Kaguya-Sama: Love is War S2E1: "Holy Fuck You Thought the Last Episode Title Was Long Just Get A Load of This Absolute Leviathan of Text"

I get that the episodes are named after the manga chapters that they're adapting, but once you're mashing four or five of them together without any truncation I think you might need an intervention. Seriously, how are people even supposed to refer to these episodes?

Well, anyway. We left off near the end of the previous season with Kaguya and Miyuki having had their first kiss, but then breaking down into paranoia about where to go from there and backing away from each other back to something just slightly warmer than the old status quo. The entire social group sans Chika (who was being really immature and obnoxious) were also about to go do a thing together for summer break. However, there were also two more episodes in season one after this, so I have no idea what the outcome of their trip was. Maybe this season two pilot will come with a refresher, maybe I'll just have to infer.

Well, let's get started.


After some (I think flashback) shots of Kaguya and Miyuki pining for each other and angsting about their living situations, we open on a masked ninja-ish lady acrobatically infiltrating a secure facility.

Is this the new OP? I'm digging it, if so. Nice music, nice visual contrast with the previous season's while still preserving the theme, interesting to look at, it's pretty good.

The ninja figure (who I assume is Kaguya) slips through the laser sensors and lockpicks her way into a room, which turns out to be the student council office. Lol, of course. Then she takes off her mask to reveal...oh. Oh dear.

Hayasaka. Or Harthaka. Whatever her name actually is.

Okay, the chances of this actually being literal just went way, way up. Both because an OP probably wouldn't frame a side character so centrally, and because Hayasaka is actually batshit enough to do whatever the fuck we're seeing here.

The school actually having quite that many security sensors seems a little implausible, sure. Then again, considering what kind of school this is, the doors are probably Haitian ebony, the wallpaper is made from ancient palace fragments looted from Nanjing, and the windowpanes are sheets of the purest crystal meth, so this much security might be warranted.

After taking off her mask (seemingly just for the sake of the dramatic reveal to the audience), Hayasaka replaces a glass bottle in one of the cupboards with another, identical bottle. She then makes her exit, leaving no visible sign of the intrusion. Oh god, what the fuck did she do? Before leaving, she whispers an apology in advance to Miyuki, but says that this is for the sake of her mistress, and that comes before everything. That could mean that Kaguya ordered her to do whatever psychotic act of sabatoge she just performed, or it could mean that she's doing it on her own after deciding that it was in Kaguya's interest. Just like the time she made her think Miyuki raped her.

Well. The next day arrives. We'll see how long a body count whatever Hayasaka did ends up having.

It quickly becomes clear that Kaguya did in fact authorize this operation herself.

Truth serum? Aphrodisiacs? Nope! Turns out she just had Hayasaka switch his coffee with...decaf.

Miyuki is so overworked between his studies, student council duties, part time job, and occasional social activities when he can squeeze them in, that his body only keeps functioning due to a precisely calibrated cycle of caffein infusions. Two minutes after he was supposed to get his caffein but didn't, he drops like he's been Vulcan nerve pinched.

So, he's an average working class Japanese man, basically.

Kaguya makes her signature demonic grin and prepares to execute the next stage of her plan, but then - before she can get up from where she was sitting beside him - the snoring Miyuki collapses onto her. She panics and hits Hayasaka's pager. Yes, of course they have a pager system set up, and yes, of course it causes the beads in Hayasaka's hairband to light up and sound an alarm. She comes running into the office and asks what went wrong. Kaguya replies that Miyuki fell onto her shoulder, and she is currently in physical contact with him. This changes everything.

The fact that the plot was "change his coffee for decaf" rather than what it's actually acting like prevents this from being a hell of a lot more uncomfortable than it is. Heh, that actually might be the intended joke; this is clearly a scene in which a rich person sent their minions to have a poor person drugged unconscious, but the absurdity of the coffee detail is so ridiculous that it turns the whole concept into anti-horror.

