Oregairu 2.8

There have been a lot of beautiful, clever opening shots in Oregairu (Yui seated helplessly midframe between the Dolorous Duo comes to mind), but this one is currently #1: Hachiman sitting alone on a bench, allegedly in his element ("I'm a lone wolf!") but anxiously, desperately miserable. He's looking for a miracle, so of course who should show up but .... Hiratsuka-sensei. This is no teacher, she is guardian angel. She is ready to teach, and for the first time in his life, he is ready to learn. 

She asks him a leading question and gets an earful about the incompetence of the planning committee, but artfully steers it towards the heart of the matter: he, Yui, and Yukino. Hachiman has  a keen ability to know what people think, but "You don't understand how they feel. People's thoughts don't always mirror how they feel. That's why they sometimes make decisions that seem nonsensical. And that's why Yukino, Yui, and you jump to the wrong conclusions." In a way, almost identical to what Komachi told him earlier when they reconciled. This woman is incredible, but she's not finished yet. The problem in both circumstances (Christmas party and the two slugs) is the same: the human heart. Hachiman pleads ignorance before impenetrable mystery: "That's not something you can understand by thinking about it." He's promptly cut down to size: "Baka! If feelings could be processed like that, they'd be digitized long ago." He already knows the answer, and she helps him see that: "The last remaining answer, the one you can't calculate - that's human emotion." In a word, that is how you find a decision of the heart. 

Sensei is like a Yoda of the heart. It makes sense, according to her, that you try to avoid hurting someone by pushing them away - exactly what Hachiman and Yukino do to each other - though Yukino is better at it by far (probably because Hachiman has Komachi, who genuinely loves him). Not the pushing away, but the why of the pushing is what's important; because you care about the other. The alienation is simply from fear. Gently, forcefully, persistently, she works on persuading Hachiman to be genuine, and hence be vulnerable before the other. The vote count is in. Hiratsuka-sensei is best girl.

This is why Haruno and Sensei, who might at first glance seem similar - harsh, abrasive, interfering - are total, absolute opposites. Haruno's interventions are paralyzing. They cause friction, anger, resentment, and help make people - Yukino especially - worse. They do not help. Sensei on the other hand, is magic: everything she does and has done results almost infallibly in positive, stretching growth for her charges. Proof: she just did in five minutes what Evangelion spends its entire run working out - the pitfalls of human interaction and closeness with others, and why genuine friendship is still worth pursuing. This works in Oregairu because Eva takes place in a loveless, bleak world. There is no warmth, no gentleness, no connection there. Small wonder Shinji is so tempted by Instrumentality. Things are not quite so bad in Oregairu, and though it takes a sleepless night to ponder what he wants, Hachiman is able, thanks to Komachi and Sensei, to make a choice.

Everything about the Hachiman-Yui-Yukino confrontation is perfect. The writing, the direction, the framing, the acting, everything. Hands down it makes one of the most beautiful scenes in anime, in close contention with Re:Zero 18 and Clannad 2.18. And all of it appears to be for nothing. For the second time in his life (the first was for Komachi) Hachiman apologizes: he's acted like a solipsist, as if nobody else existed, so that the solution can be found with the minimum of pain. His friends (I'm looking at you, Yukino) are too blockheaded to articulately call him out on it, so the cycle continues. Yui knows exactly what's wrong and how to fix it, but is unable to take the first step. After Hachiman apologizes, she's riveted in shock, still looking for Yukino to take the initiative.

Until Yukino shuts him down. Hard. Only then does Yui act. Hachiman probably played the rejection tape a thousand times before entering that classroom, so Yukino's refusal barely surprised him at all. He would have left immediately, and the anime would end right there, if it weren't for Yui, who with Hiratsuka-sensei is the hero of this series. Hachiman is unable to reach Yukino, but Yui sure is, attacking her for not being fair. It is the first time Yui has ever eloquently, passionately disagreed with someone, and it is beautiful. 

