Wow, I’m surprised I didn’t even notice, you’re right.
It’s easy to forget about when you’re hit over the head with Ayumi’s “cold” directly thereafter, but what is up with Ayumi being stopped from buying pizza sauce by a security guard? Yuu immediatly turns it into a punchline, but that really stuck out to me. What the hell?
I just took it as being connected to her powers that we don’t know of yet or something. Just blatant foreshadowing.
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Evil school.
Also peculiar that a -school- would be totally fine with saying “lol fuck grades they get perfect marks for doing our dirty work this council thing.”
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Good episode. I believe Ayu will get kidnapped/develop powers soon.
On the other hand, Nao seems to be a really strong person; she deals with bullying, her brother’s mental illness, council stuff, but still looks ahead. I like that, she’s a great character.
Takajou knows something.
It bugs me that Nao is always recording everything. Can’t the videos be used for hunting superhumans if the camera goes to the wrong hands? Specially when they’re all confined in this academy.
My theory, Ayumi’s life force is relative to her pizza-sauce consumption. Because the pizza-sauce is running out, she is dying. The big emotional scene at the end will be when Yuu realizes this far too late and can do nothing but cry into a bottle of pizza-sauce hoping for some sort of Key Ex Machina to save his sister. Okay I’m only half-joking here, but the security guard thing leads me to believe the pizza sauce has some significance.
In all seriousness, I dug this episode way more than last week’s. Despite being another “power of the week” it felt like it had a purpose. All the characters got some depth and personality. We have Joujiro who clearly is hiding something about Nao. We have Yusa who finally has a purpose beyond being cute. Yuu finally contributed more than just blind following of orders, and most importantly we have Nao.
I don’t know what was up with those punks beating Nao, but I want to know. I have a feeling that it has something to do with the student council. Maybe they lost their siblings to the scientists and blame Nao for that, but idrk of that holds water seeing as they all just started high school, an there wasn’t much time for that to happen before Yuu came along.
@Kanon summed up my other favorite thing about the episode, and how it felt natural and not forced.
All in all, between significant characterization, vague foreshadowing, Nao getting the spotlight, god…I mean Hikaru Midorikawa, and the significance of ZHIEND, I have to say this episode is a 5/5 based solely on sheer improvement over last week.
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I’m not convinced. If Nao can identify a person through it, there’s no reason why an entire organization supposedly dedicated to finding them can’t. Sure most people don’t take occult seriously, but again, these are evil scientists who are experimenting on superpowered children; occult magazines are a great place to search for clues. Something doesn’t add up; it could be bad writing, or the evil scientists don’t actually exist or at least aren’t nearly as resourceful as Nao leads us to believe.
Ayumi is going to die because she actually got experimented on as a kid. It would explain why her character is so incredibly boring and flat, only ever able to foreshadow things.
Did the flying remind anyone of the opening with Nao+Yu? I think this power will play a role later on, like powers getting used by other characters. If powers are a reflection of a person’s personality/aspirations, then maybe they disappear as they lose their aspirations due to graduating from high school (aside from the similarities to Angel Beats, this is a common theme in Japanese culture/anime of like, high school is the only time you can have dreams because after that is SADNESS AND DESPAIR AS YOU BECOME A COG IN THE SOCIETAL MACHINE FOREVER). Powers could correlate to “strength of feelings” because anime and feelings, which could then be (psuedo) replicated by others. Example: Nao dreams of filming a ZHIEND PV -> filming herself flying through the sky? -> she becomes able to fly.
Eh, I thought it was obvious that this “school” is as much a school as the one full of fake Nao friends. Maybe secretly evil, maybe not, but either way, if it’s really the only place where superpowered teenagers are safe from evil scientists (whose existence I’m beginning to doubt with each passing episode), it’s far more interested in gathering these people for whatever good/evil intentions as opposed to being an actual school. All school appearances it has are just that - appearances for those unaware about powers.