Kaguya frantically commands Hayasaka to not let anyone in the room until this situation has been resolved. I'd ask how she's supposed to do that, but this is Hayasaka we're talking about, she'll find a way. She'll be miserable and passive aggressive about it, but she'll find a way. The narrator then cuts in and informs us that the focus of this episode is going to be just how agonizing the life of Ai Hayasaka is.

Hmm. I wonder if she was this insane to start out with, or if being the full-time live in maidservant of the Shinomiyas at the expense of her own future turned her into this. Granted, she had to have been either really desperate or else not entirely right in the head in the first place to have chosen this life. Not sure which of those would be the more tragic, honestly.

Also, her first name is apparently Ai, which is pretty darned Japanese. This leads me to believe that Hayasaka is in fact her real name, and she made up "Harthaka" and did a fake Anglophone accent for Miyuki that one time because of hahahAhaHah AHAHaHAh AHAhaHAHaHAhAHA HaHA HahaHAHA.

Anyway, Hayasaka guards the door, turning student council members away with increasingly thin excuses, warnings, distractions, and fake SMS memos from Kaguya's phone. All while her metaphorical fuse slowly burns down across the screen.

Her stunts escalate from deceipt to improbable parkour stunts to straight up chloroforming people who try to come inside as the fuse of her tenuous remaining sanity burns further and further down.

Finally, exhausted, stressed, and with multiple felonies under her belt, Hayasaka returns to the office. She idly wonders what degree of sexual assault Kaguya is committing against Miyuki; no judgement there, just vaguely curious resignation. When she opens the door and comes in, however, she sees that Kaguya and Miyuki are still in exactly the same position she left them in. Kaguya has just been sitting perfectly still with an anxious expression on her face this entire time while Hayasaka was running herself ragged keeping people out.

We don't see the aftermath of this. Which is too bad. It really looked like Hayasaka was about to finally lose her shit and do something that will either change Kaguya's attitude or end Hayasaka's employment, but we just cut away. Is this going to be acknowledged in the future, or will the series just forget about it? I really hope for the former, because Hayasaka's growing discontent has been foreshadowed quite a bit already and that burning fuse seems like it needs to represent *something.*

So. Voiceover informs us that this incident was before summer break. Now, we're jumping to after summer break. It's the same schoolyear though, so they're still the student council staff; Japanese schoolyears start and end in the spring, apparently, even though summer break is still their longest vacation. Anyway, some student councillor who I haven't been introduced to yet has his first meeting with Miyuki and whatsisname, Incel-kun or whatever, since the break started. The last time they (and the audience, presumably; he was likely in some episodes that I didn't see) saw him, he was a timid, black haired little wimp. Now he's had his hair dyed and grown out, and he has an entirely new demeaner. Notably, he and some other girl who I haven't seen yet apparently started dating at some point late in season one, and they spent the summer break being together and having fun.

This elicits envy and irritation in Miyuki (because of his frustrating situation with Kaguya and indeed his personal life in general) and Incel-kun (it's in the name). The boy who got the girlfriend (his name isn't provided anywhere in the dialogue, unfortunately, so he's just gonna be Blondie for now) is asking Miyuki and Incel-kun for some advice on his relationship. That's strange, since he knows neither of them have ever dated. It's seeming a lot like he's just inventing an excuse to rub it in and gloat.

Miyuki has to act quickly to prevent Incel-kun from trying to strangle Blondie with a roll of toilet paper. Hehe, see that libs? If we outlawed guns, would-be school shooters would just strangle their victims with toilet paper instead, just like in Japan. #libtardsowned #maga #5gmakesyoutrans. Still, as Blondie continues, rubbing it in harder and more brazenly as he goes without ever getting to the thing he allegedly wanted advice on, Miyuki starts eyeing the toilet paper himself.

A horrible thought comes to both of the listeners, then. Have Blondie and his girlfriend Nagisa...actually attained Nirvana?

