Impression
Nonoka and Noel are both adorable. I know that’s exactly what I said last week, but I still can’t get over how oddly soothing Sora no Method can be. Nonoka’s so lucky – I want to take Noel home too!
Once you start looking beneath the surface however, there are a lot of unsettling implications about their relationship as well as about Noel herself. Putting aside my suspicion that she hasn’t really grown over the past seven years, it’s really odd that she appears on the pavement randomly, leaves just as suddenly and is unwilling to get on the bus to school. She’s waiting around town during that time, and she only meets Nonoka again at night – but the common theme throughout all this is that there is never anyone else around when Noel is. I figured it’d be too much of a sweeping statement to make during the pilot episode, but now it really does seem to be true – Noel has no other human contact apart from Nonoka. Hell, I’d even go as far to say that maybe no-one else can see her apart from Nonoka. The Menma vibes truly are strong with Noel, and as a presumed envoy of the disc the clincher is that, in requesting her help to remove the disc from the sky above the lake, Nonoka is indirectly getting Noel to leave as well. Noel made it sound like she knew exactly what was going on, though. The questions keep coming!
I’m unsure of which term is supposed to be accurate, by the way – the toss-up seems to be between ‘disc’ and ‘saucer’ across various material. Note that they could be end up being very different things, even if the surface definition is somewhat similar – with ‘saucer’, there’s suddenly a possibility that it could be a UFO. Did it really float down and park as the boisterous and probably exaggerating Yuzuki said, or did it appear out of thin air? Either way, it’s still the first time someone’s mentioned the irregularity of the disc’s existence over the lake – although it wasn’t exactly a smart idea to start campaigning for its removal in front of a shop selling disc merchandise. Despite her enthusiasm for seeking the return of her old status quo, Yuzuki clearly hasn’t spent too much time connecting the dots – she hasn’t linked it to the wish she made, she has no idea that “that girl” she blames for the disc’s existence is in fact Nonoka, nor does she remember Nonoka from her childhood. I was almost even expecting for her to run into an old picture of Nonoka in her photo album.
That’s just Yuzuki though. Of her other classmates, Shiihara Koharu and Togawa Shione, the latter definitely knows. And she’s held a grudge all these years for how Nonoka just up and left them after contributing towards planting a disc in the sky. If it’s this deep, her reasoning’s gotta be more than the fact that Nonoka left for Tokyo one day – it feels like there’s a story behind this. As for Koharu, she probably knows, but is just too nice to hold it against her. So she plays along instead! The drama will definitely start unfolding once all these loose threads start tying together and people start figuring out who’s who, and developments with the disc occur. Sitting in the middle of all this is one cute blue-haired loli, who may or may not be both an apparition of sorts and a wish-granting entity. The plot thickens!
Nonoka is apprehensive.
