A Condition Called Love

Episode 10

I'm glad we're finally getting into the weeds of Hananoi's solitary behavior. While this episode's pacing was weird and the resolution to the issue presented was unclear, it is a good start. It's a new school year and everyone is trying to maximize the time they can spend with each other after being moved to different classrooms. Hotaru is starting to be more forward in pointing out Hananoi's behavior, like how he always seems to keep to himself. She doesn't present it as a problem and tries to respect his boundaries. The conclusion that they come to is that it's the least worth trying to address. This episode was a far cry from how Hananoi acted at the beginning of the season when he made it explicitly clear that he didn't want to be friends with anybody. Here, I still wouldn't say that friendships are brewing, but Hananoi is at least empathetic to other people and I like his line about how the past version of him wouldn't be so open to change. Now he has enough confidence in their relationship that, even if they can't spend that much time together, they will do their best to make it up later. The scene where Hotaru called Hananoi by his first name genuinely made me laugh.

The second half of this episode focuses on Yao and while the foundation is pretty easy to understand, I'm not sure where the show plans to go with this love triangle. Love triangles in Shoujo always feel like a waste of time to me because who the main character ends up with is so heavily skewed in one individual's favor. The second half of this episode focused on Yao trying to rekindle what he thought was a nice friendship that he and Hotaru had in elementary school. Still, it's obvious that he has feelings for her and it's only a matter of time until he realizes it. That makes his constant comments towards Hananoi suddenly have this air of passive aggressiveness whether he's aware of it or not.

Yao is framing a lot of things under the guise of looking out for Hotaru because, from his perspective, Hananoi is still a shady guy hiding things for seemingly no reason. We can already ascertain that the reason probably has to do with Hananoi's crippling insecurities that no one knows about. There's just enough plausible deniability for everything to be framed in an understandable context as the show progresses. Maybe this is less about the love triangle and more about acting as a driving force for Hananoi to confront whatever he's hiding from when he was in elementary school. I'm just starting to like the writing in this show so I hope that whatever climax it's building towards will stick the landing.

Rating:

A Condition Called Love is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.