Hachiman tries to defuse the disagreement, but the girls totally ignore him. Yukino is bothered by Hachiman's method on every single level, not least because it works better than her own. He solved the hate-mail dilemma, he solved the Sagami problem, and he solved the Tobe disaster. Even from the beginning, when Yui couldn't bake a sheet of cookies without burning them and Yukino despaired of teaching, Hachiman provided the solution then too. She knows his way of doing this is wrong (and she's right about this) but his success makes her look inadequate. Her only statement that gets through to Yui is that she Yui, tried to act as if nothing was wrong in the hopes that things would fix themselves. "So I thought that if that was what both of you wanted..." she trails off. 

That is when Hachiman admits that he can't trust what anyone says at face value. "I'd fall back into my habit of reading between the lines and thinking they had ulterior motives," he relates in a most honest dialogue. Yukino assumes the most defensive stance possible, hugging herself and trying to keep everything at bay. I'm almost surprised she didn't curl into the fetal position here. But that is not the end: "Even so," he says, and the frame, so closed off before, with none of the three making eye contact with one another, opens up into dialogue, because for the first time in his life, Hachiman is being straightforward. He wants to understand and know others, resting secure in that knowledge; he wants to know others inside-out and no longer be in the dark. He calls this desire egotistic, self-indulgent, and arrogant (probably out of fear), but he wants to share that desire, and have a relationship where you are free to seek that from another and give it to another in your turn (and the camera turns first to Yukino and then to Yui as he says this). He calls this out of his reach (and it is, because it requires the will of another, who can't be controlled), but bursts out that "Even so, I want something genuine!"

Yui wouldn't - and maybe couldn't - articulate it that way, but she intuits exactly what Hachiman means. She's won over immediately, just as we knew she would be. But we also knew that Yukino would be different, and she is. To the shock of both Hachiman and Yui, she too has a quiet outburst. "I don't understand. I'm sorry." And she runs away clutching herself as if she's in pain. Which she probably is. 

That short cut is exactly why the two of them are the way they are. Hachiman was 100% totally authentically real, and he got shut down with barely a word. No wonder people act the way these two do, or the way Haruno and Iroha do; that kind of response feels like treachery, and Hachiman is shell-shocked, immobile, in despair. Somehow, however, Yui is not rendered immobile, and knows exactly what to do (she and Hiratsuka-sensei are the heroes of this arc), and just by being Yui persuades him that it's not over yet, but if he stops, it will be. 

Understanding Yukino is hard, because we only see her from Hachiman's perspective, so she almost always appears perfect (because to his eyes, she is), which is why the frame of her friends approaching, Hachiman in the foreground, Yui ahead, and Yukino in the background, smallest, most diminutive of all, is practically a photographic miracle. Hachiman just had an epiphany, Yui intuits what it means even if she can't explain it, but Yukino feels small, inadequate, and ignorant, because being genuine also means being vulnerable, which she can't abide. She tries to take refuge in words or argument, and Yui, who has no talent whatsoever for that sort of thing, counters by doing the thing women somehow know how to do at exactly the right time: she sees someone in fear and pain, so she simply flings her arms around her suffering friend. That's the camel's straw, and both of them dissolve in tears. One could be forgiven for thinking it's a hallowed moment. 

Oregairu 2.7

Finally, Yukino returns to front and center - at least for the opening. Yui figures out that she really wanted to be student council president (double blast you, Yukino, for being an emotionally repressed, inarticulate ice fiend!), and worries that something is wrong. "The old Yukino" would have eagerly taken on requests like Iroha's, but this new, damaged version just looked pained. She is all about hiding these days. Triple blast you, Yukinoshita!

Hachiman is slowly wearing himself down with all this faking. He criticizes himself for helping Iroha as just "conforming to the ideal self I've created in my mind," and recollects Iroha's sullen manipulation and Yui's forced cheerfulness (I don't care even if it is fake. Yui can do no wrong), but what bothers him the most is "Yukino's resigned smile." It reeks of falsity, just like the more superficial elements of Hayama's clique. He, Yui, and Yukino are in fact not so different from them, a hypocritical fact he is beginning to acknowledge, even as it makes him uncomfortable. That, coupled with the falsities of the  Christmas event, which is increasingly devolving into meetings from hell, headed by people who love to hear others talk about nothing almost as much as they love talking about nothing themselves - this is about to make him explode, in a much more colorful way than during the school festival, when he happens to run into......Yukino! Finally, an unscripted encounter.

