A Galaxy Next Door

Episode 11

I know I've been a bit grumbly about the low stakes in this series, but this episode proved that it can get the balance between heartwarming and tense right. In its penultimate episode, A Galaxy Next Door hits the perfect highs and lows while giving us just the right kind of insight into both Ichiro and Goshiki. To be perfectly honest, it could have ended here very nicely. That's because it makes its point so very well: that when push comes to shove, the magic stinger in Ichiro's finger has exactly nothing to do with his feelings for Shiori. Rather than being the root of their love, the stinger was simply a little extra push that helped them to get over their mutual shyness and get to know each other more quickly.

There was a fairly good chance that magic was somehow involved in their relationship. The accelerated anime romance timeline could very easily have been something caused by Shiori's strange appendage because it was so much faster than we've come to expect. But the possibility was still alarming, especially to the two people in question, who found such solace in each other. The threat of that vanishing is frightening enough that it forces both of them to really think about what their relationship means to them, and what it means not just now, but going forward. That's a little easier for Shiori, who has been confronting a past she didn't enjoy and a future she doesn't want from the beginning. She left the island because she felt trapped, and finding Ichiro and falling in love with him not only proved to her that she could live a normal life, but that has worth as just plain Shiori Goshiki, not the island's princess. Ichiro gave her the right to dream and the hope that dreams can come true, and the threat of having that taken away from her is heartbreaking.

Ichiro, on the other hand, has to realize that he does, in fact, deserve nice things. In a series of flashbacks, we see him recall how every time someone had to make a sacrifice, he took that upon himself, whether it was simply doing the dishes or offering to be the lone wolf so his friends could be a group of three together for school. By the time he was in high school, he'd become so used to denying himself that he can't even bring a “winner” popsicle stick to the store for a freebie. In his mind, he doesn't deserve it, nor is he comfortable claiming it. Does this have to do with his mother walking out? Probably on some deep psychological level, or maybe even just a plain old, debunked Freudian one. But the more important issue is that he does feel that way, and that's likely at least partially why he agreed to go through with the stinger ceremony: because a piece of him doesn't think that he deserves Shiori.

His reaction to having the stinger pulled (inexplicably) from his forehead shows just how conflicted he is. At first, it looks like something has gone wrong, and that he's been disconnected from something vital with the removal of the stinger. But when he sees Shiori and hears her tearful question, he wakes up. He realizes that he can have this happiness, but he's going to have to seize it, to speak the words out loud if he wants this to work. It's scary because he no longer has an excuse. But his strangled affirmation of love, spoken somewhere between a sob and a scream, is Ichiro finally reaching out for what he wants and accepting that he can have it.

He and Shiori deserve each other in the best of ways. He sees her as a real person (not just a pretty princess prize, as Keigo does), and she sees the best parts of him as well, the ones he's not always comfortable with. This hasn't always been a perfect series, but in this episode, they truly get it right.

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A Galaxy Next Door is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.