That couldn't be, could it? They might have made second base over the course of the summer, sure, maybe, but could they have actually gone further? Have they walked the noble eightfold path to its conclusion? Have they transcended the illusion of suffering and returned to the Brama, together?

Envy, bitterness, and rage clouds both their minds as the second of these possible Buddhas enters the office and asks where Kaguya is. She wants to talk to her about something, possibly to just do some gloating of her own. She and Blondie exchange steamy looks, and she grips her chin just below the lips as they stare into each others' eyes.

Also, speaking of the perils of 5G, she has the same hairstyle as Lain.

The two quickly just start chatting with each other and completely ignoring Miyuki and Incel-kun. The latter two decide to tiptoe out of the office and observe the two from hiding outside the door. If Blondie and Nagisa think they're alone, they'll be able to act naturally. Their interactions should reveal what stage they're at; according to Incel-kun, people act very visibly different toward each other once they've shucked off the wheel of causality together. They watch through the door as Blondie and Nagisa hold hands, then kiss, and then start necking. Increasingly, with mounting, envious horror, the observers conclude that they are in the presence of Buddhas.

As they watch through the door, trembling with rage, Kaguya and Chika arrive and ask them what the hell they're doing. Kaguya doesn't get the euphemism with "Nirvana," but Chika does, and when she explains to Kaguya that they're referring to the performing of "sacred rituals" Kaguya gets it too. The girls are now equally freaked out at the prospect that there might be Enlightened within the student council. If they haven't ascended to Nirvana already, they're surely close to reaching it. What a scandal!

Kaguya loses consciousness and collapses on the floor, causing the other three to panic and in turn generating enough noise to get Blondie and Nagisa's attention. Nagisa comes to the door and reveals that she and her boyfriend knew they were being watched, and were just using the opportunity to fuck with their minds a little.

Of course, what she's saying may or may not be true. And she knows that they're thinking that. Thus, all of the observers (including Kaguya, who's regained consciousness) start going insane all over again trying to figure out which it is. Nagisa, meanwhile, just gives them all a knowing smirk. The narrator speaks up to declare everyone a loser in today's battle.

Unfortunately, I probably made that sequence sound better than it actually was. The couple of jokes were good (the Buddhist euphemism for losing your virginity in particular), but they were stretched out for too long. Additionally, the histrionics and overreactions of the characters went passed comical and into disconnection. The scene needed to either be shorter (especially at the beginning; there was waaaay too much screentime of Miyuki and Incel-kun repetitively malding at Blondie before Nagisa showed up) or have a few more sources of comedy added to the mix.

We jump ahead an indeterminate increment of time now, from the Dharmic mysteries to Chika wanting to show off a board game she and the other tabletop club members invented. Right, she's in the tabletop gaming club, hence the repeated card or board game related shenanigans she strongarms everyone into at inappropriate times. It's called "the happy life game," and the fact that Chika invented it makes Miyuki and Kaguya extremely wary of having anything to do with it. Even after she assures them that she was only one of many collaborators.

Surprisingly, the only one being receptive to Chika's proposal is Incel-kun. Ishigami, right, that was his name. Chika is even more surprised than I am, expressing shock that Ishigami isn't just a vicious brute who goes around destroying women with facts and logic.

No, she actually does say that. I'm not making that up. Technically her phrasing is "a brute who beats women with logical arguments," but I mean, it's pretty damned clear what the author is getting at.

Ishigami replies by telling her that her body is eminently beatable. It's exactly as creepy as it sounds. There's a moment of silence as everyone in the room gives him a creeped-out stare before collectively deciding to pretend they didn't hear that.

Mostly just to end this conversation before it gets any more uncomfortable, Kaguya and Miyuki decide to relent and play one round of Chika's happy life game. The Araki-esque narrator gives us some random trivia about how board games date back to at least Pharaonic Egypt if not before. No Yu-Gi-Oh joke that I can see, unfortunately. Meanwhile, Chika sets up the game; apparently it uses a deck of carefully arranged homemade cards to make an improvised "board" of rectangular cells.