Here’s another baseless theory: Nao’s brother isn’t crazy from evil scientists. It’s what happens to people who can’t mentally cope with losing their powers. This happened to bullying girls’ friends, and so they are pissed their friends still ended up crazy despite being “saved” from the evil scientists. Nao keeps her mouth shut about this for reasons.
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That was a wonderful episode. Meaningful character interaction, foreshadowing, little bits of info, etc. There was a lot of noteworthy stuff, I guess I’ll just list whatever caught my attention. Well, most of them have already been mentioned in the topic…
- Bullying against Nao seemed to happen out of revenge. I support the theories of it being related to the Hoshi no Umi school
- Probability of romance between Yuu and Nao has increased a lot
- Mysterious person appeared in Yuu’s dream again. That, together with Yuu’s “I understand how you feel” when Yusa talked about her older sister support a certain theory of that person’s identity
- We got a clue concerning the importance of the video camera to Nao. It’s connected to her dream of making a video of ZHIEND
- Joujirou has kinniku! +1 Masato point (or is it more of a Takamatsu point?)
- Midorikawa strikes again as Skyhigh Saito. That’s his third Saito, right? Incidentally, who voiced Jet Saito in Clannad?
- Surprisingly, Ayumi’s cooking is decent if she refrains from using Pizza Sauce. I initially suspected that her cooking is actually bad and she’s trying to “improve” it by adding Pizza sauce, but I guess I was wrong
- Coughing is a baaaaad sign in a Key work
- The confession Ayumi received - was it genuine, or something similar to Nao’s “friends” in that fake school by the scientists?
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They might just not like her attitude. It’s understandable.
Or Nao works for them. That seems like the most likely conclusion imo.
They definitely did it out of some form of revenge, maybe someone got left behind.
You might want to use spoiler tags on some of those.
She’ll have a power that works independent of her body or something. Helping everyone out from the stars.
jojiro’s muscles and yuu’s nipples were the highlight of this episode
Surprised no one is talking about the siblings more. I mean I think it’s basically a…forgotten older brother? So why is he forgotten???
Good episode, curious on the beating at the start, and how Nao changed her expression so easily from the school to the store (seeing as though Yuu saw her get beat and she seemed pissed at him)
Not really sure why you were convinced that the scientists were really resourceful. I mean, the only kids we know about who they’ve tested on are Nao and her brother, and their mom literally handed them over.
[quote=“Kaze, post:28, topic:1694”]
she becomes able to fly.
[/quote]It would be very interesting indeed they were able to contract another power…
[quote=“Naoki_Saten, post:30, topic:1694”]
Bullying against Nao seemed to happen out of revenge. I support the theories of it being related to the Hoshi no Umi school
[/quote]It would be interesting if this was finally some conflict between non-power users and the power users at the school
[quote=“Naoki_Saten, post:30, topic:1694”]
Incidentally, who voiced Jet Saito in Clannad?
[/quote]IIRC he wasn’t ever voiced. Did he even have any lines?
[quote=“Takafumi, post:31, topic:1694”]
Or Nao works for them. That seems like the most likely conclusion imo.
[/quote] I’d go for this theory. Either Nao is being lied to or its some deep backstabbing.
[quote=“Purple, post:32, topic:1694”]
I mean I think it’s basically a…forgotten older brother? So why is he forgotten?
[/quote]Because his power is to erase people’s memories ;3
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So this is episode 3 right?
I guess he did. First image from Googling “Clannad Jet Saito” not sure if they were voiced though as I can’t find Youtube videos and don’t feel like checking myself. I think every voiced Saito is Midorikawa but I can’t remember if Saito is even in Kanon or Air (I’m pretty sure he’s not in planetarian or Rewrite either).
Have we really seen them be that good at finding people? The only people we even know about experiencing them are Nao and her brother and her mom handed them over. Nao keeps saying they might find power users but as far as we know, they require people actually handing over the user and aren’t actually looking around.
