Holy crap what an awesome episode. I was floored by the drama that suddenly exploded in the SanaXNanaka relationship, it was very well built up and the climax was executed with so much raw emotion that you can’t help but feel for them. There were also some buffer scenes where the tension wasn’t so high, having the double effect of not loading the viewers with a full episode of angst while at the same time acting as comedic relief, further intensifying the breakdown of the latter scenes. Myself; Yourself isn’t going to win any awards for groundbreaking storywriting, but it sticks to the basics and does them very VERY well.

Episode Rating: 9.5/10 (Bordering on a 10, really)

Following Shuri’s incident with her father and after a day off from school, Shuri is back and lively as ever, or at least pretending to be anyways. As the gang makes their way to school, Nanaka passes by, ignoring Sana’s greeting and walking by coldly, no doubt a direct result from the scene she saw not too long ago at elder sister hill.

Nanaka’s cold attitude towards Sana continues throughout the day, Sana desperately trying to figure out why she’s so angry as they head to the library to kill some time before the class rep meeting. Nanaka insists that she’s not being angry, but eventually caves in and tells Sana that she saw him hugging Hoshino near the temple at elder sister hill. Hearing that, Sana knows he’s screwed, he tries to explain that it was an accident, but ends up making things worse when he compares the incident to the time when Nanaka hugged him at the festival when a raccoon scared her, indirectly putting her and Hoshino on the same level. Things don’t get any better when Hoshino greets Sana at the meeting, inviting him to help out at the old folks home again, which he can’t bring himself to turn down, irking Nanaka even more.

Sana finally snaps as the two are walking home, asking Nanaka what more she expects of him, having explained that it was a misunderstanding and an accident. He goes on to rant how Nanaka has changed, becoming a completely different person from the Nanaka he knew in the past. This strikes a nerve and Nanaka turns around, in tears, yells at him for saying that when he’s changed just as much and runs home before he can respond.

At home, Sana continues to be half frustrated and half concerned concerned over how Nanaka is acting. He begins to reminisce about the times when they were kids, when Nanaka used to depend on him, a childish girl who needed him to hold her hand when walking past a scary dog or eat her carrots for her during lunch.

He then remembers about the secret mailbox that the two used to share, it had stopped being used so Sana put it under chain and lock, to which only he and Nanaka had the key to, saying that they should use it to write about things they want to keep secret from others, even Shuu, Shuri and Aoi. It ends up being used for rather trivial conversation like Nanaka having nightmares and Sana having trouble passing the horizontal bars in gym class, but the fact that it was something for just the two of them was far more important than the content.

Having remembered all this, Sana figures he should find the key and check to see if there have been any changes to the mailbox. He eventually finds it buried underneath a bunch of ero-magazines that he had kept tucked away on a shelf. Just as he finds it, Aoi walks in to bring him some dinner, seeing the pile of ero-magazines and a piles of tissue lying on the floor from a cold that Sana has caught, she misunderstands (*fap fap fap* lol) and runs out before Sana can explain.

When Sana goes to check the mailbox, he’s shocked and horrified at what he finds. The mailbox has been filled to the brim with letters, so much so that they topple out in a huge pile when he opens the mailbox. But more disturbing is the content of some of the letters, one of them a simple piece of paper with nothing but “Help Me!” written on it over and over.

The next day at school, Sana calls Shuu onto the roof to explain, to tell him what happened to Nanaka in the years that he was gone. Shuu tries to avoid the subject, but seeing the seriousness in Sana’s eyes, he sits him down and tells him the story. Shortly after Sana had left, there was a fire at Nanaka’s house, she managed to escape by jumping out the window, clutching her violin and the bracelet Sana gave her, but her parents weren’t so lucky and died in the fire. To make things worse, an investigation concluded that the fire was most likely the result of arson, when Nanaka jumped out the window, the physical injuries were limited to a broken leg, but the trauma caused her to largely forget the events of that night and so she became a suspect in the arson.

After her leg had healed, Nanaka began coming to school again, but a completely different person, isolating herself from everyone else. Throughout the rest of elementary school and middle school, she pretty much didn’t talk to anyone, only calming down once she hit high school, just in time for Sana’s return.

Sana asks Shuu why he, and everyone else, kept it a secret from him, something so important. In turn, Shuu asks him if he could have done anything even if he had known, because he himself was powerless to help Nanaka, a friend in need.

