Just Like A Kid.
Even the cool and composed Nanasaki Ai has some things that gets her down it seems. As we see here she seems to be having brother issues, which I guess is pretty common thing for anyone with a brother sister dynamic at home. Enough for it give her a bit of trouble in her school work. For someone who’s as smart, observant and dedicated as she is, there are still things she can’t understand about people.
That’s why I think her decision to suddenly leave the table after Junichi’s intrusion wasn’t as much a reaction to Junichi’s insinuations about her and Miya’s apparent lack of a sizable cleavage compared to Sae, but also because she clearly saw the dynamic between the brother ans sister duo. Junichi and Miya can argue and banter so easily even about breast size, so much so that it probably reminds Ai of her own relationship with her brother, and that she likely feels a bit of jealousy that Junichi and Miya have such a *ahem* healthy relationship. She obviously wants to be on better terms with her brother, but she doesn’t know how.
Junichi really wouldn’t be Junichi if he wasn’t ogling somebody at some point. This person just so happened to be their teacher this time, who’s also a looker herself like the rest of the girls, so it’s expected of him to put his gaze into more dangerous territory. I have to say though that it’s good to have the old Junichi of controlled perversion. He’s enough of a man to know what to look at and where to look for it, but he’s not an idiot to try and get it every moment he has. Thank you lord that the Junichi we know is here to stay.
As for Miya… well a lot of girls do want to have bigger boobs for reasons men sometimes don’t clearly understand, but it makes me wonder if Miya realizes the difficulty involved in carrying extra assets.
I have to hand it to Junichi. He’s done a few ballsy things in this series to win a girl that would make any straight man proud, but he said this monologue so convincingly that half the swim team probably came. Anything less and his corpse would be bleeding into the pool water. As all men know, sometimes you have to just throw away your dignity if you need to apologize or impress a girl. It almost always works. Right?
Right? Oh god tell me it’s right.
What I’d like to point out is how this arc feels like a role reversal for the guy and the girl compared to Haruka’s arc. In Haruka’s arc, even if she did take the lead for most of the first half, she was pretty much the kid in the relationship. She was the silly and impulsive of the pair and, as much as Junichi likes to tag along with her whims, he was usually the one who would put them back to reality. For Ai’s arc, she says so himself: Junichi is like a little kid. Despite being the junior, she’s the straighter and more mature half of the relationship. This time it’s Junichi who has to follow her lead. That’s why it surprises her so much that Junichi became all thoughtful and all serious in the end of the episode when she was feeling all down. It took one of his silly attempts to cheer her up, which worked better than expected, and why now she has a very different opinion of him. He may be silly, but it’s his silliness that makes him who he is,and this silliness is also what makes him more mature and thoughtful than meets the eye.