Rascal Does Not Dream of Santa Claus

Episode 5

It's not hard to see what's going on with Ikumi's case of Puberty Syndrome. Ikumi was there when Kaede's Puberty Syndrome was at its worst, when Kaede and Sakuta were being wounded by it. Sakuta begged his teachers for help, and his class treated him as insane. No one tried to understand him, and no one tried to believe him; they just stayed as far away from him as possible. He needed help, but not a single person offered it. If this weren't bad enough, some in the class volunteered Ikumi to do something about Sakuta—put the responsibility unfairly on her shoulders. And when she too did nothing, it became a festering wound of guilt that has haunted her ever since.

Encountering Sakuta once again in college no doubt brought all of this back to the surface. And it's easy to see he is nothing like the kid he was before his encounters with Puberty Syndrome. While he has formed many strong connections, he is far from outgoing—he'd rather spend time with his friends, sister, or girlfriend than branch out. In other words, he has found those who do believe in him—and those are the people he cares about. Yet, despite all that, when he can help someone (especially with Puberty Syndrome), he does so—and that almost certainly makes Ikumi feel even more like a terrible person.

While Sakuta never blamed Ikumi or anyone else in his class specifically (he was too busy trying to save his sister), Ikumi blames herself for standing on the sidelines and not helping. Thus, she is attempting to alleviate her guilt by helping everyone she can. However, there are a few major differences between what she is doing and what Sakuta is doing. Ikumi is, quite literally, looking for trouble. She doesn't simply help those she comes across; she seeks out those in pain or danger and helps them—regardless of whether they want it or not. But where she crosses the line into unhealthy territory is that she is willing to sacrifice herself in the process—to take on physical wounds that put her future as a nurse at stake.

All that comes before the supernatural consequences. The seemingly clairvoyant hashtag online is dangerous. As Sakuta knows from his experiences with Shoko, changing the future is not something you casually mess around with. Fate almost always takes its pound of flesh, if not from the original target, then from someone close to them. And of course, this seems to be what is happening to Ikumi with her own Puberty Syndrome. It looks like her messiah complex has started to make her take on the wounds of those she saves—meaning it's only a matter of time before she ends up incapacitated or dead.

Can Sakuta help Ikumi get past her guilt when it's so clearly become a core facet of who she is as a person? We'll just have to tune in next week to find out.

Rating:

Random Thoughts:

• I wonder, in the perfect timeline from Rascal Does Not Dream of a Knapsack Kid, did Ikumi help Sakuta with his sister? That would explain how Kaede's Puberty Syndrome was fixed so early and why Ikumi and Sakuta ended up at the same school in that timeline.

• I missed the implications of Saki showing up at the group date in last week's episode—i.e., that she and Kunimi had broken up, so she was looking for a new boyfriend. I'm happy that, by dumb luck, I was right about them still being together.

• Is it just me, or is Himeji trying to seduce her teachers—or at the very least frame them for having inappropriate relationships with her? Because I get the impression from after the cram school scene last week and elevator scene this week.

• I wonder if everyone's got the hashtag causality backward—like using the hashtag makes the dream come true, not the other way around.

Rascal Does Not Dream of Santa Claus is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

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Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. One or more of the companies mentioned in this article are part of the Kadokawa Group of Companies.