Needing some time to process everything he’s just heard, Sana goes to the park near his house to do some thinking. But his solitude doesn’t last long as Yuzuki-sensei interrupts his angsting with her usual caramel offering, curious, Sana asks her why she gives out caramel candies to students. She tells him that when she was a kid, she would always come home to an empty house since her parents both worked too late to be home when she came back from school. Her mom used to leave her some money, but all Yuzuki-sensei really wanted was to have a snack with her mom when she got home, so she did what many other lonely and bored kids do, she played pretend. Playing the role of her mom and herself, she would give herself an afternoon snack, settling on caramel candy since everything else was too expensive.

Eventually the habit became a reward more than anything, Yuzuki treating herself to a candy whenever she worked hard or succeeded in something. This habit spread to her friends, family and underclassmen when she got into high school. One particular incident stuck out in her memories, passing by the very park they are sitting in she noticed a boy trying to do a flip over the horizontal bar, amazed by his determination. When he ran out of energy, she offered him her standard caramel candy gift, and with it the boy’s spirit returned and he vowed to give it his best shot. Only, it was so long ago that Yuzuki-sensei can’t remember the face of the boy, only a faint memory of his smile.

Having remembered bits and pieces of it before, Sana realizes that he is the boy that Yuzuki-sensei met during high school. The nostalgic story gives Sana the push he needs, standing up, he puts on the same smile he did all those years ago and vows to give it his best shot, only this time referring to Nanaka. Seeing his face, Yuzuki-sensei realizes that the boy was Sana all along.

That evening, Sana calls Nanaka out to the mailbox to talk. When he tells her that he saw the all the letters in the mailbox and heard about the fire from Shuu, Nanaka tries to run away, but Sana stops her. Nanaka breaks down, telling him that it’s too late for his pity, that he wasn’t there when she needed him the most, that he has no idea how much pain and suffering she went through while he was off somewhere far away with new friends, all the while she was waiting, praying that he would come to save her. Sana apologizes for not bring there but promises to stay by her side from now on, no matter what.

Thoughts

Long summary is looooooong. But so much stuff happened this episode, I guess it can’t be helped. And what an episode it was, one of the most emotionally impacting I’ve seen of late.

The structuring made it so the last scene hit with full emotional force. A breakdown of my feelings as I went through the episode is as follows: the beginning lured me into a false sense that we were going to get another school comedy episode with a random isolated plot and maybe some development on Shuri. But then Nanaka showed up, reverted back to her ice queen self, so at that point I thought we were in for 20 minutes of sorting out stupid misunderstandings.

But then the scene where Nanaka has a mini breakdown after being accused of changing over the years by Sana made it clear that there’s more to this than just childish misunderstandings, foreshadowing the angst-ridden events to come. The mood lightened a bit with Sana’s flashback and the brief Aoi scene, but shit hits the fan when Sana finds the desperate cries for help in the mailbox and learns of Nanaka’s past through Shuu.

The buffer scene with Yuzuki-sensei serves as a nice fall in action which gave me time to take in the rather depressing twist of Nanaka’s past while at the same time doing well to shift the tone of the episode from depressing to hopeful, Sana’s confidence having been restored. Then everything comes together in the final scene, all the suppressed pain that Nanaka has been holding in for all these years, the regret that Sana feels for not being there when he was needed the most, but all accompanied by the overarching message that this is only the beginning for them with Sana’s promise to be there for her from now on.

I may sound like I’m fanboying a bit here, but really, I’m no literary expert, so it came off as almost flawless to me.

Myself; Yourself continues to amaze me week after week, evolving from its beginnings which pegged it as a run of the mill harem into what I believe to be the best romance/drama of the season. (Better than DCII, at the very least). I only hope they don’t screw up the ending. So far everything has tied together very well, almost every scene throughout the series has had some relevance to the overall plot, weaving this subtle yet intricate plot that continues to surprise me as it unfolds. All that remains is to reconcile Kaji’s subplot into the now central SanaXNanaka relationship. It would be nice to see Hinako play a key role as well, but I’d be content even if they left her as a side character for the main purpose of filler and loli fanservice, an important role if you think about the alternative, ~13 episodes of unrestricted angst.

Another thing that has to be resolved is the explanation of what happened to Sana in these past five years. We know Nanaka’s story, but Sana’s has remained largely untouched, despite several small hints throughout the series. I’m sticking with my theory that he went suicidal, given the continued emphasis on his wristwatch (even cutting to it during the scene with Nanaka) and his overprotective mother.

The preview for the next episode suggests we’ll be getting some more Nanaka love, balanced by some Hinako screentime along with a not too subtle power rangers knockoff.

Given how much I hate some of Koshimizu Ami’s other roles (Tenma from Sukuran and Sae from Sola to name a few) I’m amazed how well she handled that final scene.

And now for another week long wait ;_;

~ Shirukii ~