It’s finally the big day! Time to see if the committee’s efforts will make the festival successful.

As the festivities kick off, Todo-sensei runs into Teika’s older brothers and has a few words with them about Teika and Kohana’s roles in the festival before he walks off. He’s having none of their shit and it’s awesome.

The festival is indeed very successful, and as the day wears on each member of the committee is kept busy in different areas as they smooth out any issues and do their best to help their schoolmates. Kohana and Aoi are teamed up together and they too do their share of running around, although they do find a moment later on to talk about Teika.

vlcsnap-00017Afterwards Kohana takes a quick break from her committee duties to go try to find Juri’s theatre cafe. It’s been a huge hit, but Kohana can’t stay long to enjoy it because she has to get ready for their group’s Art Session. Or she would, except there’s this lost kid, and then afterwards Teika’s brothers find her and harass her… until Teika shows up to save the day and whisk her away, that is.

The two manage to make it to the tent in time to meet up with the rest of their group and have a huddle before the show starts. Naturally their Art Session goes off without a hitch, so much so that even Teika’s hardass brothers are caught off guard with how beautiful and flawless it seems. Seeing the realization that they’d been way too hard on Teika for stupid, pointless reasons dawn on their face was a glorious thing. As their Art Session comes to a close, the group’s Light of Artes combine to form a tall tower with a caged star at the top.

After all the daily events are over, the evening closes with a ball for everyone. Juri and Kohana are dressed up in pretty dresses, and the guys from the committee group are dressed up in a variety of coloured tuxedos.

But the biggest surprise, at least for Teika, comes in the form of a long overdue apology from his brothers. Furthermore Masana reveals that he had once been a part of an Art Session group: the same one Kohana’s mother Sakura (and Todo-sensei) had been in. But the two weren’t ever close, so Masana’s advice to Teika is that he enjoy the “new world” he has (a reference to Kohana’s comment from earlier).

Kohana dances with each of the guys from the festival committee, but when it comes to the final dance, she is saved from having to make a decision by Teika, who whisks her away and dances with her down by the water. Teika, for the first time in the entire series, is happy and smiling like a normal teenager who realizes he’s falling in love. He shyly tells Kohana to call him Teika.

Meanwhile the principal checks out the group’s Light of Arte display up close, and is shocked to see that while it might look fine from afar, cracks have started to develop in vlcsnap-00038its base. What could this possibly mean?

Elsewhere on campus the group manages to get their picture taken, and we see that their group picture is framed and later hung on the wall.

My thoughts: The pacing of this series has really thrown me. Events that I thought would take until the end of the series to reveal have instead been covered by this three-quarter mark, and now I’m not sure what to expect next (aside from an eventual relationship between Teika and Kohana, because that’s pretty obvious IMHO). It looks like we’re going to at least get the standard summer vacation episode, and I imagine there’s going to be some romance between Kohana and at least one or two of the guys. As cliched as the episode is, I will be looking forward to it anyways because hey, shirtless bishounen. 0:-)

I was really, really glad to see Teika vindicated and his brothers apologize for how they had been treating him. It was really important that they see him as functional and capable of standing on his own two feet, and I liked that he surprised them by saying that he would indeed do his very best but on his own terms, not theirs. Perhaps his future goals will be even larger than what they had planned for him – it certainly sounds so!

In terms of insert songs, the one used for the Art Session in this episode is awesome. It’s a group effort and everyone’s lines blend together seamlessly. This is only my second musical anime covered during my time with AAB, but I’m really liking this genre and I think it’s one I’m going to have to watch for in the future. ^_^v