Real Girl

Episode 6

Relationships aren't easy to maintain, even when you've known someone forever. Tsutsui learns that lesson the hard way this week, as his attempts at resolving his argument with Iroha lead to another conflict, this time with Ito. Suddenly cut off from both his best friend and his girlfriend, Tsutsui takes some time to reflect on how he met Ito in the first place. Getting that friendship back on track proves to be relatively easy, and after a couple of false starts, Tsutsui manages to reconcile with Iroha as well. The only problem now is his budding friendship with Ayado, which is poised to cause a whole new round of misunderstandings.

This episode is a tale of three relationships, and the friendship between Tsutsui and Ito is the first into the spotlight. The brief conflict between them isn't all that intense from a dramatic standpoint, but it provides a decent excuse for Real Girl to indulge in a flashback. In some ways, this little origin story is reminiscent of Tsutsui's first encounter with Iroha; as much as the younger Tsutsui tries to push Ito away when they first meet, their shared status as social outcasts pulls them together. We can see the beginnings of their current friendship, with Ito's empathy and desire for connection balancing out Tsutsui's more stoic and self-isolating nature. Tsutsui's lonely late-night cooking session also opens the door for an interesting reflection on how he's beginning to change as a character. His fights with Iroha and Ito make him feel lonelier than he ever felt when he was on his own, which suggests that he's beginning to understand the value of those personal connections. Now that he's experienced these positive interactions, it's much harder to stomach the idea of being alone.

Once Tsutsui and Ito go back to being best buddies, the focus shifts towards his romantic relationship with Iroha. As simple as it is in practice, the way they patch things up with one another is reasonably faithful to their personalities. Tsutsui may not know what he did to upset Iroha during their festival date, but he does at least know that he's hurt her feelings. This leads him to essentially apologize for not knowing what he should be sorry for, which is sort of charming in its own awkward way. That ends up being enough to break the ice with Iroha, who seems just as eager to close the book on this conflict. While Real Girl sticks to its usual pattern of telling the story from Tsutsui's perspective, it does at least give Iroha a chance to vent her frustrations. As we saw last week, this conflict has its origins in the characters' differing perspectives, with Tsutsui's disbelief that a girl might actually like him coming across as a lack of trust to Iroha. Now that the two of them are back on the same page, they can get back to dealing with all of those raging teenage hormones, assuming they can spend more than two minutes alone together without Tsutsui freaking out and running away.

Finally, we have Ayado's friendship with (and crush on) Tsutsui, which plays a supporting role throughout the episode but becomes more important in the last few minutes. It may be all smiles and free potatoes for now, but this relationship looks like it may present Tsutsui and Iroha with their biggest challenge yet. Much like it did last week, Real Girl is dropping some pretty big hints that there's some real chemistry between Ayado and Tsutsui, both through dialogue and the visual presentation of their interactions. One shot in particular, which splits the screen into manga-style panels, really highlights the visual similarities between the two bespectacled characters, suggesting that they've got a kind of “kindred spirit” dynamic going on. It's no wonder this looks bad from Iroha's perspective, even if Tsutsui is far too clueless to realize what's going on. Given a little more time to simmer, this tension could easily boil over into a compelling storyline.

On the whole, this is a solid episode that continues the course correction that Real Girl started making last week. There's a renewed focus on the pitfalls and nuances of relationships, both romantic and platonic. Instead of relying on a snickering villain to stir things up, the show is crafting storylines by letting trouble arise naturally between the main characters. When everyone's intentions are relatively good, the conflicts they encounter have more emotional depth, and the potential for heartbreak feels more credible. It's a shame that the animation remains on the weaker end of the spectrum, but at least the script is carrying an impressive amount of weight.

Rating: B+

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