Fujigaya school starts advertising for the play Wuthering Heights with posters of Yasuko as Heathcliff as the date of the play comes closer. These posters cause Yasuko’s popularity to skyrocket, but all of the attention she gets starts to make Fumi nervous.  She confides this to Akira, telling her that she’s worried about Yasuko liking someone else, though Akira isn’t really able to help her that much.

Fumi then has a couple of encounters with Kyoko that trouble her. The first is when they’re on a juice run together, and Kyoko asks Fumi if she likes Yasuko, and mentions that a lot of the girls at Fujigaya do. The second is when she comes back into a cafe from calling her mother, and sees Kyoko crying about Yasuko in front of a confused Akira (Fumi having gone to the cafe with them in stead of waiting for Yasuko while she had a meeting with other 3rd years). Yasuko calls Fumi that night because she got worried because Fumi didn’t wait for her and asks Fumi if anything is wrong.   Fumi tells her what she saw at the cafe, so Yasuko merely asks her if she remembers her first love.

The next day, the drama club is preparing for a dress rehearsal of the play, and Fumi tells Yasuko that she doesn’t want to go because it would be awkward seeing Kyoko there. Yasuko threatens not to go either, but relents for Fumi’s sake. At Fujigaya, all the girls once again fawn over Yasuko, and Akira figures that Fumi didn’t want to see all that, but then also notices that Kyoko is sort of acting out of sorts as well and ends up finding the whole situation awkward.

After the rehearsal, Kyoko tries to talk to Yasuko again, but any hope that Yasuko might currently like her seems to get definitely answered no (at least to Kyoko). Later that evening, Yasuko swings by Fumi’s place to see her, and asks her if she’ll work the desk at the play, because she’s worried that Fumi won’t go otherwise. However, Fumi assures her that she’ll come to see her play.

No more relationship chart expansion this episode, but we get plenty of Fumi and Kyoko angst. I kept waiting for Kyoko to somehow go off on Fumi, but I think even she knows that she’s lost and that it wouldn’t do a lot of good, so she just stands there and stews, though she may still go off on her later.

Meanwhile, poor Akira. She seems to be getting hit with everyone’s problems, and ends up getting stuck in the middle of all this drama, whether she wants to be or not. We of course then get the doubts that I suppose most everyone gets from time to time in a relationship. Fumi starts to doubt Yasuko a little because of her popularity, and starts withdrawing, which causes Yasuko to get worried about Fumi in return. It seems the two came back to an understanding at the end of the episode, though I somehow doubt we’ve seen the end to that.

Other than that, this seemed to be a relatively straightforward episode. There aren’t mountains of things to talk about, but it was still pretty full nonetheless.  I guess the only other thing I’d note is the thing with Yasuko asking Fumi if she remembers her first love.  I’m not sure what, exactly that entails for Yasuko – is she saying that Kyoko was her first love, or that she is Kyoko’s first love (or both)?  In any case, I have a feeling we’ll be coming back to that later, probably resulting in Fumi and Akira getting together eventually.

Next episode looks like it’ll be the play, which of course will be a perfect time for something to happen. We’re also almost already halfway through this series, as it’s only 11 episodes. Next episode will put us past halfway.

You can see the full review here.

The new scores for this series are:

Animation: 4/5
Story: 3/5
Music: 4/5
Dub: N/A

Series: 4/5

Click Here for the Survey on the Blog’s Content

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Of course, if you read this over the RSS, I wouldn’t necessarily expect you to fill out the Navigatoin and Structure survey, but if people could fill out the content survey, that’d be great.  I’m trying to collect information that I can use towards my next design, which I hope to launch somewhere around the end of August.

And one final note not related to the surveys: I hope to get Aoi Hana episode 5 out tonight.  However, like last week, that’ll depend on the raws.  If the raws get out by 9 or so tonight, I’ll probably be able to get it up.  Otherwise, it’ll probably have to wait until tomorrow.

CLANNAD: After Story is the 24 episode + 1 OVA second season to the CLANNAD series, which aired between October 2008 and March 2009.  Ghost Hound is a 22 episode series which aired between October 2007 and April 2008.  He is my Master is a 12 episode series that aired between April and June 2005.

The first parts of CLANNAD: After Story and Ghost Hound are being released October 20th while the He is my Master complete series is being released October 6th.  All three releases, as with past Sentai licenses, will be subtitle-only.

Update

It looks like Ghost Hound might have been revealed earlier this morning on Sentai Filmwork’s presumably soon to be launched (and long overdue) website, but they have since password protected it.

Update 2

I guess I should give some of the credit of this to the fact that RightStuf tweeted this and Scott Frye noticed that they were new.

Update 3

ANN notes that Popotan and A Little Snow Fairy Sugar, which are also on the list, were previously licensed by Geneon Entertainment.