It's as if Yukino was pushed to the brink of going beyond herself, and then retreated. She has officially given up, saying almost exactly the same words Hachiman used on Hayama: "If this is all it takes to pull us apart, maybe we weren't all that close to begin with." If this were a lesser anime, I'd assume Yukino is testing him, but there's no doubt. She's given up. Hachiman was clearly not expecting such a response. No banter, no humor, just formal, polite, false pleasantness. Then she walks away. It will take a miracle to fix now. 

Oregairu 2.6

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. 

Oregairu 2.5

Every time we get an extended scene of Hachiman and Komachi, it seems like it's the greatest scene. The writers really know how siblings interact, ranging from playful banter to sincere, simple, heartfelt emotion at the drop of the hat. A little effort, a cup of coffee, and a request for help prompts an endearing smile from his loving little sister. Completely real, totally adorable. It will hold the best brother-sister scene award for some time. 

Now Hachiman has his marching orders: keep Yui and Yukino from being elected and keep the club intact. The simplest way to do that is to negotiate (read: manipulate) Iroha into running for real. Hachiman knows her number, so to speak, and suspects she'll be easy to 'negotiate' with. This highlights how accurate his cynicism usually is: characters like Yui are outliers; not everyone (read: almost nobody) possesses her purity and goodness; most are just social garbage, like Kaori, Haruno, and probably Iroha; whiny, manipulative, worthless creatures who suck life out of others for their own advancement or own amusement. They are what Yui seemed to be in the first episode - self-centered airheads who manufacture a persona so that they never have to be real with anybody. No wonder Shinji is such a mess and Asuka is a broken shell of a human being. Those like Subaru and Yui, who can transcend the lies, are few and far between. 

At any rate, a little flattery, a little surprise, a hint of romance (he argues she can convince Hayama to help her, since she's into him, though who isn't in this school?) and Iroha agrees, as Hachiman knows she would. Onto the tougher sell. 

Yui is unsurprisingly easy to convince; just the revelation that Hachiman put a lot of effort (even if it was a tad underhanded, which she guesses but does not verify) is enough to convince her love-struck heart, but the real obstacle is Yukino, who while quite moved Hachiman abandoned his method, was sure "he'd understand;" so while she agrees, and withdraws from the race, is still not happy with the way things turned out. Just as Sensei said, when Hachiman found someone or something he truly wanted to help, he'd find a reason, one that didn't involve being a social martyr; his was found in family and friendship; but Yukino also found her reason; opposition to her sister-nemesis. Hachiman's is life incarnate, Yukino's is poison.

I only have hints of the kinds of relationships Yukino has with her family, so I can only barely understand that kind of motivation, where competition and rivalry replaces love and understanding. The world is an awful enough place already, rife with cruelty and uncaring, without those bad traits defining family relations. Hachiman is bad enough, but if he didn't have Komachi, or their relation were defined by loveless, cold formality, icily bubbling into occasional hatred (Yukino and Haruno, if the above weren't obvious), he'd be a total monster. But he has his sister, Yui has her mom (and plus, she's Yui), and all three of them have Sensei, but after Hachiman's growth of light-years, Yukino has been left behind, and she lacks the means to see it. "Can things really go back to normal?" Yui anxiously asks him. "I don't know," he drily replies, and both look by instinct to Yukino's empty chair. The cohesion or dissolution of the group now depends on her, the weakest link, for the future. 

Hachiman reflects that there are people who can't act until they're faced with a problem. By 'people' of course he means himself and Yukino. Despite her awful motivations, she genuinely did want to be council president. Only after the current president relates her hopes that Yukino, Yui, and Hachiman would together succeed her in office (president, vice-president, and general affairs manager), meaning they'd still be together and doing what they've been doing for a year, does another possibility emerge. But of course the president said nothing. Thanks, Kaichou. How were the three supposed to know that's what you wanted if you kept it to yourself? Are they mindreaders?  Thanks to her silence and Yukino's stony sullenness, that possibility is gone forever. Much work has to be done, but almost all of it is in Yukino's court now. 

