What’s the show? Bloom Into You, Episode 2.
So what happens in this episode? Not a lot, and I’m totally okay with that!
Uh-huh… and why do I feel like this is about to be a reaction post as opposed to a review? Listen, it’s been said this show is “slow”, a.k.a. “boring”—and you know what, if something taking its time and being contemplative and meditative and ethereal is “boring” than sign me up for that life!
Let’s not get off on the wrong foot here; nobody likes reading your rants… This isn’t a rant, it’s just an observation—not every show has to a riotous action-packed extravaganza of happenings and drama, sometimes a show can just ~be~ and do so at it’s own pace.
…’kay, so what happens—aside from “not a lot”? Yuu is having trouble understanding what Touko’s confession of “love” ~means~ but more than that she’s having trouble understanding why her senpai Touko wants her to be her campaign manager for the upcoming student council president elections. A large chunk of this episode is devoted to Sayaka—Touko’s closest and oldest friend—dealing with the fact that the person she was closest too has chosen a newbie and relative stranger to take her expected job as campaign manager. It’s ~slight~ stuff that doesn’t amount to much yet but it’s all well written and beautifully shot and…
And what? Sorry, I was just remembering how gorgeous the OP for this show is and I got a bit absent-minded.
Uh-huh, ‘beautiful OP’—check. What else? So after the student council stuff settles down a bit—at least the ~rivalry~ (if you want to call it that) between Sayaka and Yuu. We get to the episode’s big moment… Touko kisses Yuu! Or at least it would have been a ‘big moment’ if Yuu had reacted at all. The scene is absolutely flawlessly directed—the use of still imagery and colours (and lack thereof) is *chefs kiss* but Yuu’s lack of a real reaction… well it’s ~interesting~. And in an episode people are calling “boring” that’d be enough but no, there’s more!
Yeah? Like what? Well Yuu and Touka are having their photo taken for the records amongst the other presidential candidates and Yuu decides to take the initiative and grabs hold of her hand just before the photo is taken. Touka blushes, her heart sent a flutter by this sudden show of affection, but Yuu—well she feels nothing and she’s starting to resent this. After all who wants to be a part of a one-sided romance?
Nobody right?! Well… as it turns out, Touka is ~exactly~ fine with that kind of thing. The two meet in a café to discuss Yuu’s speech that she’s to give on behalf of her candidate and Touka more or less reads Yuu’s mind—saying that she knows Yuu isn’t in love with her but that she’s too enamoured with these newfound feelings of love to let them escape. Touka wants to love Yuu even without the feelings being reciprocated and for whatever reason Yuu agrees to this unusual arrangement—perhaps hoping that something more will grow from her absent feelings.
Right. So, uh, thoughts on this episode then? The first episode felt almost self-contained like a short film, whereas this is definitely apart of the story I know and love from the manga version. This series is so beautiful artistically—even if it’s deliberately slight on the pacing side of things. This is a complicated romance that’s unfolding before us and I look forward to see how this adaptation handles things going forward.
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Anime QandA 
I love this. This is really well done for a shoujo ai show. It’s being very true to the manga as well, and maybe some of thinking that it’s doing well is understanding the reasoning that’s explained (much later) in the manga. I also think that the handling of Sayaka being jealous of Yuu, and annoyed at Touko, is well acted.
I think it’s interesting how they’re portraying Yuu’s “not feeling anything”. It seems like it’s kind of an interpretation, showing that Yuu *is* feeling something when Touko kisses her, or when Touko reacts to her clasping her hand. And not just annoyance, but also that there’s something but she doesn’t quite want to acknowledge and buries with the annoyance.
I also love Minako Kotobuki’s acting. She’s really been able to get into these “senpai” roles lately (Touko here, Asuka in Euphonium) and do really well at them, at a distance of 10 years from K-On! and getting started in Sphere (when a lot of her K-On! contemporaries are out of the business now, even if they had more work in the intervening years).
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Yeah that’s true about the acting side of things, a lot of the time it’s hard to see the ‘acting’ part in voice acting but here it’s very evident, very natural and most of all very good.
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