My Stepmom's Daughter Is My Ex

Episode 7

While there were some moments that did leave me with mixed feelings, this episode did a good job of forwarding the inevitable big dramatic confrontation that our two leads are going to have to have with each other. Some of those mixed feelings come in the form of genuine confusion such as how I'm not really sure what Akatsuki was necessarily after with regards to helping Isana make Mizuto her boyfriend considering that would've thrown a wrench in her master plan to get married into his family in an attempt to get closer to Yume. Maybe the mentality was that if Mizuto gets a girlfriend then she can monopolize more time with Yume but that wasn't really stressed that much at the forefront. It's also possible that she was just getting swept up in the idea of matchmaking as that is totally something I wouldn't put past her. I also wouldn't put it past her to really lay on the pressure for people that probably are better off without it. I was a little uncomfortable with how much Akatsuki, and at times even Yume, pressured Isana to step outside her comfort zone when it clearly made her feel uncomfortable. I understand that a lot of it was under the guise of how she needs to have more confidence and assuredness in herself which I do agree with. And in the case of Yume, there's a lot of massive projecting going on there. But pushing this sense of impending urgency at the end that she “needed” to confess felt a little bit forced and was probably just an excuse to wrap everything up in this one episode.

I do like Isana as a character, while everybody else is trying very hard to sort of redefine themselves and find their place in all of these weird dynamics, she comes off as someone that is much more content with a quiet life. I like her banter with Mizuto and I do genuinely believe that these two have chemistry. At the end of the episode when he says they would probably make a very good couple, I believe it. Hands-down my favorite scene is when the girls almost trick her into discovering that she in fact has feelings for Mizuto and she confesses that she wants to do a couple things with him. That would've made for a generally wholesome episode all on its own but what really made it good was how it ran parallel to Yume's feelings about the whole situation. Not only did she find herself in a situation where she is inadvertently helping a girl get with her ex who is also her stepbrother, but she's helping the exact type of girl that she was back in middle school when they first got together. We've already established that Yume wants to get as far from that version of herself as possible and yet here she is being reminded that this version of herself was probably the one that had the most chemistry with Mizuto. It would've been nice if we got in her head a little bit more about how uncomfortable the situation made her but the little that we did get here was well grounded and totally understandable. The actual confession at the end and what Yume walks away with are the defining moments of the episode that could potentially affect the series the most moving forward because of the way it's framed. Mizuto is basically admitting that he can't have a close romantic relationship with anybody else as long as Yume is in his life and Yume realizes how massive a deal it was that Mizuto accepted her confession in the first place. Does she feel guilty for that or a little bit happy? And what kind of relationship are they expected to have moving forward? It's a tricky but totally understandable drama that I Am Here! for.

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My Stepmom's Daughter Is My Ex is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.