It seems to work a bit like Candyland or Snakes and Ladders, at least at first. Everyone has a token that they move across the array of cards according to dice roll. Ishigami goes first, and lands on a "misfortune" card, which - at Chika's direction - he flips over to learn that his token has been in a car accident.

The Happy Life Game. Right.

Chika tells Ishigami to roll the die again to make a saving throw vs. car accident. He gets a 1, which means that he's died. He's out of the game. Last place. Go do something else while everyone else keeps playing.

Hahahaha wow talk about shit game design lol.

Seems like Ishigami agrees with me. Miyuki just deadpan-scolds him for helping Chika nag them into playing this in the first place; he'll know better next time. Chika furiously insists that it's not bad game design, Ishigami just had unusually bad luck for the first turn. Chika, if luck can get you killed in one turn, and the game lasts many turns and provides no way to get back in once you've died, then that is shit game design. Heck, remove any one part of that sentence and it would STILL be pretty bad game design.

The game continues, probably only because of Kaguya and Miyuki reasoning that if dying is that easy then it should be over very soon anyway and this way Chika won't be nagging them afterward. Miyuki lands on an "after school activity" card, which means he has the choice of either going to a social event or heading home and studying. Miyuki, obviously not really putting much thought or effort into this, just replies on autopilot and has his game piece choose what he himself would probably do. He gets a lot less nonchalant when this prompts Chika to award him the "nerdy student" token.

So, the game judges you for your decisions. And Miyuki is playing it as his own school career. I see.

Next turn is Kaguya. She lands on a windfall card, which Chika tells her is a lucky break that she just happened into. When they flip it over, it turns out that Kaguya's game piece has won a ten million yen lawsuit against an uncomfortably nonspecific "bad guy." Congratulations. Feel like a hero?

These cards are so pointedly critical of Miyuki and Kaguya's lives that I'd be sure Chika set this all up just to fuck with them if it weren't for the die rolls determining all this.

...also, is Ishigami about to actually die in a car crash, in that case?

Kaguya's windfall comes with a catch, though. While her character is ten million yen richer, she's also acquired a suggestively phrased and illustrated "distrusts all men" trait from the incident that she sued the bad guy over.

O...kay. That definitely makes her financial gain there a bit less shady, but it also makes the game's inclusion of it even more WTF.

Also, is this implying something about Kaguya's actual backstory? Is the wealth and privilege she was raised with coming with a side order of sexual abuse? Or maybe this is just to evoke the sort of paranoia that her family instills in its members by default and which is part of her difficulty with opening up to Miyuki, rather than literally being about men specifically. Either way, she looks incredibly uncomfortable at being handed this trait card.

Ishigami, who is still watching in morbid curiosity from the sidelines, asks Chika what her specific role within the Happy Life Game development team was. She cheerfully explains that she came up with all the specific card ideas.

At this point I'm not sure if Chika is a) just a really hyperactive, naive, and not-that-smart girl, b) a shared stress hallucination of Kaguya and Miyuki's that reveals all their most self-hating inner voices, or c) a mask of Nyarlathotep.

The game, to the dismay of all, continues for several more turns. Miyuki's joyless, studious choices net him a scholarship to a prestigious university. Kaguya keeps getting more lucky financial windfalls that let her skip ahead extra spaces, keeping her in the lead despite this. Lol, of course. They've now made it into the "adulthood" section of the gameboard.

So yeah, this game actually is a Life clone. Just harder to set up, completely unfun to play, and with more existential despair subtext.

Kaguya, perhaps due to her unconsidered good luck, reasons that maybe this game isn't so bad after all. The overall structure is decent, it's just the specific events and penalties that Chika came up with that bring it all down. Yes, that's right, the frustrations you have with the system that you lucked out in are all just Chika's fault, you've got that right Kaguya.

