Real Girl

Episode 9

Real Girl is back, and it's a little better than it was last week. Iroha returns to the cabin after her late-night dash into the woods, but Tsutsui's attempt to resolve their current conflict doesn't go as planned. He can't understand why being kind to other people would make her unhappy, and that causes Iroha to give up on the discussion for the remainder of the camping trip. Once the gang returns to school, Ayado finally confesses her feelings to Tsutsui, who has no idea how to respond and ends up running away. As uncertainty about their relationship builds, both Tsutsui and Iroha get some advice from their circle of friends. Whether or not they'll put any of that advice to use is anyone's guess.

The first thing this episode does is roll back last week's cliffhanger ending. Iroha's hasty departure from the cabin turns out to be a largely inconsequential expression of frustration, and with that out of the way, she and Tsutsui can finally have a serious talk about what's going on. As has often been the case in this series, Iroha ends up withholding the most important piece of information (her knowledge of Ayado's crush on Tsutsui), and Tsutsui is too dense to figure anything out for himself. This leads to a frustrating lack of closure for our main couple, who basically just kick the figurative can down the road until the trip ends. The Journey Home also drops another hint that Real Girl might eventually redirect Ayado to Ito by sticking them together on the train. Mind you, there's not much in the way of meaningful progress, but at least this subplot remains active. Ultimately, the camping trip fizzles out without telling us anything new.

Thankfully, things pick up once the characters get back into the usual school routine. I had more or less written Ayado off as a non-threat to Tsutsui and Iroha's relationship, especially since she seemed like the type to fade into the background after making her feelings known. It's a welcome surprise that her confession is more on the aggressive side, even to the point of suggesting that Tsutsui and Iroha are likely to break up in the near future. Instead of just confessing her feelings as a final action before giving up on Tsutsui, she's making a genuine play to pry him away from Iroha. I doubt it'll work out for her, but at least Ayado is stirring the narrative pot and bringing some sense of dramatic weight back to the story. In addition to keeping the flame of conflict burning, this also forces Tsutsui to accept the idea that girls besides Iroha might actually like him, which helps him to understand where Iroha's feelings of jealousy are coming from. Hey, better late than never, buddy.

In the process of trying to make sense of his situation, Tsutsui also goes through another flashback to his younger days. Much like the origin story of his friendship with Ito, this gives us a more complete picture of who Tsutsui is as a person. We see how his ability to draw anime characters helped him make friends in grade school, only for people to dismiss him as an otaku when he kept doing it in middle school. This gives us a better sense of why he has trouble trusting and relating to others, where before we just had to take that behavior at face value. Admittedly, this flashback's connection to the current conflict is pretty vague apart from the common theme of struggling to relate to other people, but at this point I'll take whatever character development I can get. Beyond that, the soul-searching that Tsutsui and Iroha go through is relatively predictable. Tsutsui realizes that he's screwed things up with both Iroha and Ayado, while Iroha deals with some pesky self-doubt over whether or not she's the right person for Tsutsui to be with. Again, nothing all that special here, but at least it works.

That assessment can also be applied to this episode as a whole. It's certainly not the most insightful or compelling half-hour that Real Girl has delivered this season, and it sometimes feels like a scattered assortment of scenes instead of a unified whole, but at least the majority of those pieces do what they need to do. Modest though it may be, that's an improvement over last week's underwhelming attempt at stirring up conflict. The series has effectively stopped itself from sliding off into oblivion, and now it has a chance to rebuild some of its positive momentum. Let's hope it can take advantage of that chance next week.

Rating: B-

Real Girl is currently streaming on HIDIVE.