A Sign of Affection Ep 3

This week Yuki found herself feeling insecure with her new feelings. Unsure whether she has a chance or not when Emma, one of Itsuomi’s friends from high school shows up and gets all clingy with him. It’s been established that they will never get into a relationship (because of reasons), and we certainly saw there’s a clear line drawn by Itsuomi himself when he tells Emma that he’s done with her crap. He’s willing to let her stay at his place if she needs a place to say, but he has no intentions of being around when she is. But unfortunately Emma found the sign language guide, which is going to raise her suspicions as to why he has suddenly decided to pick up on it. I’m not particularly looking forward to her character, because I suspect she’s going to be an annoying nuisance for a while.

And then there was Oushi, who again is being a real jealous brat right now. Man, he was not happy to see Yuki going out (after dark no less, despite her permission from her mother) on her own to meet up with Itsuomi. All his problems with Itsuomi is his personal grievances, and he pretty much ruins his own credibility of concern when he says when bark outs how the guy is ‘jerking off for being so kind’, like really dude? Really?

As for Itsuomi the man himself, well I’d be lying if I said he didn’t have some slip-ups this episodes when some things he did and said. He’s definitely frank in some ways, perhaps too frank by saying, he doesn’t know if he’ll actually use it though– after all the work she put into the notebook. At that I was like, “HOW RUDE! GIVE IT TO RIN THEN. I KNOW SHE WOULD APPRECIATE IT!” However he did follow up with how he’d rather learn with her in person, and in all fairness, it is more efficient than drawings….and he’s probably the type who’d rather learn languages by immersing himself with the native speakers VS textbooks. Still… that was so rude, but people be like that sometimes. Well if there’s one thing he learned this week (thanks to Rin), is that the way he suddenly touches her can startle her– which we could see he really didn’t think twice of up until now. He jumped back when he realized that what he was doing was not really the best way to go about it. Fortunately Yuki is totally fine with it, because it’s him, so she did let him know that, which was very cute. Heehee…

The other little gripe people might have had with Itsuomi had, though it didn’t bother me too much was asking her to come to him after dark (though considering her mom wasn’t concerned about it, it goes to show she has a degree of independence that Oushi can’t fathom with), to meet up together at the laundry mat. Or how he didn’t say hi right away when she showed up (which felt like a provoking jab in a sense of after hearing Oushi rant about how he’s not a good guy), though what he had thought instead was to get her something to drink because he noticed she had ran the whole way there. Then when she offered to pay for her drink he said it’s okay, but then asks if she had a 10 yen coin because he only had a Croatian dollar on him stopping him from getting his own drink. I didn’t think this was rude in any sense, and to boot Yuki got another souvenir from abroad, something she’s very interested in too. There was also this moment when Itsuomi did share a bit about himself, knowingly that she wasn’t going to hear it because neither of them were looking at each other. So I feel like it was more for the audience to know and him speaking out loud to himself than it to be shared with others to begin with.

That said, thanks to that we’ve learned Itsuomi used to live overseas, and he naturally gained interests in learning more about various cultures and languages. But after meeting Yuki, he realizes there’s a whole world that he has yet to learn about right under his nose the whole time. That’s why he’s really interested in learn sign language.

The little meet-up Yuki and Itsuomi had at the laundry mat was a sweet and wholesome time together, learning different gestures meaning. Funny enough the head-pats he’s been giving her all this time was actually another way of to say “cute” as there’s many gestures to verbalize it. I’m also glad that Yuki had the courage to eventually ask Itsuomi about his relationship with Emma, to which he had assured her they are not in a relationship, and she’s only a friend to him– though one that is certainly testing his patience.

Additionally, we learned more about the scope of Yuki’s hearing. It was on the mark of what I had been thinking to myself last week when Oushi said she couldn’t hear anything, that Yuki can hear some things, but it comes across as noise, which different to distinguishing the sound which you can identify. So it just sounds like a jumbled mess, it’s too incoherent to even piece together. At best the hearing-aids serve as a benefit of letting her know the presence of a sound at all to give her an indication to turn around and look at her surroundings. Without them, she hears nothing.

They also talked about that squealing the hearing-aid makes when it’s not worn properly. Fun Fact: I legitimately cannot tell you if they had put sound in for it or not. Because if they did, I didn’t hear it. But if they didn’t, well please let me know so I know I didn’t miss out on anything haha! For things like this I do have to ask because I’ve been given the impression that there had been sound. But it’s impossible for me to know for sure if we’re seeing it specifically from Yuki’s perspective or the others. The anime has been inconsistent in that regards, which is a bit unfortunate. Though what I can tell you though, from my own experience is that hearing aids have this horrible high pitch squeal, and sometimes it’ll even make that sound when it’s in your hands unless you take the battery out.

Well that’s about all I got to say for this week. I’m wondering mostly though about what’s Emma’s relationship with Shin, whether she’s actually in a relationship with him and whenever shit goes south she uses Itsuomi as a rebound or something. Well, we’ll find out soon enough, either way she sure is making herself look like a trouble-maker to brew up all sorts of misunderstandings.