ORESUKI: Are you the only one who loves me?

Episode 4

Our boy Jōro is no longer being bullied by everyone in high school but he's still avoiding Cosmos, Sun-chan, and Himawari and instead spending all of his free time with Pansy in the library. Pansy doesn't mind the extra attention but she knows he's actively avoiding awkward confrontations with his former friends and insists he make-up with them by being honest about his feelings. However, Pansy isn't being 100% honest here either; Jōro knows that she's deliberately masking her attractiveness and has no friends to call her own.

Jōro goes about rekindling his friendships, even with "I could rape you if I want to" Sun-chan. Sun-chan also apologizes to Pansy who forgives him because he "didn't actually do anything" and agrees, with some urging from Jōro, to help them all study for midterms. Let's just hit pause here for a second about how absolutely disconnected from reality this scenario is and the weakest point thus far in ORESUKI's soap opera shenanigans. You can't just pull out the sexual assault flag, wave it around, and then have a story go on with business as usual. We see it in fiction pretty often and its over abundance in popular series like Sword Art Online even led creator Reki Kawahara to apologize. I'm not going to spend too much time getting preachy here, but suffice to say you can't seriously threaten anyone with assault and expect that they'll help you with your homework a week later. If you're writing a story, please have some sense about how serious that scenario is. You can't simply close the box on it for your characters once it's open or you end up with this sort of nonsense.

This episode feels like a short breather before the next arc gets into full gear. We're introduced to school reporter Hina "Asunaro" Hanetachi, who Jōro notes has an intimidating list of sources and access to secrets. She mentions the school's upcoming celebration that includes a "flower dance" where one male student is picked to dance with three selected female students. School legend says that he'll marry one of the three girls he dances with during the event. If Jōro isn't selected by lottery to dance with Pansy, Cosmos, and Himawari I will eat my hat.

Most of the episode is spent with the newly reaffirmed crew attempting to study with help from Pansy and Cosmos. This would have been the key time to widen Cosmos and Himawari's personalities which have remained pretty bare for the first three episodes. Cosmos is still, by all appearances, a perfect student council president albeit with a bit of a goofy side. Himawari remains her opposite; energetic and well-meaning but not academically gifted. In the spirit of the series so far, I'm hoping there's more to them than surface-level appearances but the series isn't revealing anything to the contrary yet. Without further development, they're not very interesting as romantic rivals or characters in their own right, especially compared to Pansy. Pansy still has "mysterious circumstances" following her around, at least.

Asunaro also has more to her than meets the eye. The episode's final scene shows her prepping her next article and it's about Jōro's attempt to hook-up with one of the three girls. Asunaro must be in the gossip rag business by the looks of it. Is she wrong? Well, yes and no. She's right about his intentions but wrong about putting him on blast for it. Jōro reaffirms that he isn't giving up on getting some kind of romance out of his current situation which is still kinda shitty. He hasn't yet shown that he has any genuine interest in any of the girls as people, even going as far as suggesting that being with Pansy would be settling because, as the anime's title asks, "Are you the only one who loves me?" Pansy might be the only girl who loves Jōro for exactly who he is so, regardless of whether Jōro loves Pansy or not, he might consider her his only option. Which is B-A-D, but he seems to be growing some kind of fondness for her since he actively tries to get her into his friend group. He also continues to characterize Himawari as a "slut" because she has large breasts and hugs him. (Crunchyroll oddly translates this as 'bitch' which, while this is what Jōro is literally saying, the word has different connotations in Japanese than in English).

The issue with Jōro isn't that he wants a romantic relationship or even that he thinks his female friends are attractive, it's that the writing doesn't really support his interest in them outside of the physical. He wants to rekindle his friendships but I honestly don't know what he likes about either Himawari or Cosmos. It seems more likely that he's comfortable with them and well, he's a pretty shitty dude so his other options are to make less-nice friends or put on the mask again to try to make new ones.

Rating:

Odds and Ends

Hina Hanetachi slips into speaking in the Tsugaru dialect when she's caught off guard. Jōro notes that it's better to speak in this dialect than trying to fit in, so she may be a recent transplant to the area. Tsugaru dialect is spoken in western Aomori prefecture and varies so much from standard Japanese that it can be difficult to understand to fellow Japanese people who don't speak it.

Flowers

• Hina "Asunaro" Hanetachi : Hina is written with the kanji for the Hinoki cypress and rapeseed while her family name is written for the kanji for "wing" (羽) and "to take off" (立) as in to fly, not clothing. The nickname "Asunaro" is from a specific type of cypress Thujopsis dolabrata. It gets its name from a longer Japanese phrase "asu wa hinoki ni narou" which literally means "tomorrow it will become a hinoki cypress." The tree was named this because it resembles the highly-valued Hinoki cypress but is smaller. It's actually kind of a sad nickname to give a person as it denotes a tree that resembles a larger, valued tree but will never become it; it's an Asunaro after all, not a Hinoki. This is doubly so for Hina as she has the kanji for the Hinoki in her given name. It's hard to say right now how much Hina will live up to her nickname as appearing to be something she's not.

  As for more about the trees themselves, both Hinoki and Asunaro are planted as ornamental trees in Japan around temples and palaces. Hinoki timber is often used to build temples and other special buildings and is highly rot resistant and naturally fragrant.

Books

• Pansy is reading Kokoro by Natsume Souseki when Jōro suggests she join in on the midterm study session. The story follows a younger man and an older man who is referred to as "sensei" (teacher). Pansy will be acting as the group's teacher during the study sessions despite Cosmos' over-the-top attempts to help.

ORESUKI: Are you the only one who loves me? is currently streaming on Crunchyroll, FUNimation, and HIDIVE.