Kimi ni Todoke – These Two Will Have So Many Fights

Believe it or not, this is the fourth time someone in this series has gotten hit.

Even in the same series, different couples can have their own individual methods for working through their problems. If that wasn’t true, we would have had to see Ayane and Kent blushing around each other for a dozen chapters before anything like this could have occurred. It’s still very strange to see Kent getting as passionate as he did in this chapter. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that this is the same guy who casually tried to seduce Sawako much earlier in the story. Nothing he’s done up until now has been this expressive, which is what makes it both much more shocking for him to punch Mogi and, at the same time, makes his feelings toward Ayane a lot easier to understand.

It’s unlikely that the two of them could have gotten together without something big like this happening. Both of them are good at analyzing others but bad at analyzing themselves, so if all they did was talk it would have just been Kent making some sort of come-on, Ayane rapidly rejecting it and neither of them realizing what they want beyond that. I don’t think Kent even realized what he was doing until a few seconds after. I’m not going to say Mogi deserved it, since his behaviour towards Ayane was more callous than actually spiteful, which is also uncalled for but not exactly a punchable offense. What I do understand is that Kent was able to get his feelings across in a way words couldn’t.

I’ve seen a number of different responses to these two getting together. Most of it is arguments between the happy Kent/Ayane fans and the angry Pin/Ayane fans (and the annoyed Sawakaze and Ryuu/Chizu fans, but what else is new?). but one valid question that gets brought up is whether the hookup occurred too early. I honestly don’t think it did, and that’s mainly for the reason I brought up at the beginning: Kent and Ayane are not like the others. They’re able to talk on a normal level and don’t have years upon years of history, so there aren’t as many walls between them as there is with everyone else. It isn’t as though Ayane’s issues with getting close to people are going to suddenly disappear because of this, either. They were still there when she was dating Mogi, and I suppose she would rather try and work out her issues through experience.

It’s going to be interesting to see where this couple is headed now, but before that we still have one other thing we need to settle at this Christmas Party, don’t we? It occurred to me that having this scene in the middle of the party means there will be a 90-95% chance of Sawako and Kazehaya reconciling before it ends. Why do I think this? Because if there won’t be any developments until later, this confession would have happened at the end and that would have been it. If they were only going to grow further apart, it would mean putting a happy event right next to a sad one, which doesn’t feel like the appropriate choice for this series. So by process of elimination, we should be getting a happy scene with Sawako and Kazehaya rather soon. Either that or my logic is horribly mangled and I’ll be hating myself for this in a month. Please don’t prove me wrong, Kimi ni Todoke.