“Secret Triangle”

Fridays at 11:00 am EST on Crunchyroll

As Moriko prepares for her date with Koiwai, she decides to meet up in-game with Kazuomi, the boy at the convenience store. Yuta is still not convinced that Hayashi is Moriko, but he can’t ignore his curiosity.

Jel’s thoughts

I mentioned briefly it feels like a lot of this show is coming from experience and that seems to be even more the case this week. Moriko’s inner monologue about her makeup and figuring out how to pull herself together seemed all too real. I primarily work from home and during the week, if I get particularly lazy, I may not really leave the house for a few days at a time. So I have probably had similar conversations with myself. I might have also just been debating whether I should spend $30 on a new shirt or save it for video games so… yeah, I feel like this show is personally attacking me at this point and I love it.

The most important thing is that Moriko, as the localized title says, is recovering. Playing the game has given her the break she needed and introduced her to some good people, and now it’s time to balance her life back out. I particularly appreciate the gentle tone of it all. There’s no “bad” people in this show. Even Koiwai seems well intentioned to a certain extent. I’m glad Kanbe turned out to be Kazuomi as I originally suspected he was Koiwai. He makes a much better friend and mediator and, let’s be honest, love interest for Lilac. So I’m on board there.

Speaking of Koiwai, I was assuming the hilariously Jdrama bit with Moriko getting stood up was his plan to make Yuta jump into action. I hope that’s the case as it seemed to work and I’d love to see these two just go on a date and live happily ever after. Unfortunately, this is only episode 5 so that seems unlikely. I’m further worried about the preview for next week, which seems to indicate Koiwai does show up (he seems like the type that would be super late to a date) and that Yuta totally misunderstands the situation. I love the way this show has been smoothly making progress, I’d hate to throw a wrench in it like that. It’s entirely possible the preview was cut to throw us off the scent of what actually happens so I’m not going get too worked up yet.

One final note, I like how the final shot of the ending song was changed to show Moriko’s new appearance. And with that in mind, I’m off to get my hair cut!