Kotoura-san Episode 11

Impression: Leaving it untitled because my title muse isn’t functioning today-ahahaha/fail
Oh my goodness this episode felt so over dramatic. By the second half, I was having a hard time taking this seriously. Everyone was apologizing to each other and while it was sweet at first I quickly grew tired of it. Too many apologies happening all at once. While I am glad that everyone are apologizing for their selfish actions and are taking a step forward to move on, still… I don’t know.
So it turned out that Tsukino was the culprit (which was obvious to most of us- too bad that while I was suspicious of her, I let the voice doubt and scrap my speculation on her). She has a split personality that was developed by her bottling up all of the negative feelings and experiences she went through when she was in high school since was bullied for her remarkable height. It turns out that even back then, the split personality took over and injured the girls who bullied her without her even realizing it until later on. Today her split personality was disgusted by Kotoura, wondering “Why on earth a ‘monster’ like her has friends?” and felt it was very unfair. But I can’t help but be curious on the reason behind the timing of the attacks. What triggered her to attack the girls only recently? Perhaps she always did but managed to get away with it.
There was a moment when I wanted to slap some sense into Kotoura where I was like, “OH  MY GOD HARUKA DON’T SAY THAT YOU SHOULDN’T EXIST. GOD DAMN IT. I DON’T WANT TO HEAR YOU SAY THAT. DON’T SAY SUCH A THING!” because Manabe (especially) had frequently told her to not shoulder the blame and think she always the one at fault. Moritani even told Kotoura for the past two episodes, including this one that this isn’t her fault, it is the criminal’s. Actually speaking of Mortiani she really grew on me this episode. Remember in the beginning I was like, “OH HELL NO. LIKE HELL I’D EVER FORGIVE HER!” Well Moritani has been making it up to Kotoura in the best way possible. First of all, when Manabe wasn’t there because they were avoiding each other since their disagreement, it was Moritani who was trying to get Kotoura to snap out it. Then when she saw that Kotoura had disappeared she went straight up to Manabe and scolded him for not being by Kotoura’s side because this is such a dangerous situation. FOUR FOR YOU MORITANI! And to top things off she confessed so that she can be rejected and finally move on. I am proud of her for not turning back into that jealous!bitch she was. I would have hated to see her go downhill again, nor would I have been able to come to respect her present character now. Of all the characters, Moritani definitely has the strongest character development with promising results. As for Kotoura, she isn’t quite done with her character development yet since she needs to break the habit of making herself the default person to blame- regardless of being the victim in the situation. Today she did make a breakthrough of realizing that she does have a reason to exist and that she has people are by her side and want to be around her. With that said, I believe that in order Kotoura to eventually stop blaming herself so much, she needs to hear her mother tell her that it wasn’t her fault for their misfortune. After all it was her mother that planted that seed into her head when she was a child in the first place.
Finally last but not least, Muruto! He may not look ‘manly’ due to his size and appearence, but he most certainly does have a manly mind set. He jumped in front of Mifune and took the hit for her. He later tells her that he would choose her over her mother anytime. When he said that I was actually confused Did Muruto just confess? Can that be considered as a confession? It felt very vague… too vague to be sure. I suppose at this point it is ultimately up to the viewers.
Next week is the final episode, looks like if anything Kotoura and her mother will finally spend some time together and clean up their past… at least that is something I would like to see.