in the not too distant future.

My main hope for Chuunibyou now is the growing chemistry between Yuuta and Rikka, and their delicate relationship is definitely the highlight of this episode. But I’m also beginning to tire even more rapidly of the chuunibyou phenomenon, and I honestly hope we start getting some straight talk soon, or we just go back to out and out comedy. Chuunibyou remains satisfying entertainment, but it has to be more decisive with its future direction.