Pseudo Harem

Episode 5

This was probably the most segmented episode in the show thus far, and that's a shame because it made the overall pacing feel off. While the skits had the common theme of everyone figuring out ways to pass the time during summer break, almost half the episode was also taken up by segmented skits about Rin and her younger sister. I'm surprised that I'm enjoying the character interactions just as much, if not more after they dropped the premise that the show was being sold on. Like last week, this episode barely had any alternate personalities being acted out, even though we technically introduced a new one, Lazy-Chan, and the roleplaying for it was relatively light.

There's a narrative progression here despite the show's structure. We see Eiji trying to use Rin's first name regularly, and he even throws it right back at her by trying to get her to call him by name. They spend time together on more dates and romantically charged settings, even if circumstances need to throw them into them. I'm assuming the next logical progression would be for one of them to push for one of those romantically charged situations, but I also wouldn't be surprised if we're a little far off from that.

The interactions between Rin and Eiji are still strong, even if half of this episode didn't have them together. Some of the aforementioned segments about Rin and her sister were cute, but I wasn't expecting to spend so much time on them. When the final quarter of this episode focuses on her sister interacting with another young boy, I didn't find it nearly as cute, even though I understood the parallels being set up there. I wonder if this episode was meant to get all those segments from the Manga out of the way so we don't need to bring them up again later. I can only hope that's the case.

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Pseudo Harem is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.