...

I love how brazenly unsubtle this show can be sometimes.

...

Eventually, Miyuki lands on a marriage card, which means he and the player closest to him are now married. That means that they share the effects of all cards they land on going forward, unless they divorce I guess.

The player closest to him, of course, is Chika.

Hmm. Interesting that the show hasn't let us see any of Chika's own turns, up to this point. What sort of cards she's been landing on and what trait-cards she's been collecting herself. Well, anyway, she and Miyuki were close together on the board, a little ways behind Kaguya, so now they're married.

Additionally, all other players on the board must give the newlywed pair 50K yen in wedding gifts.

The very next turn, Miyuki and Chika have their first child. Chika jokingly puts her arm around him and bats her lashes. When prompted to give them 100K yen in baby shower gifts, Kaguya is so distraught that she once again needs to be reminded that she owes them Monopoly money, not real money. They have eight more children. Kaguya's company makes Fortune 500 and becomes a household name. That means she's winning, right?

"...rosebud."​

Just as Kaguya's gameboard piece is about to act out the end of "Richard Cory" as they approacch the old age side of the board though, Chika lands on a rare, special card. It turns out her spouse was cheating on her (Ishigami playfully ribs Miyuki over his lecherous ways at this), and she divorces him and keeps all nine children. Also, the court ordered child support payment is 20 million yen per child. So, 180 million yen. That's about 1.2 million USD. Enough to completely bankrupt Miyuki and end his comfortable middle class existence; he's on the streets.

Kaguya, it seems, has no greater pleasures available to her with all her money than just taking spiteful amusement in the misfortune of poorer, more social members of society.

Well, Kaguya's turn next. I was expecting her to land on a card that would let her gentrify the others' neighbourhoods out of spite or something, but no! She just landed on an unusually late marriage card, and Miyuki is the closest to her on the board.

...somehow? I thought financial success moved you further ahead, so shouldn't he have moved way into the back far behind Chika now? Wait a second, moving forward on the board also causes you to age, does wealth lower your life expectancy? Okay, yeah, Chika wasn't the only bad game designer involved here.

Well, ludonarrative dissonance issues aside, this could be a real heartwarming romance plot. Solitary billionaire turning miserable and spiteful as she grows old alone. Financially ruined divorcee and estranged father, torn apart by regret over the affair that ended it all. They find an unlikely love, and perhaps some kind of redemption for them both.

Miyuki and Kaguya are both enchanted by the prospect, especially Kaguya (who had been freaking out until now). Aside from Kaguya taking the game way the fuck too personally up until this point, both she and Miyuki are figuring out how to leverage this ingame event into an opening for "ha ha, only serious" real life flirtation. The wheels are turning in both heads. The music gets (even) more dramatic than usual. But then, from the peanut gallery, Ishigami remembers something from the rules he was boredly leafing through while waiting for this to end.

Because of that trait she acquired when she first started building her fortune, Kaguya cannot bring herself to fall in love with a man, even all these decades later.

Oh my god is Chika going to marry both of them one after the other? I really hope that's where this is going...

YES!!!!!

I told them both, way back in the pilot, that they should just chill out chasing each other down and just date Chika. Looks like the game is also telling them that.~

...okay, to be fair, knowing more about her now I think Chika would be a pretty annoying person to attempt a relationship with even if she isn't a disguised eldritch abomination. But still, you get the point.

Chika and Kaguya end up having another child of their own. I guess one could infer that they adopted, but Chika's interpretation is that "we're spry for our age." Anyway, shortly after that, Kaguya reaches the end, signaling the end of the game. She's in first place, Chika in second, then Miyuki and way back in fourth is Ishigami who died in a car crash when he was still in high school. The game did not, as they'd all hoped, end in just a couple more terms after Ishigami's death. Kaguya's brief enjoyment of her luck in the game has turned to ash. Miyuki's dislike of it has only been cemented. Ishigami is just bored to tears waiting for this shit to be over. Chika loved it, of course, and immediately invites everyone to play again.