This was a really really good episode! We start off with some backstory about Nao which just makes me even more curious. What exactly is she doing that causes others to beat her up? They are implying that she does it in the process of doing her job for the student council, but it just simply doesn’t make sense that she is doing that to current students, right? Unless they are abusing their powers for some reason, but we haven’t been given enough hints about that.
Nao is definitely up to something fishy that we haven’t seen yet, that much I am certain of.
Then fast-forward to the mountains and we finally get some background on the Yusa/Misa relationship. Yusa doesn’t seem all that fazed about the death of her sister, though. Was one month really enough for her to get over it? Or is she just covering her own emotions?
The Nao x Yuu x ZHIEND scene was great, though. That track was really cool, and I can’t wait for a clean version of it 
Her plan to make a ZHIEND PV was what took me by surprise, though! Here I thought there was some political reason for that video camera, but I guess she has a much larger personal reason for all this. It at least adds more value to her camera for her own sake, and not for others’
They also seem to be pairing Yuu and Nao pretty heavily in this episode for some reason. I wasn’t feeling it the past few episodes, but I guess I can’t complain 
They’re definitely starting to get better than the Joujirou x Yusa ship, that’s for sure.
SKYHIGH SAITO! And Midorikawa! Not much comments for the monster of the week, as he seemed to take the backseat for this episode, and there isn’t any problem with that.
And we are brought back to our loli which miraculously made something without pizza sauce! I genuinely felt as relieved as Yuu when I saw that
So yeah, this episode had really good pacing, really good character interaction, really good backstory introduction. 5/5, best episode so far 
Interestingly enough, I have a few friends who were worried about her. I haven’t gotten attached to her, personally, but I guess the loli pandering works for some people
Maybe they don’t bother to read tabloids? lol who knows how they work. Maybe they would be on their way right after Nao & co. They haven’t touched up on that at all.
Thank you kanon 
I’m starting to feel it’s becoming way too obvious at this point that the powers are related to their desires more than anything. It’s a bit of a stretch from my original thought of it being based on their personalities but eeeh close enough.
Without pizza sauce, ayumi is forced to contribute to the story! We’re on to something here!!!
AKA Yuu’s onii-chan? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
The whole point of Hoshi-no-Umi is to “protect” the students with powers or potential to receive them. It wouldn’t be very good protection if they could go out all willy-nilly Yuu has an excuse because of student council duties, but Ayumi doesn’t have the same convenience.
Huh, that’s actually an interesting theory! I don’t know if it holds ground yet, but I’m curious to see if there is any possibility with that one.
('cept college is the time for partying in japan, you know that :v )
But yeah I get your point
also interesting~ I like the way you think, at least
We’ve been talking about that one since episode one, heh. None of us have come to a coherent conclusion quite yet (except maybe memory manipulation powers)
He did, but no voice
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And the guy from the key visual, and from the OP, yup.
It’s been brought up before. Nothing new to talk about really.
Bush Saito from Kanon and Saito the Hopper from TA are only mentioned. We never meet them.
There isn’t a Saito in Air. It’d be weird to have Midorikawa do it too…
It’s the quality I expect from any modern filler episode of a 1-cour show. It’s definitely the best episode so far, but it’s not a kind thing to say.
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Remember guys: flying dude isn’t saito; Skyhigh Saito is his idol!
The subs did not suggest that at all.
Course the subs also refereed to NaoNao’s interaction with the group of girls as ‘tortured by a mob’ so I’m willing to believe they’re imperfect.
Huh, that isn’t what I understood from the subs o_O
I understood that it was his dream (as in aspiration) to become like a hollywood star named Skyhigh Saito.
But I guess I could be misunderstanding it myself, oops
Yeah I read it as him wanting to become a movie star, and he would call himself SKYHIGH SAITO, because why the hell not.
