I wonder what it is about Akari that attracts so much harassment from animals.  Poor girl.

—-

Our first vignette focuses on Kyouko and the drama surrounding the first air conditioner use of the year.  As an American, the idea of not having the A/C on at all times is a foreign one, so I rather enjoy the drama that comes from the summer heat and, in Kyouko’s case, the inability to find batteries for the A/C remote.  Her getting sidetracked on such a simple errand is very true to her character, and I thought it was hilarious that she was essentially stopping at all her friend’s houses to cool down with their A/C before venturing back to her own house.  The cicada in Akari’s house was the best part — poor Akari.

The second vignette is actually my least favorite out of all the vignettes this season.  I love Akari, but an entire section on her being stranded alone at a train station was just entirely too boring.  I’m all for cute girls doing cute things for cuteness sake, but this felt a little too forced.  It seemed to drag on for way too long and just didn’t hold my attention.  The best part was the text messaging between the girls and how they used picture messages to communicate; it was really cute to see Akari take and re-take her pictures until they were satisfactory.

The third vignette involved one of my favorite plot devices, which involves one of the characters being sick and dreaming about themselves and their friends in an RPG.  This was especially hilarious considering most of the girls don’t have personalities that suit an adventure style game, so we end up with Kyouko unwilling to attack with the blade of her sword and Akari feeling bad for the enemies they defeat and using her white magic to resurrect them.  It’s just trope-ish enough to be familiar, but since the characters are unique, it was a pretty humorous little skit.

The fourth vignette focused on Himawari and Sakurako spying on Akari as she goes about a day in the park.  She ends up getting attacked by pigeons twice (Sakurako’s fault, naturally), which kind of made the theme of Akari getting harassed by animals carry through the entire episode.  We also got to see Kaede (Himawari’s little sister) again, and she seems to be very concerned about Sakurako’s lack of breasts.  Just rub it in her face, why don’t you?

The title of this episode was “Lazy Summer”, and I feel like that’s a very accurate representation of what happened.  It was less humerous than the previous episodes have been, and the Akari feature was terrible, but it was still light-hearted and pleasant to watch, especially since it’s summer right now.  I just hope the next time I leave my apartment, I don’t get attacked by pigeons or cicadas…

GO Rating: 3.5/5