Oregairu 2.4

Different methods are on full display here, from Hayama to Hachiman to Haruno to Yui to Yukino. This is one of the best episodes in the series. The writing is taut and the characters are in all-out war. Each one has their own conceived, well-designed plan, and all of them contradict one another. 

First up is Hayama, who asks Hachiman to go on a double date with him and the two girls from last episode. Unsurprisingly, Hachiman refuses point blank. He has no idea what Hayama is up too, but a) it's on a day off, and b) being the quintessential third wheel for the most popular guy in school and the girls who fawn over him sounds like the opposite of fun. Hayama recruits Haruno to plead for him, and she tries to persuade Hachiman: "Doesn't a date with a girl you used to love sound romantic?!" No, Haruno, it does not. It sounds miserable and awful. But of course this interests her, so she bullies him into going. 

This is precisely as fun as it sounded, with the girls belittling Hachiman every chance they get, and Iroha popping up and being foxy (eerily reminiscent of Haruno when we first met her, and just as false-seeming), but towards the end, Hayama's character takes a real dramatic upturn. He's just as smart as Hachiman is, just as intuitive; with Iroha, for example, "She shows everyone her cute side, because she just wants to be loved, so she hides her true self." The implication being that if we reveal ourselves fully to another, they would be disgusted and ashamed. But this is peanuts to the finale, when Hayama savagely roasts these two flakes with a cheerful smile, sticking up for the universally-despised loner. He uses Hachiman's own method to help him. He wants Hachiman to learn his own worth and stop taking the fall for everything in a twisted desire to help. It bothered him that Hachiman alienated his friends in order to help solve the Tobe dilemma, just as Hayama figured might happen, so he tried to mend it by summoning Yui and Yukino to witness his defense, but it fails, because Haruno intrudes and starts provoking her sister. 

Yukino stalks off in wrath with Yui in tow, and Haruno, now bored, also leaves. This woman ruins everything she touches. If she has friends, we never see them or hear of them. Maybe that's why she spends all this time with highschoolers when she's supposed to be a college student. Angry himself at Hayama's intervention, Hachiman proclaims himself a lone wolf, such that "What happens to me is my business and nobody else's," words that probably sound as false to him as they do to us. He's lost his conviction. He tries again to convince the others to use his method to solve Iroha's request, but is turned down for the last time. Yukino decides to run, probably because Haruno provoked her. She'd easily beat Iroha, and presto, nobody loses, everybody wins.

Yui doesn't like that, intuiting the club will dissolve once Yukino wins, as she seems sure to. So she confides to Hachiman that she intends to run as well, beat Yukino in the race, and be a lackluster president, all for the sake of keeping the club together, because "the club has my one love," she concludes with happy tears in her eyes. Somehow I think she is not referring to the clubroom, but one dour person in particular who inhabits it. And Hachiman is not ignorant of her meaning either. But whereas last time, when Yui was about to confess to him and he deflected, now she deflects and runs off, leaving the three of them to their own devices. 

Hachiman's self-sabotage method won't work in this situation, for the other two won't allow it, and he's unable to force them. He doesn't object to their solutions either, but is unwilling to throw his lot in with them. He still has reservations, probably because he doesn't want to see the club end any more than Yui does, though he's a lot less willing to be vocal about it. To be fair, he is on the verge of changing. Hayama's move made an impact - a real one - even if he only appeared to get angry about it and leave, which often happens when one encounters a personal argument that can't be refuted. Yui has already forgiven him, but Komachi and Yukino are still mad. In order to change, he has to start with them.

Oregairu 2.3

The fallout comes home. One of the best sibling scenes I've ever seen is our perfect opening, and confirms just how much Komachi loves her brother. She intuits something is wrong, cleverly weasels out of him that it is (he tries to deflect but to no avail), and tries to get him to tell her about it - assuming that as in the past, she'll eventually persuade him to spill. 

