“I…I won’t run away any more.”
Impression
“What will happen, happens. That’s how the world is.”
This episode was all about picking up the pieces – dealing with the aftermath from the shocking revelation that Kud’s mother was involved in a rocket explosion. And even then, the meagre solutions found in this episode are probably only temporary, because I doubt we’ve even hit rock bottom yet. Anyway, we don’t know if Kud’s mother is safe – as pessimistic as it sounds, I don’t think she’s alive. Her rocket’s experimental reactor exploded, and the hazards are bad enough to the point where they’ve quarantined Tebwa to prevent further contamination – at the very least, there’s no way she’s completely unharmed. It was interesting to see how various members of the Little Busters reacted differently to the thought of death; you could tell that Komari tried to look on the bright side of things, while Rin was blunt in suggesting the worst-case scenario, which the show does imply at various points.
Kud’s reaction to the possibility of returning to Tebwa filled me with mixed emotions. On one hand, she’s getting an easy plane ticket back – great! Of course one train of thought would be her desire to see her mother again, and to confirm that she’s safe. But then, as Rin said, won’t she feel even more sad if she returned to Tebwa, only to get the worst possible news? It’d feel horrible to go all the way there, only to find out that in fact, her mother didn’t make it. It takes courage to make a decision like that – and that’s not factoring in Kud’s past on Tebwa as well. The situation she’s put up with in Japan is bad enough – being looked down upon and picked on as a foreigner for all this time. Yet she was ostracised back in Tebwa too, for not keeping up and perhaps even failing to meet the high standards set by her mother. In the end, though, it’s still better to go there and face the pain rather than stay and regret not going – when you fail to try, you try to fail after all. In both this situation and with Kud’s box of dreams, I didn’t like how she kept running away without properly facing things – only when you overcome hardships will you get stronger. And most of the time, things aren’t as bad as you think…though that applies more to real life. As for this, I don’t think shit has properly hit the fan yet.
Finally, there were some creepy moments here and there – one of them was Kyousuke’s private talk with Kud, which seems more confusing than anything else. What’s he referring to by the “same thing” happening again after she’s “remembered” everything, and is it related to Riki’s strange vision of Kud’s box burning?
Note: I apologise for the horrible delays I’ve had with this. I’ll try my best to get the rest of the reviews out in a timely manner.