Blue Box

Episode 21

It's time for a good old-fashioned Girls' Night Out for Karen and Chinatsu, y'all, and you know what that means! That's right: A quiet evening of sitting by the bed in pajamas and contemplating the different speeds and intensities at which people experience the swirling mixture of attraction, respect, and affection that develops into a nebulous secret sauce of chemicals in our brain and eventually transforms into the feeling we call “love.” Also, there is some orange juice.

Granted, if anyone expected Blue Box to suddenly become an anime that was interested in exciting bursts of drama and witty exchanges of dialogue, well…they've clearly not been watching the show. Twenty-one episodes in, and this anime's formula remains as winningly consistent as ever. We put some kids with feelings into a room with other kids who also have feelings, and then they proceed to talk and think very intently about those feelings. If we're lucky, they even talk about the eventual day where they will, in some fashion or other, possibly have to act on those feelings. Perhaps, someday, these kids will even manage to communicate to the people that they have feelings about? We can only pray. Unfortunately, Chinatsu and Taiki are not as brave and correct as Hina is, so today is most decidedly not that day.

That's okay, though. For as much as I would love to get to the point where Taiki and Chinatsu can just start dating already, I loved spending so much time with Chinatsu and her unique process of understanding what “love” even means. Her apt metaphor of the blossoming flower paints the picture of a girl who has probably never felt intense or particular physical attraction to someone before and who doesn't seem to have a very firm dividing line that differentiates the intimacy you feel for someone who is a friend versus a potential romantic partner. She's a slow and steady kind of girl, and she's never going to be as intense (or flighty) with her feelings as Karen's little sister Ayame is, but that's perfectly all right. Like Karen says, everyone has their own pace when it comes to romance and attraction - and that says nothing about people who identify more along the spectrum of asexuality or aromanticism - so Chinatsu can take whatever time she needs to figure herself out.

(I would like to note, however, that the show has so many powers of time compression and pacing adjustment at its disposal that could go a long way towards make the journey for us go by a bit quicker…)

If anything, though, this episode also proves that Chinatsu does like Taiki in a more-than-just-friends kind of way; she's just had to realize that there's a name for that particular feeling that catches her breath whenever Taiki ends up getting a bit too close to Hina or, now, Ayame: Jealousy. Just like when our younger cat absolutely loses his goddamned mind whenever we spend more than a few seconds paying attention to our oldest feline friend, Chinatsu is a big ol' Jelly Bean. Sure, for Blue Box, its characters most intense jealously amounts to “Chinatsu pauses for a beat before shooing a spider away with a tissue”, but that may as well be a telenovela-style smackdown for our leading lady. Hina is lucky that she didn't actually steal Taiki's first kiss at the play; Chinatsu might have been moved enough to, I don't know, use a slightly less polite form of verb conjugation or something.

Rating:

Blue Box is currently streaming on Netflix.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.