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I’ve always felt that there was an impulse here to try and look at the phenomenon of chuunibyou if not seriously than at least wistfully, but it was being undercut by the comedy (which was mostly working, thankfully). Now we’ve got the facts laid out on the table it seems we may be headed for that sort of examination after all, because the merits of escapism are squarely at the center of where the show is now.
The opposing camps have staked out their positions pretty clearly. Touka and Grandpa are squarely in the “face reality” camp, believing that no matter how painful, life must be faced head-on before we can move on. Rikka (and Dekomori, though I consider her largely a comic device just as Isshiki is) has chosen to live her life in an alternate reality (“Break reality! Open the synapse!”) to avoid facing what’s undeniably a very painful reality. And squarely in the middle, just as a main character should be, is Yuuta. He has a chuunibyou past to rival anyone’s, and he’s chosen to abandon it for reasons entirely more shallow than what Touka has in mind. He also has a loving family that’s intact (even if Dad is in Jakarta on business) and nominally has no good reason to live in a fantasy world of his or anyone else’s making. It seems as if Yuuta is going to be the pivot point around which this conflict gets resolved, and it’ll be very interesting to see which side the author (and the adaptation) comes down on. Perhaps a measure of both - an acceptance that we weren’t given minds capable of flights of fancy just so we would stay grounded all the time, but that sooner or later all of us have to land.
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