For all the grief Yukino gave Hachiman for not changing, she's the changeless-est one of them all. This woman is so blind! And inarticulate! She has a frozen ice smile in place, and Hachiman fights the desire to run away, noting that "In order to avoid crying over spilled milk, you try harder than ever to act the same as ever." He has the intuition that things are not alright, that the new normal routine is just "papering over the cracks of something that had fallen apart." He and Yukino haven't actually spoken a word to one another that wasn't through Yui. "What happens when we can't pretend anymore?" he wonders with somewhat ominous undertones.
The pattern is intimately familiar by now: Hachiman and Yukino are in a rut, so they need something from the outside to help them. That arrives in the form of Iroha, a girl I despise just slightly less than Haruno (there might be hope for her; there is none for Haruno). She has to cooperate with another high school to organize a Christmas event for senior citizens and nursery school children (yet another Japanese school community event that makes me shudder and gag reflexively. I am a bad man). She puts on a weepy helpless act to elicit sympathy. Thanks to Hachiman, I am not fooled. Thanks to Hachiman, that type has been ruined for me now. Iroha and Haruno, what with the cute and clumsy or flirty and sexually playful acts, have shown what's underneath them - insecurity, need to manipulate, looking towards domination, hiding oneself, etc. - and it's genuinely repugnant. It will always be at least a little effective, at least until the realization returns to consciousness - sexual attraction is real and powerful, after all - but it is only a false promise of connection, like the proposition of a prostitute; a promise of everything but which in reality is the furthest possible distance removed from genuine closeness.
What Iroha and Haruno are doing, of course, is only a distant analogue, but the principle is the same; using expressions of closeness and intimacy as weapons. It's a tamer version of the advice Cersei gives Sansa during the assault on the Blackwater Bay: use certain behaviors to get what you want. Small, petty, filthiness of soul.
Iroha might be doing something Haruno never would or even dream of doing. She lets Hachiman see how she's manipulating people, including him, so the spell necessarily collapses - at least as far as he's concerned. He thinks it's because she wants him to dislike her (since she displays the cute side so that people will like her, the logical converse reveals his conclusion), but at least there's a possibility for something real, whereas Haruno is manipulation and lies incarnate.
The rest of the episode focuses on the meetings between Kaihin and Soubu councils, and is the best possible depiction of the hell that is meetings. Perfectly skewered, and wildly hilarious, especially when Hachiman adopts the same vague, abstract, pious communitarian platitudes in order to argue for something approaching sanity. He is only partially successful, but the level of insight into the sorts of people like meetings is as clear as it is true. The villain for this arc has just been given.
The pattern is intimately familiar by now: Hachiman and Yukino are in a rut, so they need something from the outside to help them. That arrives in the form of Iroha, a girl I despise just slightly less than Haruno (there might be hope for her; there is none for Haruno). She has to cooperate with another high school to organize a Christmas event for senior citizens and nursery school children (yet another Japanese school community event that makes me shudder and gag reflexively. I am a bad man). She puts on a weepy helpless act to elicit sympathy. Thanks to Hachiman, I am not fooled. Thanks to Hachiman, that type has been ruined for me now. Iroha and Haruno, what with the cute and clumsy or flirty and sexually playful acts, have shown what's underneath them - insecurity, need to manipulate, looking towards domination, hiding oneself, etc. - and it's genuinely repugnant. It will always be at least a little effective, at least until the realization returns to consciousness - sexual attraction is real and powerful, after all - but it is only a false promise of connection, like the proposition of a prostitute; a promise of everything but which in reality is the furthest possible distance removed from genuine closeness.
What Iroha and Haruno are doing, of course, is only a distant analogue, but the principle is the same; using expressions of closeness and intimacy as weapons. It's a tamer version of the advice Cersei gives Sansa during the assault on the Blackwater Bay: use certain behaviors to get what you want. Small, petty, filthiness of soul.
Iroha might be doing something Haruno never would or even dream of doing. She lets Hachiman see how she's manipulating people, including him, so the spell necessarily collapses - at least as far as he's concerned. He thinks it's because she wants him to dislike her (since she displays the cute side so that people will like her, the logical converse reveals his conclusion), but at least there's a possibility for something real, whereas Haruno is manipulation and lies incarnate.
The rest of the episode focuses on the meetings between Kaihin and Soubu councils, and is the best possible depiction of the hell that is meetings. Perfectly skewered, and wildly hilarious, especially when Hachiman adopts the same vague, abstract, pious communitarian platitudes in order to argue for something approaching sanity. He is only partially successful, but the level of insight into the sorts of people like meetings is as clear as it is true. The villain for this arc has just been given.
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