Plot: After starting a relationship with Nao, she and Haru have great difficulty dealing with Sora’s reaction to their romance.
Breakdown: Since Nao and Haru already established a relationship in episode seven, this arc is about Sora dealing with their love.
And according to my eyes, ears and whatever remains of my brain cells, she takes it approximately….bad.
Episodes eight and nine are literally just Sora being a completely immature, bratty, possessive little cunt.
I don’t like saying the c-word. So I keep it reserved for special people who deserve it.
Sora is one such person.
If you thought Sora was useless, apathetic, abrasive and annoying before, buckle up, buttercup, it’s about to get so much worse. This arc is a trial of my patience. Every thing that happens, Sora has a fit about. She’s either being passive-aggressively bitchy or she’s being full-on bitchy, all the while maintaining her inability to do a single thing ever. She’s seriously in the running for most infuriating female anime character I’ve ever seen. Yes, Heroine from Amnesia might have some competition. At least Sora gets a name, but Heroine’s not a bitch.
Starts out innocently enough. Sora overhears Haru saying he’s with Nao, so she amps up the cold aloofness towards them, but most particularly towards Nao. She is doing everything in her power to get Sora to accept her, but Sora won’t budge an inch.
Granted, they made quite the INSANELY STUPID error of forking each other in the goddamn living room with the view to the outside wide open and the door to the main house open a crack, allowing Sora to catch them doing the dew….again. Bear in mind, she was also audience to Nao’s rape of Haru back when they were kids.
After this, she literally throws Nao out of the house, not even allowing her to put her shirt back on, and bars her from ever seeing Haru again, claiming this is just like back when she had sex with him back in the day. In her mind, Nao is forcing herself between Sora and Haru. When Nao leaves, Sora rushes into the kitchen, dumps the curry that Haru and Nao made for her into the sink and chucks the pot onto the floor.
Nao decides to break up with Haru for Sora’s sake, but Haru convinces her to get back together, promising that he’ll have a talk with Sora about it. However, Sora’s too much of a stubborn bitch to even let him get a word in. Nao continues to try to get on Sora’s good side, but she won’t have it.
It eventually gets to the point where Sora is faking sick (badly….at least fake a cough or something.) so Haru will stay home with her instead of going to the beach with Nao and the others. It doesn’t work, but he says he’ll come home immediately if she texts him.
Sora heads to the beach since she’s too hot to stay home (and apparently doesn’t possess the ability to make ice in her freezer…..I am not kidding.) When she gets there, she sees Haru has been nearly drowned and is on the beach, unconscious and not breathing. She does nothing. She doesn’t even panic. She’s scared of living a life without him, but he’s basically dead in front of her and she has no reaction.
Nao does CPR on him, saving his life, and while it seems like this might be the moment Sora would start accepting Nao…..Nope.
She heads home.
Meanwhile, Haru, Nao and the others head to the shrine to check out the summer festival setup when Haru gets a text from Sora, alerting him to come home due to her illness. When he arrives, Sora is sprawled out over the floor, seemingly passed out. He panics, and when he tries to get Sora to wake up, he discovers that she’s fine. She hugs him and tells him to never leave her. Panicking your brother for no reason when you have a history of ‘illness.’ Nice.
She continues to play sick for a while, but it’s not working. When he leaves to go to school one day, Sora refuses to go. Haru finally seems like he’s getting fed up with her shit and moves to meet Nao at the end of the path leading to their house. Sora steps between them and forces him to choose either her or Nao. Haru decides to go to school with Nao.
When Haru arrives home, Sora is gone, leaving a message saying she wants them to leave this village. Haru, Nao and their friends search all over the village trying to find her for hours when Nao finally finds her hiding in the bus stop.
Conveniently, a bolt of lightning strikes the bus stop after Nao and Sora exit, catching it on fire. Sora’s stuffed bunny is still in the bus stop, though. It’s the last thing Sora has as a memento of her mother. Nao decides to do the only badass thing done in this series – she goes into the building to get the bunny.
