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Fuuka
Episode 8

by Gabriella Ekens,

How would you rate episode 8 of
Fuuka ?
Community score: 3.7

Welcome back to Fuuka, a show about a pop star's doomed love for some random high school boy. Well, “doomed” may have proven to be an undue assumption, but we'll get to that later. When we last left our heroes, they were about to go onstage for their first performance as a band. However, their debut is being sabotaged by a horde of Koyuki's admirers, who have it out for Yuu as the object of her affections. They even start throwing bottles and threatening his family! Eventually, Koyuki reveals herself to get them to stop, but that just turns her into the target of their abuse. The tumult is resolved when the band regains their composure and starts playing. As it turns out, our heroes are so good at music that the entire crowd stops roughhousing in order to focus on their sound. They let Koyuki go, and as soon as the song ends, Fuuka invites her onstage. The two of them perform a duet, which symbolizes their amicable competition over Yuu. By this point, the crowd has changed completely, bursting into ecstatic cheers for their former adversaries.

Overall, the situation turned out as well as it possibly could have for Yuu's band. The audience loved them, and the whole Koyuki situation has given them a ton of free publicity. On Koyuki's end, however, things aren't anywhere near as peachy. While her managers aren't letting her go altogether, they're cutting down on her public appearances for a while, and they've told her not to contact Yuu any more. Rather than inform Yuu of the situation, she starts ghosting him, leaving the poor guy confused. On top of that, the entire situation has stressed Koyuki out to the point where she's having trouble singing. All her concerts are cancelled for the immediate future, and now her entire career is on the ropes. Eventually, a desolate Koyuki answers one of Yuu's many phone calls, She insists that everything is fine, but Yuu can tell that something is up. Yuu can hear the sound of ocean waves on the phone before she hangs up, so he rushes out the door to comb the beach where they first reunited after so many years. He finds her there, embraces her, and the episode ends.

As hackneyed as all this was, it's definitely one of the better episodes of Fuuka. There were strong stakes, and the whole thing actually built up to a meaningful climax. However, the real big news is that this show is starting to majorly diverge from its source material. It looks like all that seemingly undue emphasis on Koyuki was building up to something intentional – this may be turning into a romance with her rather than Fuuka. I haven't read the manga, but apparently, all that stuff with Koyuki post-concert wasn't in the original. In the manga, this concert segued into Fuuka and Yuu beginning their relationship in earnest. While I understand how fans of the manga may be miffed, I don't actually mind this decision all that much. Fuuka and Yuu's relationship hasn't gotten any focus since episode four, and most of the show since then has been about Koyuki pining. Ignoring whatever happened in the manga, this development makes more dramatic sense for the anime as a standalone work. It also means that Koyuki might get a happy ending after all of those episodes spent wallowing in misery. While it doesn't seem to have resulted in a better story (Fuuka-to-Koyuki is just exchanging one fantasy girlfriend for another), and it certainly makes the title awkward, I'm not inherently opposed to this turn of events. Let's see where things go from here.

Grade: B

Fuuka is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Gabriella Ekens studies film and literature at a US university. Follow her on twitter.


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