Not this time. He coldly shuts her out, and the hurt is palpable. Even the cat notices. This has probably not happened before, or at least rare enough that it's a nasty, unpleasant surprise. Abruptly leaving for school, she closes the door and fumes, loud enough for him to hear, "I knew something was wrong!" before running off. Emblematic of the wall he's so expertly built - he and his sister are visually divided, and the one person who'd probably understand ("you might be doing something wrong and not be aware of it", she says, which is at least half right. Hachiman knows what he did alienated his two friends, but he might not be sure exactly why) he is able to drive away. 

And of course everything is awkward, especially the Service Club. Hachiman and Yukino verbalize that everything is fine - strange, isn't it, that the two people who claim to value straightforward honesty are the most reticent and false-speaking liars when it comes to their own friendship? Both are totally blind to their own inconsistency - and Yui tries, but honest Yui knows everything isn't fine. "I can't figure out what they're thinking," she laments, ostensibly referring to Hayama's clique but really referring to her friends. It is a genius directing move that makes it unclear whether her line is mental or expressed, an ambiguity made flesh by the stubborn refusal of the other two to be straightforward. Neither Yukino nor Hachiman know how. 

"You can't know the thoughts and feelings of others," Yukino counters, "And even if you could, understanding them is a different thing entirely." Hachiman takes a different tack: "Don't worry about it, because we're the ones feigning normalcy the most." Yui accepts that in sad resignation (seriously the animation detail here is beautiful, even iconic), but not Yukino. "That's what normal means to you? When nothing changes?" And this makes her, for the first time in the series, visibly, seriously upset. 

This small group is less growing in natural ease with each other than it is constantly walking a tightrope, with a definitive falling-out a hair's breadth away. Yukino of course cannot express her frustration, because she's unwilling to be honest and vulnerable with herself, let alone Hachiman; the self-saboteur is unwilling to make even the least amount of initiated progress into admitting he may have messed up, or that he longs for the company of others. Yui, of course, is capable of both of those things, but it unable to spread that to Yukino, to say nothing of Hachiman. Again and again the Dolorous Duo depend on circumstances orchestrated by Hiratsuka-sensei in order to get past their own stupidities; left to themselves, they're already on diverging paths formed by their own social cowardice. 

And so once again Hiratsuka-sensei barges in with another project: Iroha Isshiki has been placed on the student council president ballot, and wants to drop out without damage to her reputation (she's cute, popular, and "juggles multiple guys at once," according to Hachiman's dour analysis). It is immediately proposed someone make a sabotaging speech which will cost her the endorsement (three guesses as to who, but you'll only need one), and a surprising thing happens: Hachiman encounters resistance, first from Yui and then from Yukino. Yukino gets visibly upset again, and then in frustration asks sensei for a moment of time to discuss the club, wherein it is decided that until the issue of method is resolved, attendance is noncompulsory. Hachiman takes the hint immediately and leaves without a word. "You and I both were never fit for getting along with others," Yukino says to his back, but it is unclear if he hears her. 

Strangely, Hiratsuka-sensei lets him leave, and is the gentlest she's ever been, first asking (as if she had any doubt) if something happened between them, and then saying, "When there's someone you truly want to help, your way [i.e. the way of self-sabotage] won't work." It's as if she believes he and Yukino will come back together, though everything points to the opposite result. Perhaps because of Yui, because unlike last time, where Yui seemed to be powerlessly in the middle (it was Sensei who got him drafted into the festival committee, if I remember), this time she compels him to return, so after a scene confirming Haruno has the ugliest soul (who enjoys manipulating and making people uncomfortable out of sport "because it was interesting" - Hannibal's "Because I wanted to see what would happen" explanation hit home hard right then) he shows up again in the clubroom, where the girls decide someone else will run to defeat Iroha in the election. Hachiman thoughtfully and brutally rips into their particulars, and when Yukino practically begs him to change (granted, you have to read deep within the lines), he leaves again. Yukino could solve the problem if she explained what bothered her about his method, but that would make her vulnerable, and she cannot but be the aloof, superior one. The two paths are still diverged.