Kaguya and Miyuki are too depressed and anxious to tell Chika what's wrong with her game. Ishigami, however, provides her with a list of actionable, well-considered edits and fixes that she and the rest of the tabletop club could make to improve the game. A dice pool system, more cards that let you make choices instead of being railroaded, and a serious rethinking of the permadeath thing. Ishigami might have fucked up ideas about women, but at least he didn't get too emotionally invested in this stupid game to think straight, and he seems to have a decent head on his shoulders when it comes to game design.

He's definitely on the reactionary-techbro-game-dev track. Meh.

That's the end of that scene now.

For this next vignette, we flash one year back in time. Kaguya and Miyuki are in...I don't think this is the student council office, since they wouldn't have been president and VP yet at this point, but someplace. I guess they were already acquaintances. Or maybe they WERE on the school council, but not running it yet. That could be...oh wait, no, she adresses him as "President" in this flashback scene. Student council president for multiple years? Can that even be a thing? Well, whatever the case, Kaguya realizes that it was Miyuki's birthday a few days ago, and wishes him a belated happy birthday. Miyuki apparently hadn't even known himself; he hasn't celebrated his birthday in quite a while, and since starting high school he stopped even remembering it was a thing.

This being before they realized they were crushing on each other, Miyuki facetiously asks Kaguya if she's going to try and throw him a party next year or something, and she laughs it off as you'd expect. It feels like normal high school banter, without the tension and verbal fencing that's defined their interactions since series' start. Now, however, it's four days until Miyuki's next birthday, and - despite having really not thought much of that interaction at the time, most likely - Kaguya can think of nothing else.

As she's angsting over whether or not she should do anything proactively, Chika stops playing charades with herself across the room and comes over to see what has Kaguya so distressed. Yes, Chika was playing charades with herself. No, that doesn't make any goddamned sense. When Kaguya tells Chika that she's kind of worried about something but doesn't want to talk about it, Chika vanishes and then comes back five minutes later wearing a witch hat and instructing Kaguya to let her tell her fortune so she can put her mind at ease. Her means of fortune telling being...a horoscope app on her phone.

...

Remember, Chika is supposed to be like what, 15? 16? You see why I'm not sure if I should categorize her as "immature and hyperactive to the Nth degree" or "something trying to mimic human behaviour and only mostly succeeding," yeah?

...

Though ready to dismiss this latest nonsense of Chika's without a second thought, Kaguya realizes that she can turn this to her advantage. Damnit Kaguya, hadn't you already learned better than this? No schemes that involve Chika, you decided this multiple episodes ago! Oh well, fine, go for the football again Charlie Brown, I'm sure she won't grab it away from you this time. Anyway, the ap has you enter your birth date along with other information to calculate your horoscope. So, if Kaguya can get Miyuki to do it as well, he'll enter his birthdate, and thus she'll be able to "remember" it without it seeming like she actually cares.

...okay, sorry, this is dumb. They're student council officers. They handle all kinds of student body related documents. There are any number of ways she could pretend to have been reminded of his birthday by looking at an enrolment list or something. This is something that Kaguya, going by her most consistently depicted level of cunning and resourcefulness, should have easily been able to think of. I'm not making a "character should have done ____ wah wah competence" complaint, I'm saying that it's out of character for Kaguya, specifically, to have not thought of this.

Eh, well. Anyway.

Kaguya says loud enough for Miyuki to hear that she thinks all of them should do this, and then has Chika enter her information. Kaguya was born January 1st, interestingly. Chika does the thing, and the app gives a surprisingly accurate rundown of Kaguya's personality. Her birth stone is Alexandrite; bearing the name of a legendary emperor, it demands reverance and has high expectations placed upon it. The iridescent quality of the stone, blue or red depending on the angle light is hitting it from, suggests a dual nature. Kind and well-meaning sometimes, but an outright demon when her inflated pride is at stake.