Meanwhile, Sora is just sitting on the ground silently like a useless sack of shit. Even when the sign falls down and blocks the entryway, trapping Nao inside the blazing inferno, what does Sora do? Yell out for Nao? Call for help? Try to douse the fire somehow? Try to move the sign? Why would she do any of those things when she could do literally nothing? Not even care. She just sits on the ground with that stupid look on her face.
Nao kicks the sign down in one swoop from the other side and walks out of the bus stop with the bunny, her skin and clothes steaming with the heat and rain combined. Doesn’t make up for the rape, Nao, but good job.
Sora, being a cunt, doesn’t even thank her for what she did or ask if she’s okay, she just takes the bunny. She admits that she was worried Haru would throw her away if he got with Nao. With her mother and father gone, she’s afraid of Haru leaving her all alone. Still a piss-poor excuse.
I would allow this if Sora was just being grumpy and not welcoming Nao with open arms, but her actions were WAY over the top, overly possessive towards Haru and cruel to Nao.
Not only that, but she has no reason to believe Haru would just throw her away. He does literally everything for her and dotes on her all the time. A good chunk of what Nao and Haru are doing together is either for Sora or something Sora is fully invited to partake in because everyone’s going. If anything, she’d just have one more person to dote on her and baby her like the infantile piece of shit she is. She’d be LESS alone than she is if she accepted Nao.
She’d be less alone if she were less of a cold bitch, too. Every one of the group at school treats Sora like a friend – they’re nice to her, they do things for her, they invite her out to stuff all the time, but she almost never gives a crap about them. She always choose to sit at home lazing about in bed, doing whatever she does on her computer and munch on chips.
In addition, that really shows bad faith in Haru if she believes finding a girlfriend would make him dump her like that.
And what is Haru supposed to do – never have a love life? Never get married and have a family of his own? Dedicate his entire being to catering to a useless vegetative ungrateful little bitch his whole life?
Considering this is supposedly an arc where Sora isn’t in love with Haru, does this mean she never wants to go off and get married to some poor bastard or have kids who will probably die shortly after childbirth because she’d be too lazy to do anything for them? Maybe get a job where she will be promptly fired for getting everyone else to do her work for her and being a bitch to everyone?
Also, remember, Sora is 16 not 6. I feel the need to remind everyone of this because it’s very easy to confuse that fact given her behavior and appearance.
After the bus stop incident, Sora seems to finally accept Nao and oh so graciously allows her and Haru to date.
Nao and Haru bone at the summer festival right out in the open because why learn to have discretion?
The end.
As for the Nao and Haru relationship outside of that, it’s fine in regards to how they mesh with each other, but it’s also unhealthy and one I can’t support.
Not only is there the obvious rape issue, but according to Ryouhei, Nao is extremely depressed and listless when Haru is not around, and it’s been that way since Haru left four years ago. So, basically, her happiness is dependent upon him and he feels obligated to be by her side to make her happy. (Side note, even though I’ve never seen her dad, her home life seems fine now.)
They pretty much went through their own separate story in episode seven, so there’s not much to talk about here in regards to their relationship – the arc is almost entirely focused on Sora.
In essence, I pretty much hated this arc. That one badass moment in the end does not make up for 40+ minutes of Sora being a spoiled little selfish toddler.
As for the Motoka omakes this time around, graphic sex scene in episode eight, implied one in episode nine. It’s actually a bit weird that I’m almost certain Motoka will be the one to get the most action out of all of the girls in canon.
Next and final arc, but also the most painful to deal with, Sora’s arc. Just a heads up, more attempted rape, cheating, and of course uncomfortableness courtesy of incest. Let’s just get this over with.
If you enjoy my work and would like to show your support, please consider donating at my Ko-Fi page. Every donation goes to helping me pay my bills and keeping this blog afloat. Thank you! ♥
The Anime Madhouse 