Oregairu 2.2

The matchmaker plot continues, and the series intimates that the unexpected is to be anticipated, using the reactions to a haunted house. Some things are normal - Yui and Yumiko are scared and Hachiman isn't - but others are not - Kawasaki and Tobe are scared, while Hina and Saika eat it up. Naturally this is also a place where the growing attraction of Yui for Hachiman gets ever more so slightly obvious. 

From a quick conversation with Yukino, confirming her happy, perky attitude is continuing, we get an entirely unexpected development when Hachiman runs into Yumiko for a private conversation. Already suspicious because Hayama seems to be subtly undermining Tobe's quest, Yumiko confirms that Hina will definitively reject Tobe, because she delicately "rejects everybody.' Yumiko likes how things are with her clique (not least because she gets lots of time with Hayama) and so fiercely orders the hapless one to "not ruin it," which Hina quietly confirms in her own icky yaoi-loving way. Moral of the story? Don't play matchmaker. 

This would be extremely boring if it were not the backdrop for the Service Club's increasing bond. Hachiman, Yui, and Yukino are functioning as close to a harmonic unit as can reasonably be imagined, even if Yumiko is right and Yui is withholding pertinent information. Scenes with the three of them walking together down the street, with the girls foisting food on the boy (who concludes, "I feel like livestock being fed. I could get used to this. Food tastes the best when you don't have to work for it.) are hilarious, and nothing says friendship like tranquil munching in silence together. Simple, contented companionship.

The group these three have formed is constantly being compared and contrasted to Hayama's clique, which Hachiman claims to look down upon and despise for its shallowness and artificiality. Like Yumiko, Hayama likes the way things are now and doesn't want them to change, to which Hachiman retorts, not entirely wrongly, that "if this is all it takes to shatter your bonds, they were never that deep." Perhaps, but the bonds he's formed with Yui and Yukino are probably as fragile, if not more so, than their's. "What's lost can never be returned," Hayama intones in resignation, and indeed that is the fear in friendships. Both he (and Hachiman, if he were aware of it) are being ruled by that fear, instead of confronting and overcoming it, and if they tried, they would find other opportunities open even as these might close - because even though it is a motivation from fear, it is still an insight - mucking around with a friendship is a good way to distance and alienate the other, and often, that distancing is irreversible. So Hayama wants nothing to change, Hina wants nothing to change, and Sayoko wants nothing to change. Thus, Hachiman concludes that "there is something I can do." That it will be something absolutely effective and self-destructive is a given.

The stage is set and the pieces are moving. The two girls agree that Hina will probably reject Tobe, and when Hachiman tells them there is "a way to resolve things semi-peacefully," they both spontaneously agree to trust him in handling it, with such bright, eager smiles it's guaranteed to make you uncomfortable. Proof that their real delight is working together, and not succeeding in accomplishing the goal asked of them. And so the plan is put into action. There, in the romantic spot Yui wanted someone (guess who!) to confess to her, Hachiman fake-confesses to Hina, who politely turns him down. 

She is smart and knows he was faking, as does Hayama, Yui, and Yukino. Tobe and the others, however, are totally convinced, and so Hachiman will probably experience again all the negative aspects of being rejected he brought up at the beginning of the arc. He cares deeply for others, enough to self-efface, but can't move away from a socially self-destructive, alienating pattern. 

In the school festival, Hachiman was truthfully cruel to Sagami, meaning her disaster could be blamed on him being mean to her on the rooftop, and when amplified and spread via the Way of Gossip, preserving her false reputation as a good committee chair, his self-destructive behavior reconciled him and Yukino, reestablishing their friendships. But this time, she tells him, "I very much hate the way you do things." She's so mad she doesn't even have the words to properly express herself and stalks away. Outwardly calm and composed (she didn't even raise her voice), but inwardly a raging volcano. 