The key to happiness for her is to let go of her pride, and to allow herself to simply be herself rather than constantly performing to meet expectations.

Well fuck. That's not a horoscope exactly, as it's not predicting future events, but it sure as hell describes Kaguya accurately.

...which kind of makes this a retread of the sketch we just saw. "Chika introduces them to a stupid game that turns out to be startlingly relevant to their real lives." Eh, maybe it'll go somewhere different with it this time, hopefully.

Ishigami, meanwhile, hears Chika reading the "very kind sometimes, and a demon other times" description from the horoscope, and weirdly latches onto the possibility that Kaguya is a literal demon.

Probably because she's a woman.

Speaking of characters who may or may not be demons, it's Chika's turn next. Her horoscope compares her to a flame, bringing light to everything around her and slowly warming up even the coldest and most rigid materials given time. The horoscope's advice to her is basically to just keep being herself, her love and honesty will make her wishes come true if she continues doing her thing.

Kaguya's reaction to this is...slightly off base, perhaps, but still not too far away from my own.

I don't know if I'd call Chika "greedy," per se, but "narcissistic" is on point. She has that sort of childish myopia that you normally expect from someone too young to work their mirror neurons properly. She is also loving, sure, but her egocentricism prevent the manifestations of those things from being a "light source."

Then Ishigami says that he has the same birthday as Chika. Which...well, on one hand, the app asks for some other personal details as well before giving you a horoscope, but on the other the fact that that description is only slightly less fitting for him than it is for Chika still speaks for itself.

Chika then illustrates Kaguya's point - and sells me a bit more on her meriting the "greedy" description - by freaking out at Ishigami for daring to have the same birthday as her.

He tries to destroy her with facts and logic as is his way, but Chika just keeps shouting over him and just not letting a word sink in.

Kaguya pries herself loose from this latest stupidity and saunters over to Miyuki, asking him to take the horoscope test and offering him Chika's phone. He refuses. Horoscopes are dumb, and he refuses to humor the concept of them. Kaguya is thus pushed into the unenviable position of trying to babble out a pseudoscientific defence of horoscopes that she doesn't remotely believe herself, while Miyuki just thinks less and less of her for it.

At one point she slips up and lets herself get fixated on the "birthday" part of the horoscope, which leads him to scoff that she knows birthdays don't mean anything. He remembers talking about his birthday with her last year himself, and clearly she doesn't even remember it. Ouch.

The narrator then informs us that Miyuki actually looked up hers as well, on his own time. And also that he's used that horoscope site himself, not that long ago. But he'd never reveal either.

Then...I have trouble following this. Miyuki whispers some part of his thoughts out loud that Kaguya hears, but misinterprets. And...somehow infers from it that he's inviting her to do something for his birthday. I'm having trouble following, might be a wordplay issue that doesn't translate well.

And also she thinks that he implied he wants private attention from her, rather than a more general party.

This feels really forced to me, translation issues or no.

Anyway, Kaguya decides that that's what she's going to do, and gets all happy and dreamy about it. Setting up the plot of the next episode, I imagine.

End episode.


Feels like a step back, in some ways. I thought we might advance a little bit in Miyuki and Kaguya's relationship after she let him kiss her hand last season, but I guess not. Maybe they had a setback in the final two episodes of season one, or maybe it was just quietly forgotten in favor of more episodic writing.

Funny. Some of the best gags out of the episodes I've seen so far. The status quo is getting stale for me though, and that status quo is sufficiently explored by now that it sort of keeps ending up being endless reimaginings of the same jokes and scenarios. Some executions better than others, but there really needs to be some kind of progression for me to stay interested much longer.

Well, this one's ending is clearly setting up the next. Maybe that one will move the plot, or at least introduce some novelty like the WTF Hayasaka episode did.