Saekano: How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend Flat

Episode 5

I feel like a broken record for saying this once again about this series, but Megumi just keeps getting the best lines. On two more occasions in this episode, she lays out beautiful zingers from a non-otaku perspective on things: one at the beginning when Aki, Eriri, and Utaha are commenting on a recent dating proposal she turned down, and one later on when she observes that a different girl has been spending the night at Aki's place almost every week. While the former is a joke scene that could just as well happen outside of anime, the latter is more gleefully biting commentary on an odd state of affairs with Aki that anime fans have been conditioned to accept as run-of-the-mill. Megumi, who was never a dull-looking girl, also shines visually, as she looks decidedly prettier with her hair down for this whole episode. I'm also starting to wonder where she draws the line between volunteering to help finish out the project because she wants to see the results and because she's actually started to like Aki – or if there even is a line there anymore.

Between that and a few other humorous bits, this is easily the funniest episode of this season so far. But it's hardly all laughs, as episode 5 also delves into an issue that's been on the periphery so far: Eriri's difficulty keeping up with the artistic load. She resolves to isolate herself at a family house in the backwoods for a week to get the artwork done by the deadline, which is a warning flag to Utaha about creators who are ready to bolt. Aki doesn't take these concerns seriously until he starts noticing the exact pattern in Eriri's behavior that Utaha was describing, including Eriri's decision to modify her artistic style for the path that Aki wrote. This causes the second half of the episode to evolve into a much weightier examination of how far Aki trusts in Eriri to get the job done, which is apparently exactly what Eriri wants to hear from him. Yes, her pride is on the line with the gauntlet thrown down by Izumi, but what she clearly cares about just as much is acknowledgement from Aki. In other words, she wants Aki to demand results from her instead of just asking for them.

But I wouldn't be rating this episode so highly just for the humor and that situation. What really sold me on the episode is the poignant way that Eriri finally came to visualize the scenes that Aki wrote in the episode's final regular scenes. The choice of piano music for those scenes, which I believe is being heard for the first time in the franchise, is superb and sells the sentiment beautifully. Combined with Eriri's own feelings, it provides a great cap to an unusually well-balanced and well-paced episode.

There's also an epilogue scene that provides a meaty cliffhanger for next episode. The drama is played up in a way to suggest that the actual concern here might be exaggerated, but it adds to a further impression that something happened involving Eriri and Aki back when they were kids, which may have led to them being separated for a while. Presumably, next episode will delve into that more, but for now we can be content with the strongest episode of Saekano season 2 to date.

Rating: A-

Saekano: How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend Flat is currently streaming on Amazon's Anime Strike.