Ruri Rocks

Episode 11

The decisions kids made about their futures while still in high school can be brutal. Virtually nobody knows what they want to do with their life until much later in it, so asking young people to commit to a track while they're still in that developmental phase is a lot of undue pressure. That's felt in those career goals sheets Japanese schools so often have students fill out, as well as the elective classes they have to choose. The latter is the inciting element of Ruri's efforts with her rocks this week. One might think that studying Earth Science like Shoko would be a no-brainer, but it's clarified here that Ruri's enjoyment of and engagement with mineralogy, like the earth itself, has a fair few layers burying it that she needs to dig through before she can commit.

On a base level, there's the point about potentially turning hobbies into a hustle. Shoko was overjoyed to find out that studying minerals could be a viable career path. But for Ruri, she's always focused on this primarily as a fun way to engage with rocks she thinks are pretty, to say nothing of a large part of the enjoyment just coming from spending time with Nagi and friends. Turning her fun after-school activity into something she has homework for would potentially be a very efficient way to turn Ruri off from the whole exercise. Lord knows that's relatable.

The other relatable reason for Ruri's reluctance to research seems to be a lack of confidence. She's always been a girl who wanted pretty rocks in the first place simply because they were fashionable. She hasn't been marinating in a love for the subject for years like Shoko, and she's spent much of the time thus far being led by Nagi and Imari in the actual process of the research. Ruri even thought that sea glass was a gem that one time, surely she's not cut out for this smarty-pants science stuff! Best just to keep it casual.

These issues holding Ruri back make themselves apparent over the course of this episode, but in parallel, viewers also see them countered. To the point about making her mineralogy hobby into more of a job, well, that's sort of been debunked by the entirety of Ruri Rocks itself. It's edutainment, and every moment has been about making this process look as cool and fun and sexy as possible. In Ruri's case here, it can plainly be seen just how much enthusiasm she truly has for it all. A new segment of mineralogy is detailed in this episode, in the slicing and grinding of rock samples for the purpose of looking at them under a microscope. There's a loving, almost too-technical level of detail delivering this information, but the key part is that Ruri could have potentially regarded it with the same tedium she afforded the sand-searching earlier in the series. Except now, Ruri's so deep into the rocky trenches that she's fascinated by poring over thin slices of stone under what are almost certainly very expensive microscopes.

That level of sheer enthusiasm is seen in the field work in this episode as well. With Nagi attending a conference in the U.S., Ruri and Shoko, with Imari once again babysitting them, head out to research the origins of Ruri's sapphire on their own. Ruri even arrives at her own understanding of how far she's come, remarking on how it would have been inconceivable for her to search so intently for a rock that wasn't a sapphire only a few months ago. But she recognizes that learning more about these minerals is its own reward now, and that's apparent in the array of silly scrutinous faces she makes in doing all this research. It contrasts with her tendency to get distracted or impatient in her early days, putting the character-acting details of Studio Bind to extremely effective use in an animated adaptation like this.

All of Ruri's clear enjoyment of the study belies the other point of her self-doubt that she's disproving without even realizing it: her aptitude for the science. Nagi's absence is, once again, in service of telling this story and developing these characters, with Ruri getting to lead Shoko to the storied location where they found the sapphires, reviewing Cool Rock Facts™ she's iterating on in her further searching, and just generally showing off how far she's come. Ruri's retained enough that she's able to think critically about elements like the different-sized sapphire crystals in the stones they uncover, and follow that to what it might mean about the true nature of the deposits. It's important that she do all this without Nagi to guide or inspire her, though her mentor in mineralogy absolutely deserves credit for being such a patient, effective instructor.

All that means that while this episode of Ruri Rocks does come with another one of the show's now-trademark stunning deposit reveal scenes (the score in particular here does a very good job building up the delivery of the draconic sapphire store), that's complemented by the emotional reveal of how far Ruri's come. She knows not to stop searching for information after finding the original thing she wanted, and that she must push forward, attaining new information. That's the science of stones, sure, but it also applies to Ruri learning new things about herself. Not that she's fully grokked her real stocks in rocks by this episode's end, but she's getting there. She's started really digging below the surface, as it were.

This episode made me consider that Ruri Rocks is going to need to reach an emotional wrapping point in another episode or two, for a satisfying season beyond all the fun facts delivered. And importantly, this episode proved that Ruri Rocks was capable of such a thing. I've loved Ruri for the incorrigible brat she was since the beginning of the show, but this episode demonstrated how she's been naturally growing and changing so naturally that it might not have been immediately apparent, even to herself. It's a satisfying space to wind up at, and a sign of the understated strength of this otherwise seemingly straightforward science stuff show.

Rating:

Ruri Rocks is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Chris doesn't know much about cool rocks, but he could talk your ear off about cool anime and cool Transformers. Catch him doing so over on his BlueSky, or see previous posts over on his blog.

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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.