She lacks the words, but Yui sure doesn't. In a beautiful, pleading monologue, she begs Hachiman to never do that again; even while acknowledging that he probably succeeded, "Why can't you think of other people's feelings for a change? How can you be so smart but so stupid?" And in tears she also walks away. Hachiman is able to be brutally honest with those who mean nothing to him (kudos to Hina for this insight), but those who mean the most to him are precisely those who need the truth the most and who he's afraid the truth will alienate because he, like Hina, "is rotten." He notes to himself that "because we value things and don't want to lose them, we hide and dress up the truth. So everyone lies, but the biggest liar is me." He is smart enough to realize the simplest solution to the popular kids' dilemma, but refuses to turn that insight to the relationships he's been building with Yui and Yukino. By "other people" Yui meant herself and Yukino, so it is probably there where anything resembling an answer will be found. 

Why are Yui and Yukino so upset? Granted, Yui is more heartbroken than angry, but neither one is happy with their friend. It could be because the way he helps other people is to make himself the gossiped-about villain, which ruins his chances of genuine relationships. As Sensei told him, "There are people whose hearts break every time you hurt yourself," and both of the girls were hurt by what he did. Because they care about him and his reputation, for him to ruin it all over again for people he claims to not care for at all must be infuriating. But then why were they not mad about the Sagami Solution? Hachiman is not in love with Hina and so the resulting gossip will actually be amusing, not embarrassing, whereas the Sagami Scenario made him look callously cruel. Yet Yukino admired him for it that time. That time, being a sheep in wolf's clothing was good. Now it is bad. There must be more to it than simply the girls being inconsistent.

Another possibility could be hinted at by the episode's title, "Unheard Confessions," of course referring to Tobe, but probably indicating Yui and Yukino as well. Both of them are developing feelings for Hachiman, and maybe it bothered them that he was able to lie about something as important as love so casually. Telling another girl he loved her probably hurt them because of that, even (especially?) when it was clear he didn't mean it. Yui of course has been in love with him since last season, when only her mom's phone call stopped her confession, and it's all but certain Hachiman knows about it. Yukino on the other hand, is just as friendless and solitary as Hachiman, and has no experience with friends, let alone love, so she may not even realize the truth herself, even though she's so strongly drawn to him and he to her. They were made for each other like Kurisu and Kyouma. 

Yukino is probably the key here. She has changed since the last season; we've never seen her this warm and open before. Her feelings are beginning to change; to friendship certainly, and to love probably. Always before she has been calm and collected; always in control, ever articulate, never at a loss. But that night walking back to the hotel, she lost her sense of direction and had to rely on Hachiman; she felt vulnerable then, and flustered when out of courtesy she thanked him for walking her back. She has no experience with positive relationships, if Haruno is any indication here, so of course she would have no idea how to understand or integrate what she's feeling now, much less how to explain it to others, even if she wanted to. Hence: "It frustrates me that I can't articulate myself." What didn't bother her before bothers her now - not because it is different (Hachiman and his methods are the same), but because she is different, even though she barely knows it herself. 

Put more cynically, with Sagami, Yukino realized Hachiman was doing it for her; now, she realizes he was doing it for someone else; or perhaps she's frustrated that his underhanded tactics work, while nothing she does has ever been really effective, which makes her feel expendable and inadequate, even as she knows he's not going about this in the right way. I doubt either of those motivations - jealousy and resentment - are the primary reasons for her anger, or if they're even there at all, but it's at least possible they're contributing factors.

Both of the girls are right to be upset but are being unreasonable at the same time. Anyone paying attention to Hachiman's stories of past attempted connection will realize instantly why he does what he does and how he does it. Constant rejection is enough to make anyone suspect that perhaps they're rotten, and unworthy or incapable of genuine connection, which is the one thing that truly makes life worth living. Hence the self-sabotage and the lies, and his recognition that "I am the biggest liar of them all." He claims he wants to be a solitary bear, but is longing for true friendship. Yui will probably forgive him almost instantly, but Yukino will not. She expects him to pull an about-face and totally change on a dime, while refusing to really understand him. Tragedy in the making.