“This is the only whistle I’ll be blowing, asshole.”

Recap: After getting taken in by the police, the members of our dysfunctional trio hardly talk to each other for over a month. Rumours about Saeki and Kasuga breaking up only add fuel to the fire, but oddly enough, Nakamura seems to be doing just fine.

Is it me or has Sawa very steadily been getting prettier over the course of the show’s run? While in the first episode, she still looked ungainly and bizarre, as evidenced by the copious amounts of image macros using her facial expressions as an indicator of the show’s perceived hideousness, later episodes often made me wonder if the girl on screen was still the same one as the one from all the joke posts. It definitely is. Despite the lack of detail in the rotoscoping, this controversial method of animation also manages to make The Flowers of Evil‘s characters look extremely distinct without relying on extravagant character design. Just look at the scene where Saeki and her friend Ai run up to Kasuga: two girls with roughly the same haircut, wearing the same clothes, yet still easily distinguishable from one another through their mannerisms and facial features alone.

But I digress. What struck me the most in this episode was that little shot you can see headlining this post. Completely at random, I noticed Nakamura’s eyes have suddenly gained some noticeable colour, whereas before they have always been dark like everyone else’s. Maybe I am just imagining things, but whether or not the producers have actually been tampering with Nakamura behind the scenes, it does nicely show how Kasuga’s perception of her is changing. In earlier episodes, Saeki was almost always shown smiling, sometimes even idealized in some delusional way. Now, however, it is Nakamura who gets to be pretty — notice how as of last episode, she has suddenly become the subject of what little fanservice this show has — while Saeki becomes the one frowning unsympathetically in the background.

Worst breakup ever.

It is an enrmously clever way to portray Kasuga’s shift in perception, and shows how it is now Nakamura becoming the girl he idealizes. Nevertheless, all the same pitfalls that characterize Kasuga’s penchant for failing horribly are still there. Once again, he creates an image of an unreachable girl, fueled by his own self-loathing, which he tries to live up to by changing his ways. Whereas previously he tried to be as normal as he could in order to be deserving of whatever angelic ideal of Saeki he had in mind, the roles have now completely switched around. In his dreams he has met the exact antithesis of ‘his’ Saeki, a diabolical Nakamura who resents him for being such a wimp. Without even asking the real Nakamura what she thinks of him, he immediately clings to this hypothetical Nakamura who obviously knows him better than he does.

Shoving all the blame onto himself, yet at the same time assuming that Nakamura cannot exist without him once again shows how often Kasuga walks the line between self-loathing and special snowflake syndrome. Is Nakamura really reaching out to him because she is looking for a kindred spirit, or is she just toying with Kasuga’s rather vivid imagination? It remains the biggest mystery of this story. In any case, a paradigm shift has come full circle now. Kasuga is no longer running from Nakamura towards Saeki, but rather the other way around. With his promise in the preview that he will be the greatest deviant Nakamura has ever seen, he is now embracing an image of himself he had previously rejected, yet ends up alienating even his parents and his perverted friends. It is not surprising, then, that Saeki will put her foot down and try to pull him away from Nakamura’s influence.

Random Observations

• If you think you missed last week’s post, worry not: There wasn’t any. I was ill.
• I love how the production committee ekes out its scarse budget by making lots of scenes very dark, therefore allowing them to only animate part of the screen while everything else is pitch black.
• Random video of the week. And you thought Attack on Titan had weird fans.