[Vena]

Originally Posted by Zuul

You cannot possibly start strong and then nothing happens for 17-2 episodes straight.

The problem, all in all, is Kagura and how he's used in the story. He's never addressed completely, and every time he appears he causes Amata and Mikono to backpedal because neither of them opens their mouth to speak. Worse off, is that Okada (since she's the one who's written every one of those episodes, iirc) has used every second available to make Kagura and Mikono's bond honestly look like something of a disadvantaged protagonist (as Triple_R and I talked about earlier). What else are we meant to think when (on average) five episodes of Amata and Mikono are wound back by (on average) five minutes of Kagura and Mikono.

Spoiler for Genesis reference for sake of comparison:

Genesis handled this better, assuming the same objective, with Sylvia and Apollo, because Sylvia and Apollo, while starting off on the same side and together, weren't in anything short of a relationship of mutual dislike. Add in tsundere Sylvia, beast boy Apollo, and you had standard anime trope of them slowly getting closer together until near the end when Sylvia dropped the bitch act. Stagnation was a non-issue because anything and everything that they could do together was progress since they started off at less than nothing.